Since the example of Ayn Rand is way to triggering for these intellectual lowlifes, how about we present a more, uh, conservative (as in very likely understated) case of unexceeded libertarian intellectual excellence in making the scholarly and technically-refined case for right-libertarian (i.e., capitalist) political theory/philosophy: Chris Matthew Sciabarra's Total Freedom: Towards a Dialectical Libertarianism (2000). Sciabarra has since gone on to be lead editor for the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (1999-present) while his academic background is such that he was a student of a leading Marx scholar of his day, Bertell Ollman, author of such works as Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971). It is also of such an astonishing research orientation that his Total Freedom ends up with 48 pages (or some 1300-ish) references, including all the major philosophers and works of philosophy throughout history along with pretty much anything dialectics-oriented (a tradition stemming from Aristotle, by reputation probably the greatest philosopher of all time, and continuing most especially through Hegel and Marx (in transumated form, i.e., dialectical materialism), and then on through to - Sciabarra argues quite convincingly - the 'dialectical libertarian ascendancy' of Mises, Hayek, and Rand. And judging by his Rand-related work (not the least of which would be his also-thoroughly-researched [which by necessity includes all the Peikoff courses up through its preparation/publication period] Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995)).
Sciabarra refers to dialectics as "the art of context-keeping," a notion (context-keeping, that is) quite familiar to the Serious Students of Objectivism, i.e., those with longtime exposure to the Peikoff courses. In briefest essence, context-keeping is orienting one's mind toward being able habitually to clearly establish interconnections among all of one's cognitive contents, being sure not to leave out parts or aspects of the truth that usually come crucially to bear on the treatment of any one aspect or part. And how does a perfectionistic research orientation reflected by 48 pages of references not demonstrate in practice a dialectical sensibility precisely as Sciabarra defines it? Wanna do dialectics excellently? Take a hint from the size and scope of the bibliography ffs. (Do leftists keep context nearly so well, or are they typically partial, fragmentary and one-sided on how they approach ideas, particularly political ones? Do they demonstrate a curiosity and interest in getting or telling the full story? If Rand demonstrates quite convincingly that that owners of mind/intellect are compensated accordingly and therefore justly in a free, capitalist economy, do leftists care about understanding her point to the satisfaction of all concerned and responding accordingly? Even better yet, how about being willing to bend over backwards to understand their opponents' views to everyone's satisfaction before uttering so much as a word of critique? Could we ever reasonably expect such interpretive charity coming from leftists, given what we can know and prove about them?)
(Having heard pretty much all of Peikoff's courses save for all but the first hour of his Grammar course, and having heard a number of them at least twice - and this includes Understanding Objectivism, the OPAR seminars, The Art of Thinking, and (duh) Objectivism Through Induction, I consider myself among these Serious Students although I don't necessarily identify as an Objectivist; I prefer the term 'Perfectivist' for some odd reason.)
Anyway, Sciabarra's Total Freedom is his exhaustively-researched answer to any variant of leftism that claims the mantle of dialectics. Private property is a sine qua non of libertarian individualism, there are just really no ways around that given the tie between intellectual production (an irreducibly individual activity - see, e.g., the inability of leftists/leftism to produce any other intellectual with the same powers of leftist agitation as Marx himself, in all these 150+ years ffs) and the exclusive control over material resources (including fundamentally one's body and mind/brain, BTW) traditionally characteristic of private property norms. Anyway, Sciabarra's covered all his bases, consulted all the essential scholarly sources, drove the point home with a critique of a less-than-satisfactorily-dialectical version of libertarianism advocated by one Murray Rothbard.
So, has there been a leftist rebuttal to Sciabarra's work in all this time, these past two decades and counting? Well, being also a perfectionist-research-orientation type, I know where to look first for promising leads in that direction, because of what I know about his pattern of past responses to criticisms and where he would post them. So here you go:
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/totalfrdm/tfrevues.htm
First off, I don't see anything that would suggest a leftist critique of Sciabarra's dialectics-based argument.
And why would there be, really? Leftism is wrong, false to the facts. The human world is simply not suited to the left's egalitarian or quasi-egalitarian agenda; they have no remotely credible program for repealing the bell curve. They have no remotely credible argument for how capitalism is a fundamentally unfair system that impoverishes most those who create the most value-added. The argumentative techniques they have in favor of this latter view come off almost invariably as ignorant, dishonest, or downright stupid. Socialism in its original sense that all the leftists were agitating and apologizing for - collective ownership and/or control of "the means of production" (including in practice, as Rand points out, the most important means of production ignored by uniformly shitheaded socialists: the irreducibly individual self-moving human intellect) has proved time and time again to be a monumental failure if not humanitarian catastrophe. Rather than provide a remotely credible explanation for all this failure and catastrophe, or a remotely credible answer to Mises, Hayek, Rand, Nozick, Sciabarra, Hospers, Mack, Den Uyl and Rasmussen, and on and on go the names of the not-remotely-credibly-answered political philosophers, they continue to agitate, AOC-like if not Chomsky-like, for collective appropriation of individual intelligence. (Chomsky says in a video titled 'Manufacturing Consent' that things won't improve for ordinary folks unless there is an end put to "private control of the resources." "The resources" presumably including the human intellect? Chomsky is quite the intellect in many ways - even in ways praised explicitly by Rand in how he handled Skinner behaviorism - but on the matter of capitalism vs. socialism he seems like an absolute shithead.)
So, to boil it down: Sciabarra presented, two decades ago, a monumental work of scholarship fundamentally challenging the leftist claim to either dialectics or to libertarianism. If there had been even one rebuttal by the left to Sciabarra's thesis, I probably would have heard about it way back when. (I'm included among perhaps well over a hundred others in its Acknowledgments section, for one thing....) Roderick Long does have a Journal of Ayn Rand Studies review of Total Freedom, and he identifies as a left-libertarian of sorts, but he's also into Mises and praxeology and the Austrian School . . . and Rand . . . and Aristotelian philosophy most importantly, and since when were leftist losers big on whatever the Aristotelian tradition might have to offer to current understanding? Zizek does Marx and Hegel but what about Aristotle? Zizek has an article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies but it's not of much distinction and it sounds a lot like he's doing what he's reputed widely for: being provocative, i.e., a sort of philosophical troll. And does he have any good answer to Sciabarra/Total Freedom?
I can't think of any good answer; I don't have any high expectations that a near-future delving into of the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx is going to give me satisfactory or impressive answers in this regard. (Maybe it really is just some strange accident of history that Marxism attracted psychopathic cults time and time again, pretty much all rooted on the premise that "the capital-owning class" exploited "the working class." Take that, Hank Rearden/Galt/Rand?) Sciabarra's already aware of Ollmann's work and he's not a convert to Marxism/leftism, etc.
Now, just how is it that in all these two decades, apparently no prominent leftist critique of Sciabarra's work has emerged? Just how big of a loser does this make the Left/leftism, exactly? Because it seems to me that this lack of rebuttal is a devastating indictment of what I strongly suspect if not know if not know for a 100% certainty to be a fundamentally dishonest intellectual culture of leftism?
If that isn't a devastating indictment, then what is? There's simply no valid excuse for it, whatsoever.
And anyone who has the curiosity to seek out the evidence knows that this is just the apex of a mountain of it, when it comes to leftism. Leftism is fundamentally a corruption of the human soul/psyche and intellect; its persistence has to be more a psychological and sociological phenomenon than an intellectual one. The persistent absence of references to Aristotle or Aristotelian ideas speaks volumes in itself given the left's pretentions to intellectual and moral superiority. Nor do I find it surprising, given the history of human belief and ideological movements, that something so perfectly discreditable and cult-like as leftist/egalitarian/anti-capitalist thought could continue on so long after the argument had been settled on its merits.
(If you're still a leftist after roughly 1974, how serious an intellectual can you possibly be? From what I've been able to glean metadata-wise, Nozick's most prominent leftist critic, the Marxist G.A. Cohen, postulates that society could be run essentially along the lines of a camping trip. (Or why not a family?) Also, I did read through, way back when, his full-book-length critique of Nozick, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. If I could boil down what I think was the essential argument there, it's that from self-ownership alone you couldn't derive any specific regime of property rights.
[Edit: here, I'm checking it now, but you also can check out some 'metadata' on the book here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394221.Self_Ownership_Freedom_and_Equality [Adjacent tabs now include: https://sites.google.com/site/professorericmack/home/selected-papers which contains a paper with 'marxism' in the title responding to Cohen; and http://politybooks.com/mack-online-chapter/ as well as a paper copy of Mack's Libertarianism book at hand; don't worry, I'm well ahead of y'all in metadata level things like where to look first and what related materials, etc. Also looking very forward to Mack's latest commentary on the Dougs' rights theory in that online chapter, sounds very tasty! Haven't had that much excitement since their 1993 Reason Papers exchange on, well, basically, teleology and deontology in rights theory if I can boil it down that way. I think I resolve the basic differences there in my 2006 JARS essay on egoism-and-rights, and just to be clear, Aristotelianism is foundational to the normative project, and it's the 'Kantian' elements found in the concept of rights that are built on the Aristotelian foundation given the prime-mover role of the intellect/reason in a eudaimonic/flourishing human life; Kantian normative theory is built on the formal requirements of a reasoning being's practical(/praxis/action) imperatives, but what's the ultimate point, the ultimate telos of practical imperatives? And what about the constitutive role of virtue/rationality in the best/happiest kind of human life? Anyway, Kant's categorical imperative(s) are monumental insights into the formal character of a reasoning being's practical imperatives, which in terms of the moral imperatives we call categorical, overriding and all-things-considered imperatives include things like: make your maxims applicable to all reasoning beings in all similar circumstances; respect yourself and your fellow human as an end-in-itself, not to be treated merely as a means or instrument to the ends of another (consequent to which the libertarian self-ownership principle: other men's lives are not yours to dispose of). And something or other about a Kingdom of Ends based on a universal implementation of Kantian-style moral reasoning, which sounds like one of those preconditions for an 'end of history' type of dealio there. Also, to make a long story very short, I believe this, and it's a big lesson that a lot of non-Aristotelian libertarians can really learn from as well: the reasons that we have for promoting a certain kind of reason-based or intellectualist or Aristotelian vision of the good life, are the same reasons we have for affirming a concept of rights based on the universalization of the free exercise of human reason and all that is consequent to that (including the capitalistic right to private property, a connection which Rand nailed as well as anyone).] ]
So as for Cohen's 'self'- vs. 'world'-ownership dichotomy: So much for Rand's point about the human mind/intellect and the bell-curve realities involved there? (And so much for the essential history of capitalism which is a marked material betterment of all folks on the bell curve, in an historically very short period of time, which Rand correctly attributes to individuals' reason being set as free as never before in the realm of material production?) Anyway, Hayek was a young socialist as of roughly 1922, until Mises' Socialism came out and changed his mind. What's the excuse for why so few non-Hayek folks did the honest thing? Socialism settled the argument on its merits in 1922, and Mises/Hayek were proved fundamentally right about socialism's inability to solve key problems of economic production, while Rand discredited socialist ethics right to its rotten little envious core as early as 1936 with her debut, We The Living. All the left ever managed against Mises were some 1930s articles by Lange and a couple others limited to the "calculation" issue (whereas Mises took on all aspects of socialist thought up to and including its tendencies toward cultural destructions), whereas Hayek rebutted Lange in subsequent articles anthologized in Individualism and Economic Order (1948). The collapse of socialist-proper economies vindicated Mises and Hayek. Hayek went on to supplement his economic work with work in politics, philosophy, and psychology. I'm unaware of much in the way of serious and honest leftist rebuttals to Hayek; the closest thing I know of to a Rawlsian response to Hayek is Tomasi's Free Market Fairness (2013), which is essentially positive and duly credits Hayek's insights. I mean, shouldn't Tomasi's book basically settle whether leftism has any shred of credibility remaining? Meanwhile, all the left has ever managed against Rand is a bunch of outrageous, context-eliding, dishonest-on-their-face smears. If this doesn't speak very poorly about the quality of leftist minds, then what does? [Rand not being around herself to ask this question, I guess it's on me to ask it on her behalf, and it's a great fucking question, is it not.])
So the left is really fucking pathetic, but just how really fucking pathetic, exactly?
[In the queue: Something positive and not altogether polemical, I swear! Wherein, I deal with the question, What would a society of people adopting Rand's philosophy for living (hint: the basic/fundamental virtue is rationality) look like? Spelled out in furthest nonfiction detail, we get her best student Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (based on the Rand-authorized course, etc.), and in particular the chapters on "Objectivity" (the basic habits/practices of mind of a well-ordered intellectual life) and "Virtue" (the section on Honesty being particularly memorable and effective). Peikoff's OPAR seminar lectures (as well as the parallel lectures in the authorized '76 course) on these topics are at the ARI Campus site for free, etc. etc., links needing to be supplied yet again?]
[Addendum: It's not just these intellectual figures the left has behaved dishonorably towards; just look at how the left recklessly smears Trump as a racist on the flimsiest of pretexts - pretty much every fucking time; maybe there was an exception or two where Trump really shouldn't have been so politically incorrect whatever valid point he was trying to make and the left ignored - and how the entirety of the American left seems just fine with how Brett Kavanaugh was recklessely smeared as a sex pervert based on stories that never got close to passing an honest sniff test, and how it's all fair game because of his "privileged white male" existence, or whatever the dishonest, scraping-bottom rationalization for the typically leftist affront to common sense (to be sneered at as 'bourgeois ethics') epitomized by the Kavanaugh episode. Nancy Peloser says Trump's border wall is about "making America white again" and not a leftist says a peep in protest or objection. (Not even a strategically wise remark to the effect of, "Keep it up, Nancy, and it'll cost us another presidential election"? Are leftists this fucking pathetic and depleted of the best minds, even at the lightweight level of activism strategy/tactics?) If that isn't disreputably scummy on her and their parts, then what is?]
[Addendum #2: Ollman - again, Sciabarra's mentor and author of the book on Marx's conception of alienation - had this blurb about Russian Radical: "Ayn Rand, a radical? A comrade of Marx, methodologically speaking? Libertarians and Marxists BEWARE, because Sciabarra makes a solid case for his astounding claim. An eye-opening work, and a pleasure to read!" This about a work nearly a quarter century old now, and did the leftists ever take Ollman up on his provocative claims? I'm talking the Academic Left, here. Did it lift a finger in the direction of intellectual curiosity when a leading scholar of Marx raised the equivalent of a red flag (ahem?) requiring some pretty urgent attention? I mean, like, how is it possible that one could apply methodological tools that have deep parallels to Marx's, and end up with a libertarian-capitalist politics? As a(n aspiring) metaphilosopher with something of an obsessive interest in methodology myself, this strikes me as pretty rock-bottom fundamental stuff with huge implications over time and place for a whole lotta people. I mean, look at the 20th century implications of Marxian theory, in action, and think carefully and thoroughly about what important lessons this tells us about applying methodology correctly? It's clear - or is it? - that despite their own professed commitments to full context-keeping, Marx and Rand ended up going about it differently. Rand has no commitments to historical materialism (materialist conception of history, histomat, diamat, etc.). She claims methodological precedents in (and her only acknowledged philosophical debt to) Aristotle, and as anyone who's looked carefully and honestly into her system of ideas (which necessarily includes anything closely related to that Rand-authorized/endorsed 1976 course and its presenter) can see how Rand presents a plausible vision for how neo-Aristotelian sensibilities might be applied today to some pretty fundamental-level issues (such as the nature of virtue, or philosophic method itself, or why ever have any institutions that employ physical force), and one thing I don't see coming out of such a program or anything like it is what came from Marxism, e.g., the Gulag Archipelago, the Great Chinese Famine, ongoing Chinese illiberalism/repression (the actual fascism-like concrete we can look to today, pace that goddamned knuckleheaded nitwit AOC and her vocal fry...), the ever-cult-like Academic Left, and other very anti-human-telos failures of the past century. I'll get all the data and metadata I need for full diagnostics on this pitiful excuse for an effort at creating what that Comprachico--ized numbskull AOC & ilk refer to as an advanced society, once I go through the Oxford Handbook of Marx. On the fail scale, Stalinism is as good a candidate for a 10/10 rating as any, but it's like these 'demo-rat socialist' leftist losers are trying their best to push a 7 or 8, something more Atlas Shrugged-like if their latest ideologically inbred lurching is any indication. As the too-brainwashed-to-know-she's-a-walking-caricature AOC declared, someone's right to housing supersedes your privilege of earning a profit. The Blue State model currently being played out in NY, CA, CT, MA, IL, and other more advanced societies appears not to be yet far left enough for AOC and the Academic Left. There's still too much capitalism, too much gentrification, too much of economic laws dictating what bourgeois neoliberals consider practical and feasible. Sounds like they need some reeducation/immunization from neoliberal ideology? Double down on the leftist Cold War line of the 20th century, in other words? But I do wish those bourgeois neoliberals in San Francisco, NYC, and LA the best of luck in their effort to keep things fiscally sustainable (the primary key is to avoid an Atlas-style brain drain...), not be overtaken by an ever-insistent far left, and maintaining their own smug satisfaction that they've so much as adequately rebutted Rand, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Nozick, Krauthammer, Limbaugh, Buckley, et al. I mean, I don't expect any adequate rebuttal to any of these thinkers from an AOC or Peloser, but someone, anyone among the center-left neoliberal bourgeoise? I was hoping Rawls might do a 50-page rebuttal to Nozick like Nozick did with Rawls, but no such luck there, so where do I look next, pray tell? Someone rebutting Mack (rebutting Cohen rebutting Nozick)? I guess not. Anyone rebutting Hospers' libertarianism formulation ("other men's lives not yours to dispose of")? I already know about no rebuttals to Sciabarra (and it's not like he doesn't debate his points exhaustively with his critics and seems to get in the last word, much like the neo-Aristotelian Dougs Den Uyl and Rasmussen, who also aren't being rebutted, although as I've pointed out before in this blog under the "dialectic" tag, the Sciabarra and Dougs arguments seem to come to the basic essential idea, a perfectionist/dialectical social ethos combined with a nonperfectionist/libertarian politics, so it wouldn't be any surprise if neither of these arguments met with serious rebuttals, right?...). Krauthammer, widely reputed in D.C. for having been the leading intellectual figure among its regular commentators, was a Democrat until the mid-1980s, by which point it had become clear to the finest observant minds that a Reagan-like agenda was superior to a typical Demo-rat-like one. What did the Demo-rats do since the 1980s that would have led Krauthammer to reverse his judgment on this? Jack shit, that's what. And on and on it goes. As I've indicated, I don't think Cohen's rebuttal to Nozick amounts to anything, although I do have to grant credit to one James P. Sterba for his taking on libertarians for their full-on rejection of welfare-rights claims. So there's Sterba, noteworthy for standing out for taking on libertarians more effectively than just about anyone (although my metadata about Beyleveld's Gewirthian treatise The Dialectical Necessity of Morality (1992) tells me that he does an admirable job there as well...). So Sterba and Beyleveld/Gewirth among the center-left bourgeois neoliberals, and no far-left criticisms of right-libertarian politics worth serious consideration IMHO. And this is even without taking into consideration the neglect (by center-left liberals, leftists, and many libertarians) of conservative thought. (I know, there are just so few of them in academia, it can be hard for the leftists, center-left, and libertarians while going after one another to remember about the conservatives. That's kinda fucking sad, actually. I mean, surely there's a really good treatise-length refutation of conservatism out there, somewhere? Monograph-length? Also, is there any good refutation of Rand by conservatives anywhere? John W. Robbins just doesn't cut it, now, does he. Sciabarra's grasp of Rand is way better, also the Dougs'. And since leftists are so shitty at refuting Rand, and the center-left so-called liberals don't seem to know really what to do except fall back on Rawls, or something, and non-Randian libertarians spend so much of their time barking up less than optimal trees, one is left to ask where any good refutation of Rand might ever come from. I mean, Nozick, Huemer, Mack (his 'Problematic Arguments'/'Shuffle' critiques), Charles King, Scott Ryan . . . they raise points worth going through, but do they really refute any of insights from the likes of the Dougs and Sciabarra into the most fundamental Rand stuff, i.e., the method, the life-based teleological eudaimonism, objectivity in cognition as requiring social and political freedom (man as an end in himself, etc.), the role of sense of life in aesthetics, . . . . BTW, Rand's essay "What is Capitalism?" is, as far as I can tell, irrefutable; as Rand points out, it can serve as an essentialization of Atlas Shrugged's theme about the role of the mind in human existence, and it also brings into the discussion a philosophical essential for Rand - her distinction between the objective, the intrinsic, and the subjective. Now, I've not yet obtained a physical copy of the Ayn Rand Society's Philosophical Studies series Volume 3, 'Reflections on a Free Society,' but the metadata I've gleaned about it is that there is no debate about "What is Capitalism?" in this volume. (The focus is a lot more on Rand's theory of rights and government, with one Darryl Wright doing quite a bit of heavy lifting with the first three chapters.) It's like there's simply nothing in there to debate! - that Rand nailed a difficult philosophical topic and in the process established a foundational grounding for capitalism-related common sense going forward. Of course capitalism is a system uniquely suited to actualizing the potentialities of human intelligence in the realm of material production, and the concretes and contrasting systems are all around us today and throughout history. So how did the universities churn out so many fools like AOC?) One last thing: when that Volume 4 in the works, about Rand's relation to Aristotle and Aristotelian themes, is published, what are the enemies/bashers/smearers/belittlers of Rand going to do to then? Flush their credibility yet further down the toilet by pretending that it or any such book doesn't exist? By failing to recognize its significance? Just how more fucking pathetic, exactly, are they willing to get? Do these fuckheads not know that Salmieri studied under Gotthelf who was both a leading scholar of Aristotle's biology and and longtime associate of Rand's? The Aristotelian tradition is as high-profile a tradition or school of thought as it gets. Its scholars are perfectionists. So what is one to make of the fact of there being a highly-reputed scholar of Aristotle who takes Rand most seriously as a neo-Aristotelian figure? Metadata-wise, what does it tell you? Does it tell you that it's safe to go on ignoring, belittling, etc. Rand if intellectual credibility is your concern? That it would be safe to ignore the work in progress by Salmieri, Sciabarra, Tara Smith (someone big on perfectionism, BTW), Den Uyl and Rasmussen, Miller, Lennox, Mayhew and other neo-Aristotelian Rand-positive scholars? I mean, because the Academic Left is placing its bets and staking its long-term credibility on ignoring these very figures (on the assumption that Rand being evil/lightweight, Rand-positive people are themselves intellectually/morally deficient). The decision to ignore these figures still wouldn't give a shred of a valid excuse for why there doesn't seem to be a peep coming from the Academic Left about the virtues of Aristotle or Aristotelian themes. Not even about his being the father of dialectical method, before Hegel and Marx. How bright can they possibly be compared to their smug pretentions?]
