Comments Elsewhere

Neverfox:

Thank you for taking this up, and for pointing to the comment. I don't know how much it helps, but I also talked about the sentence-parsing issue a bit in comments on the blog here: http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/05/16/women_and/#comme…

darius404:

I don't know if Neverfox's comments, or the earlier comments that have been cross-linked here, will convince you about the meaning of the infamous sentence on pp. 14-15. But I do think this thread though is a pretty good example of the reasons why I don't have much of anything to say about the proper parsing of Brownmiller's infamous sentence beyond what I've already said in the paper and in those comments. I just can't see any further utility in trying to argue about the best grammatical parsing of the clauses in a pair of programmatic sentences in the first chapter of a book, as if this were something important to settle in isolation and without reference to the arguments and analysis offered throughout the rest of the book.

My paper has a specific topic, which is more or less exclusively concerned with trying to understand the features and upshots of one of the central arguments of that book (as for example in the extended discussion of "police-blotter rapists" as "myrmidons to the cause of male dominance" in Chapter 6 of the book). I don't know whether you've read Ch. 6 of Against Our Will or not (or even if you've read all of Ch. 1). But my view is that this chapter is important and that one good way of understanding the argument Brownmiller makes is by applying concepts drawn from the literature on "spontaneous order" in human societies. But that getting the radical feminist peg to fit in the spontaneous order slot will take some creative attention to the shape and orientation of both of them; and that this may teach us something important and useful, both about radical feminist theory and also about the concept of spontaneous order.

Maybe Brownmiller's programmatic sentences in Ch. 1 are written in such a way that they make certain common misunderstandings of her natural; or maybe she wrote them in such a way that their plain meaning really is just in tension with, or flat-out contradicts the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis that she has to offer in Chapter 6. I'm not convinced that either of these problems is a problem Brownmiller actually has. But if it is, then perhaps that is a problem for Susan Brownmiller as a writer; but I think that the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis are infinitely more interesting than picking at the writing of the programmatic statements. And that coming to an understanding of the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis, and the relationship that they may have to the various senses of the ambiguous term "spontaneous order," and of what we might get to learn from all this, as radical feminists and/or as libertarians, is probably a more fruitful field for having a conversation. There is much more to be gleaned there.

Do you have any thoughts about that? About the analysis of rape culture as a malign spontaneous order; or about the delineation of three different senses of "spontaneous order" that's outlined in the paper, or any of the remarks towards the end about ways in which this might help clarify some important issues for both radical feminist and libertarian theory and practice?
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@neverfox:disqus:

Thank you for taking this up, and for pointing to the comment. I don’t know how much it helps, but I also talked about the sentence-parsing issue a bit in comments on the blog here: http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/05/16/women_and/#comment-20111207021701

@darius404:disqus:

I don’t know if Neverfox’s comments, or the earlier comments that have been cross-linked here, will convince you about the meaning of the infamous sentence on pp. 14-15. But I do think this thread though is a pretty good example of the reasons why I don’t have much of anything to say about the proper parsing of Brownmiller’s infamous sentence beyond what I’ve already said in the paper and in those comments. I just can’t see any further utility in trying to argue about the best grammatical parsing of the clauses in a pair of programmatic sentences in the first chapter of a book, as if this were something important to settle in isolation and without reference to the arguments and analysis offered throughout the rest of the book.

My paper has a specific topic, which is more or less exclusively concerned with trying to understand the features and upshots of one of the central arguments of that book (as for example in the extended discussion of “police-blotter rapists” as “myrmidons to the cause of male dominance” in Chapter 6 of the book). I don’t know whether you’ve read Ch. 6 of Against Our Will or not (or even if you’ve read all of Ch. 1). But my view is that this chapter is important and that one good way of understanding the argument Brownmiller makes is by applying concepts drawn from the literature on “spontaneous order” in human societies. But that getting the radical feminist peg to fit in the spontaneous order slot will take some creative attention to the shape and orientation of both of them; and that this may teach us something important and useful, both about radical feminist theory and also about the concept of spontaneous order.

Maybe Brownmiller’s programmatic sentences in Ch. 1 are written in such a way that they make certain common misunderstandings of her natural; or maybe she wrote them in such a way that their plain meaning really is just in tension with, or flat-out contradicts the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis that she has to offer in Chapter 6. I’m not convinced that either of these problems is a problem Brownmiller actually has. But if it is, then perhaps that is a problem for Susan Brownmiller as a writer; but I think that the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis are infinitely more interesting than picking at the writing of the programmatic statements. And that coming to an understanding of the detailed arguments and nuanced analysis, and the relationship that they may have to the various senses of the ambiguous term “spontaneous order,” and of what we might get to learn from all this, as radical feminists and/or as libertarians, is probably a more fruitful field for having a conversation. There is much more to be gleaned there.

Do you have any thoughts about that? About the analysis of rape culture as a malign spontaneous order; or about the delineation of three different senses of “spontaneous order” that’s outlined in the paper, or any of the remarks towards the end about ways in which this might help clarify some important issues for both radical feminist and libertarian theory and practice?

Jason Bessey: Rothbard of course did a lot to popularize the term “libertarianism” in the US, and to spread the idea that American libertarianism was a body of ideas and a political identity radically distinct from the emerging political conservatism of Buckley, Kirk, et al. But he was not at all the first person to use the term in the US. Here’s Benjamin Tucker using it in passing in the 1880s, for example: http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/liberty-and-the-george-theory, http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/a-libertarians-pet-despotisms (he also used it to translate the term “libertaire” in French Anarchist writing, e.g. here: http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/state-socialism-and-anarchism). Charles Sprading’s LIBERTY AND THE GREAT LIBERTARIANS (first published 1913, http://archive.org/details/libertygreatlibe00spra) was published before Murray Rothbard was born, but it was later circulated pretty widely in laissez-faire circles in the 1950s and seems to have contributed to the uptake on the term by Rothbard and a number of others in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Daniel Baber: I agree that “Intellectual Property” is a government-sanctioned monopoly, and that it ought to be abolished. But Rothbard did not. He opposed patents, but he specifically defended copyrights as a “prosecution of implicit theft.” (He also thought that in a market of total liberty (as he understands it) “Part of the patent protection now obtained by an inventor could be achieved on the free market by a type of ‘copyright’ protection.” See Man, Economy, and State, here: http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap10e.asp#7._Patents_Copyrights.

I am glad that contemporary Rothbardians have more or less unanimously come out against “Intellectual Property” restrictions, and have come to see that these are in fact government privileges, not protections of any legitimate property right. They’re right to believe that. But this is a new development, and in fact a reversal of position that has happened pretty suddenly and dramatically (over the course of the past 15 years or so). There’s no basis as far as I can tell for projecting the belief back onto Rothbard himself.

MBH:

My responses are relevant to Rad Geek’s remark about the use of political liberalism.

No, they aren’t. They seem to be based on a fantasy that the remarks were made by someone who has anything less, or anything different, to say about the purposes or functions of political conservatism, or political libertarianism, or whatever this rambling digression and facile sarcasm are supposed to be about.

But I don’t. I have exactly the same thing to say about those. That is (part of the reason) why I do not waste my time on political candidates or political strategies. Here, as elsewhere, you seem to be spending a lot of time elaborately ridiculing positions that nobody present actually holds or endorses. What you think you gain from this, I don’t know.

Well, it all makes sense if you just recognize that the first and overwhelmingly important purpose of political liberalism is to get more liberals elected to political office. What does it matter if corporate backscratching and logrolling vitiates any possible progress toward liberal society or the emancipation of the working class? The point is that it got Roosevelt reelected, and kept Democrats in control of both houses of Congress for decades.

is in Lisbon.

is shipping out M@ and ACS booklets for June 2012 to subscribers to-day. Proudhon and Worker Ownership, delivered fresh and hot. This month, look for the special edition Maine postmark!

is printing up this month’s Anarchist Classics and Market Anarchy booklets. For June ’12: Proudhon’s “Epilogue” to the General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, and a collection of conversations on economic aspects of worker ownership, self-management, technology, and distributed systems. Tonight, the printing, the folding, the stapling. The mailing, after the weekend, when we’re able to get to a post office in Maine.

Chomsky is a theoretical Anarchist who in actual practice functions as a partisan Social Democrat, because when you come down from the ideal society he’d like to see in the sweet by-and-by, or up from his radical critique of currently existing conditions, it turns out that he hasn’t really got much of anything to offer in terms of practical mechanisms other than a bunch of thoroughly conventional efforts at achieving social change by means of social control, social control by means of political power, and political power by means of electorating and politicking.

If anything Lin Ostrom was exactly the reverse — while in theory she was a fairly conventional liberal statist, in practice her contributions to the literature have been an immensely insightful set of radical alternatives to conventional understandings of politics and social life, and gives us some really critical insights into how immediate social problems might be solved without participating in or depending on conventional political mechanisms of social control. And thus, whether she intended to or not, has made a really important contribution to Anarchist understanding and practice.

Marja’s post is fantastic. Thank you for relinking it.

The quote from Adam Buick is wrongheaded and uncharitable to the economists. (As is the whole hand-waving passage that it is a part of.) The position that Buick is dismissing certainly is absurd, but it is not the position that economists are asserting when they describe people’s wants as “infinite.” For two reasons. First, because not all economic wants are a matter of “obtaining” or having or owning things in the first place. But even when what someone wants is a relationship or a human engagement or an experience or a state of being or an accomplishment or indeed giving something up or letting it go or passing it on, all those wants still involve a cost — you have to choose it over other options and this involves a certain amount of work and expense, either for yourself or for other people or for both. Which is potentially relevant for any distribution based on at-will demand. Second, because there is just a thudding mathematical error involved here. Infinite means without end; it doesn’t mean all-encompassing. If The Count wants to count all the natural numbers then his wants are infinite but there are also infinitely many numbers that he doesn’t care about counting at all. (And this is of course potentially relevant to the rationality of his desires — since just the real interval (0,1), let alone R as a whole, includes an uncountable infinity of numbers that he could not possibly ever reach no matter how much time he had to do it.) Now, maybe The Count’s desires are also absurd. But if so, not because he wants to count all the numbers; anymore than the textbook Homo economicus‘s infinite desires necessarily encompass “obtaining the whole universe.” And perhaps there is a good argument against the claim that people’s wants are infinite, given the specific meaning that economists attach to all of the terms in that phrase. But Buick is attacking a strawman, and so hasn’t given the argument yet.