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The "Anarchists" Strike Back
The books reminded him that some people claimed to be both Rothbardian anarchists and conservative Catholics. How dare they! Feser supports the war; here were writers who, by claiming that this view was obviously mistaken, challenged his own grasp of Catholic tradition. It was imperative, from his standpoint, that he strike back. Those he condemned as defenders of an un-Catholic social philosophy must not be allowed the upper hand. ~David Gordon, LewRockwell.com
I guess there are Rothbardians who have no problem with the label of anarchist, which really does surprise me. I must not be as familiar with what their libertarianism entails as I thought I was. I have scarcely ever encountered a libertarian who did not react with offense the moment the a-word was thrown in his face. In any event, Mr. Gordon gives Mr. Feser a bit of a dressing down on libertarian grounds, which don't interest me very much, but the more important part of the response (and, in fact, a better answer than my own critique of Feser) is here:
Cardinal Journet, e.g., states in The Church of the Word Incarnate, Volume I, pp.306–307: “After reading this specification [by St. Thomas] for a just war we might well ask how many wars have been wholly just. Probably they could be counted on the fingers of one hand.” Cardinal Journet was a well-known conservative, and the reformers of Vatican II viewed his great treatise on the Church as defending an overly hierarchical view. Cardinal Ottaviani, the principal opponent at Vatican II of the liberals, went so far as to say “that modern wars can never fulfill those conditions which. . . govern – theoretically – a just and lawful war. Moreover, no conceivable cause could ever be a sufficient justification for the evils, the slaughter, the destruction, the moral and religious upheavals which war today entails."
This echoes in stronger terms the quote from then-Cardinal Ratzinger I posted yesterday.
Via Daniel McCarthy
Daniel Larison | March 28, 2006
Comments
Why would Rothbardians object to the label "anarchist" when Rothbard himself labele his philosophy "anarcho-capitalism."
Glaivester | 03/29/06 20:22
Good point. Apparently I was simply wrong about this, and I'll make a correction post shortly. I guess that should tell you something about how closely I follow our paleolibertarian friends' writings on political theory. It should also underscore, if there was any need to, that those who embrace the label of anarchist will tend to view quite a few things differently from your garden-variety paleoconservative (if there is a garden variety).
Daniel Larison | 03/30/06 10:15
I think you're right to parenthesize the question of whether there is such a thing as a garden-variety paleo. For all that they have in common, the Thomists, Jeffersonians, Machiavellians, sociobiologists, and others one finds among self-identified paleoconservatives have quite distinct ideas about the political good. And from the beginning, or very nearly so, there have been anarchist fellow travelers. Chiefly they're the Rothbardians or paleolibertarians, but some of them are figures not commonly thought of as libertarian -- Joe Sobran, for example, who has come around to the Rothbardian point of view and calls himself an anarchist, but is no less of a paleoconservative than he ever was.
Daniel McCarthy | 03/30/06 19:34
Thanks for the comment. I realise I must have been exaggerating a bit when I distinguished between the paleolibertarians, many of whom I often see in the pages of Chronicles and TAC, and the paleocons. However, to the extent there is something more of a paleo consensus on economic questions centered around subsidiarity and an idea of a commonwealth it is precisely on those questions that paleos and our "anarchist" friends differ sharply. I didn't mean to "write out" the paleolibertarians or anything of the kind, in case that was the impression, as most of them have been at this a lot longer than I have.
Daniel Larison | 03/31/06 12:16
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