Assignments, weeks of:

09/11: Introductory.

09/18: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty & Other Writings, "On Liberty," 1-93

09/25: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, "The Subjection of Women," 117-217

10/02: Frederic Bastiat, The Law (entire)

10/09: Lysander Spooner, Lysander Spooner Reader, 11-122

10/16: Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition, 1-104, 188-193

10/23: F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, xxvii-xlvi, 1-182, 221-239, 261-262

10/30: Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness, 1-103, 162-180, 231-268

11/06: Wendy McElroy, Freedom, Feminism, and the State, 3-113, 145-191

11/13: F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, 1-119

11/20: Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions, 1-140

11/27: Virginia Postrel, The Future & Its Enemies (entire)

12/04: Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (entire)—it's long; read all semester.

Paper: This is a discussion and writing seminar. Half your grade will be determined by your ongoing, informed participation in class discussions; half by a ten-fifteen page paper (see separate sheet). The paper is due no later than Tuesday, December 11, at 5 PM (in my mailbox or under my office door).

Discussion Questions for Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies:

1) Postrel explicitly seeks to convince you that "left/right" political distinctions do not make sense of our world and its current divisions. Does it follow in any way, explicitly or implicitly, that she does not find the notion of "libertarian" or "classical liberal" useful to understanding the conflicts around us?

2) We've encountered lots of dichotomies in our readings: e.g., planned v. spontaneous; coerced v. voluntary; centralized v. dispersed; unconstrained v. constrained. How would you relate Postrel's stasist v. dynamist distinction to the distinctions that our other authors have tried to make at a fundamental conceptual level? To what degrees is it or is it not a new distinction?

3) Where (if anywhere) do you find Postrel most in agreement with Hayek writ large? Where (if anywhere) do you find her most in disagreement with Hayek? Such agreements or disagreements, of course, may be matters of degree, emphasis, and nuance.

4) How do Postrel's analyses of "knowledge" relate to those of Mises, Hayek, and Sowell?

5) What is the place of Postrel's extended discussion of "play" in her broader thesis?

6) Given your sense(s) of the tradition we have engaged thus far—and independent of the issue of how you think she would classify herself—is Postrel a "classical liberal"?

7) Explicitly or implicitly, what is (are) Postrel's fundamental moral criterion (criteria)?

8) If you were constrained to anthologize ONLY ONE chapter of The Future and Its Enemies, the goal being to expose someone to the heart of Postrel's way of thinking and analyzing, which chapter would you choose, and why?