The Substack Philosophy Class is finishing "Anarchy, State & Utopia" on Tuesday. The next Tuesday is off. After that, we're starting up on G.A. Cohen's "Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality."

Picture of G.A. Cohen

No real essay this week, sorry! My computer was out of comission for a couple days and now that I’ve more or less got it working again I’m frantically catching up on other work. But Andy already made some excellent artwork for next week’s essay “Steve Paxton’s Defense of G.A. Cohen’s Defense of Karl Marx’s Theory of History”:

Picture of Cohen, Marx, and Steve Paxton

…and, speaking of Cohen:

For the last several months of Tuesdays (twenty-four class sessions plus the inevitable off-weeks), the Zoom Substack Philosophy Class has been working through Robert Nozick’s classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It’s a good book for a class of (mostly) socialists to read. Nozick is an excellent writer and an extremely sharp philosopher (however massive his ideological blindspots) and ASU is the most intellectually rigorous defense of capitalist property rights to date. It’s a book that can be frustrating, in the best and most useful way. I know I’ve gotten a lot of going through it this carefully (see here for the first of what I hope are several things I’m going to write based on that class), and I think the students have enjoyed it. We’re finally going to finish it off in the twenty-fifth session, covering the very last bit of the book, day after tomorrow.

Having thus finally finished our dinner, it’s going to be time for dessert—G.A. Cohen’s book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, in which (among other things) he systematically dismantles every part of Nozick’s case for libertarianism, brick by brick.

Cover of Cohen's book "Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality"

Anyone who skipped dinner but wants to join us for dessert all the same (flagrantly ignoring everything Pink Floyd has taught us about meat, pudding, and the relationship between the two) can do so by just becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack:

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Class meets on Tuesdays at 1 PM East Coast/10 AM West Coast and lasts about an hour. Zoom links are posted for paid subscribers the day before. If you have the kind of job where you can’t put on a Zoom class in the background for an hour, or if you have to miss the occasional class and catch up later, the recordings are always posted here by the following weekend.

So, again, we’ll be finishing Nozick this Tuesday (August 4th). I’m going to be in airports and on planes all day the following Tuesday (August 11th) coming back from my annual trip back to Michigan to hang out with some friends from high school at a cabin by a body of water in my home state that is called, I swear to God, Crystal Lake. (I’ve been going for many years and remain un-slashed so I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll make it back this time as well.) The Cohen class starts on Tuesday, August 18th.

I hope to see some of you then!

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