This is a rejoinder to some of the contentions of Part II of Jeffrey Friedman's monster article (or mini?book?) about ?The New Consensus.? After questioning his supposedly ?non?tendentious understanding of Marx,? it proceeds to deny that what Friedman calls Positive Libertarianism is any more a sort of libertarianism than imaginary or non?existent cows are a kind of cows; and to insist that what Friedman calls morality is light years removed from the dutiful, domestic decencies of what would normally be considered (...) moral conduct. Next it examines Friedman's misunderstandings of option rights, which actually presuppose only the weakest possible claims to equality. Finally it concludes with criticism of his bizarre and perverse assumption that concern about the consequences of our actions has little or nothing rather than almost everything to do with their morality. (shrink)

Fukuyama's argument that we have recently reached ?The End of History?; is defended against writers who fail to appreciate the Hegelian meaning of Fukuyama's ?Endism,?; but is criticized for using simplistic dichotomies that evade the economic and ideological convergence of East and West. Against Fukuyama, the economic critique of socialism, revisionist scholarship on early Soviet economic history, and the history of the libertarian ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx are deployed to show that history ?ended?; years ago: the creeds (...) of the First and Second Worlds sprang from common assumptions; and even before Eastern European reform movements, both sides of the Iron Curtain had moved to economies that are neither capitalist nor socialist. (shrink)

Friedman misunderstands postmodernism?or, as it could better be called, metamodernism. Metamodernism is the common sense beyond the lunatic formulas of the Vienna Circle and conventional statistics. It has little to do with the anxieties of Continental intellectuals. It therefore is necessary for serious empirical work on the role of the state.

Jeffrey Friedman broaches a number of criticisms of Libertarianism as a conceptual basis for opposing the extensive modern welfare state, examining several variants and concluding that they are fundamentally unsupported. He opts for a “consequentialist” view of foundations. Nevertheless, he thinks that the modem welfare state is subject to effective critique along such lines. But rational contractarian individualism works and does provide foundations for libertarianism, while “consequentialism” is an ill‐defined theory.that is quite unpromising for the proposed critique; nevertheless, Friedman's empirical (...) and economic critique of the welfare state is valid. (shrink)

“Postmodernism” denotes efforts to replace foundationalist philosophy with contextu‐alist, immanentist forms of reason. “Postlibertarianism” denotes efforts to transcend contemporary minimal statism, questioning both its “libertarian” moral superstructure and its underlying consequentialist claims and seeking to determine whether the latter can be generalized in a way that displaces the former. Efforts to reach minimal‐statist conclusions by postmodern means seem bound to aggravate the problem that plagues contemporary minimal statism: its failure to be true to its consequentialist foundations, reflected in its long‐standing (...) devotion to dubious arguments for the intrinsic good of laissez‐faire capitalism. For postmodernism fosters the illusion that one can do without any foundations at all. Rather than recovering its consequentialist roots, therefore, postmodern minimal statism tends to rely unquestioningly on the normative foundations already accepted by the libertarian “speech community,” neither responding to alternative interpretations of the value of liberty, nor transcending the arid conversation of “liberty” in favor of investigations of the real world of contemporary capitalism and the welfare state. (shrink)

In Doing What Comes Naturally, Stanley Fish argues on behalf of rhetoric and against philosophy. The latter assumes an independent reality that can be perceived without distortion and then reported in a transparent verbal medium. The former insists that this is impossible. As Fish acknowledges, this debate is a version of the old quarrel that has raged since the dialogues of Plato and the orations of the sophists. The present paper first examines how the Greek sophist Isocrates actually formulated the (...) terms of the debate. Then it turns to Plato in order to demonstrate that his treatment of the old quarrel is superior to Fish's postmodern update. (shrink)