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Gene Callahan on Rousseau

Gene Callahan, Austrian economist, LRC contributor, and author of Economics for Real People, runs a blag called Crash Landing. He wrote a good post about the first part of The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, defending Rousseau as being a very intelligent, sharp, and skilled political philosopher, and for having some quite libertarian ideas.

For someone who I have often seen presented as “the anti-libertarian,” Rousseau has two positions that are largely libertarian: 1) One of the major selling opints of the State for Rousseau is that it serves to secure private property. (Whether he is right that it can do so is doubtful, IMHO, but if it could that would be a good thing.) 2) He makes it clear that only unanimous consent can justify the State, and there is no justification for the, “Your ancestors were conquered, now shut up and obey,” explanation of legitimacy put forward by conservatives.

If I hadn’t become obsessed with our new blag and getting all my thoughts into writing out there on teh interwebs and learning how to host a web page with Apache and MySQL, and I actually read as diligently as I should, I would be into his layman’s Austrian economics book already. As it stands, however, I still have to finish the rest of The State and all of Market for Liberty by the Tannehills beforehand.

Btw, he wrote one of my favorite anarchism quotes in my soon-to-be-uploaded massive political quotes list. It probably came from one of his LRC columns:

Nor did I become an anarchist in the first place because I think everyone is gentle and peaceful, or that everyone would be so if there were no state. Contra the author of one of The Federalist Papers, who wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” I have always believed that if men were angels, the state might be acceptable. It is precisely our non-angelic nature that makes the power of the state too dangerous for any human to possess.

Astute.