From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Mon Sep 09 2002 - 01:53:26 MDT
The Virtue of Liberty by Tibor Machan
http://www.ieseurope.asso.fr/ies3/version%20anglaise/VIRTUE.htm
The book is online at the The Institute for Economic Studies Europe.
The Foundation for Economic Education
Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533
Preface
This book grew out of my Institute for Humane Studies Lectures which
I have been giving since the summer of 1990 throughout Europe*
Sweden, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, as well as in
Paris and Aix-en-Provence.
My main objective in these lectures has always been to explain in
plain terms* addressed often to undergraduate and graduate students
from around the world for whom English is a novel and not fully
developed language* the ideas underlying classical liberalism. Since
there are several versions of this political viewpoint, the lectures
explain these various versions. But I also defend, as the best of
the classical liberal outlook, the natural rights perspective
associated primarily with John Locke and the thinking underlying the
political institutions of the United States of America.
A word about the title. "Virtue" is used in it to mean "that which
makes for excellence." Not, however, moral excellence, since
liberty, both in its metaphysical and political senses, is a
capacity and precondition of human life, respectively, not an action
guiding principle by which human beings ought to guide their day to
day conduct--except in the sense that they ought to acknowledge its
role in their lives and the quality of their political communities.
This work, then, examines the merits of (the right to)
political/economic liberty and some of the problems surrounding the
effort to understand those merits.
I have reworked the lectures considerably, and have added
discussions that may help in dealing with certain prominent
contemporary social and political issues and controversies. In this
effort I wish to thank Douglas Rasmussen and Mark Turiano for the
many hours they spent with me brainstorming these ideas and
considering the numerous objections to them I wanted to anticipate.
I also wish to thank the Department of English at the United States
Military Academy* especially Colonels Peter Stromberg, Anthony
Hartle, Paul Christopher, and Captain Ted Westhusing* with the
members of which I had the opportunity, as visiting professor of
philosophy during 1992-93, to air many of these views in a regular
faculty seminar during the Spring 1993 term. Comments and objections
by members of the department have helped me, I believe, to clarify
some of the issues covered.
Tibor R. Machan
West Point, New York
May 1993
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Varieties of the Freedom Philosophy
I Why Do We Have Rights?
II Liberty and Virtue
III The Right to Private Property
IV Morality, Liberty, and the Market Economy
V Environmentalism Humanized
VI Does the Coercive State Have Moral Standing?
VII Individualism, Naughty and Nice
Endnotes
Index
About the Author
Smuggled out of Hungary in 1953, Tibor Machan came to the United
States in 1956. After serving in the U.S. Air Force, he went on to
earn a bachelor's degree from Claremont McKenna College, a master's
degree from New York University, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the
University of California at Santa Barbara.
Professor Machan has taught at numerous colleges and universities in
the United States and abroad, including Franklin College in Lugano,
Switzerland, UC Santa Barbara, and the U.S. Military Academy. He is
currently Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. He has
written and edited several books, among them The Main Debate:
Communism versus Capitalism (Random House, 1987), Individuals and
Their Rights (Open Court, 1989) and Capitalism and Individualism
(St. Martin's Press, 1990).
He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and has written
op-ed pieces for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago
Tribune, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He has been a regular
columnist for the Orange County Register since 1967. Professor
Machan is a contributing editor of The Freeman.
The father of three children, Machan currently resides in Auburn,
Alabama.
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." --Anais Nin
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