New at Reason

Tim Cavanaugh | December 14, 2005

Julian Sanchez reviews [PDF] Ted Honderich's Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair?

Comments

|12.14.05 @ 12:33PM|#

A good little piece... one addition I would like to see on the Reason site one day is a recommended reading list. I know the print edition has book reviews each issue, but a good libertarian reading list - from the classics to recent releases - would be a welcome addition.

|12.14.05 @ 1:08PM|#

Now there's a book project-- and I mean that. An authentic geneological analysis of the conservative tradition could really be a great, long-lasting work of scholarship.

One thing I would love to read more about is the connections between Burke and Hayek. Anyway, I always love to see some pompous academic's nose tweaked.

VM|12.14.05 @ 2:01PM|#

Good work, Julian! as usual!

enjoyed the piece greatly!

thanks!
VM

|12.14.05 @ 2:06PM|#

Excellent title!

Warren|12.14.05 @ 3:18PM|#

Julian,
If your subject is half as awful as you claim, I can't understand why you'd waste over 1700 words on it. Not that I doubt you, just saying.

|12.14.05 @ 3:32PM|#

Because that's what Cato assigned?

|12.14.05 @ 3:49PM|#

Is it possible to copy and paste from a PDF file? I wanted to quote passages from this one.

Julian's withering review did away with any interest I had in actually reading the volume. After the review, I was kinda wondering about Honderich being a philosopher. I mean; aren't philosophers are supposed to make arguments that are rigorous or, at least, not wildly disjointed?

Also, Honderich claims that conservatives don't believe in rights!?...and he also claims that their only rational is "organized selfishness". Wouldn't that at least entail property rights? I'm thinking that in the poverty of Honderich's thought, property rights don't count for much.

Julian, could you please cite a discussion that you like concerning the influence of Kant on Nozick? That sounds interesting.

|12.14.05 @ 3:55PM|#

Is it possible to copy and paste from a PDF file? I wanted to quote passages from this one.

Look on the toolbar for the "Select Text" icon (at least that is the verbage on my Acrobat). Then just select the text and right-click "Copy to Clipboard."

|12.14.05 @ 3:57PM|#

Thanks, K. Toishi!

|12.14.05 @ 4:26PM|#

... I wrote: I mean; aren't philosophers are supposed to make arguments that are rigorous or, at least, not wildly disjointed?

Aren't commenters supposed to make comments that aren't garbled? It's almost time for that Preview button New Year's resolution. again...

|12.14.05 @ 4:40PM|#

So he cobbles together a group of people with widely varying ideologies, calls them conservatives, then concludes that the key value of conservatism is selfishness, since that's the only value all of his examples share. QED, I guess...

|12.14.05 @ 5:05PM|#

Rick-
I can't think of one off the top of my head, but the discussion under the "Why Side Constraints?" heading (from memory here...) in AS&U bears the pretty self-evident imprimatur of Kant's "merely as a means" formulation of the categorical imperative.

|12.14.05 @ 6:29PM|#

This book looks to be a good counter-point to Honderich's:

VARIETIES OF CONSERVATISM IN AMERICA

http://tinyurl.com/8azva

|12.14.05 @ 7:30PM|#

" bears the pretty self-evident imprimatur of Kant's "merely as a means" formulation of the categorical imperative."

yeah and Julian's review is written just like the above example...bleh

*runs to grab his copy of "the third culture".

|12.14.05 @ 8:39PM|#

Re: Kant. This is what Julian was referring to:

Nozick takes his position to follow from a basic moral principle associated with Immanuel Kant and enshrined in Kant's second formulation of his famous Categorical Imperative: "Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only." The idea here is that a human being, as a rational agent endowed with self-awareness, free will, and the possibility of formulating a plan of life, has an inherent dignity and cannot properly be treated as a mere thing, or used against his will as an instrument or resource in the way an inanimate object might be.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/n/nozick.htm