“Left Liberalism” is a direct translation of Linksliberalismus and refers to the middle-to-late-nineteenth century German political movement in opposition to the regime-oriented National Liberals; it has no connection with what is sometimes called “left-liberalism” in the present day." - Ralph Raico, Eugen Richter and Late German Manchester Liberalism
Left-libertarians always bring up the post-Enlightenment continental liberals as though this somehow establishes a connexion between libertarianism and the post-Marxist cultural radical left. But this is far from the case. Proudhon, the most economically left of the liberals, was a deeply conservative Christian. Bastiat was a Christian, also. Max Stirner would have laughed at the awkward pretensions to ‘liberation’ the left-libertarian cultural gestalt puts forth.
The ‘left’ of continental liberalism was different than left-libertarianism in that what it represented was a radical individualism and a passive tolerance and pro-commercial view of society. Whatever basis they ascribed to it, their sociology was fundamentally shaped by their views on the power of contract, private property and the rule of natural law; likewise a distrust of empiricism and cultural fetishism in favor of a Thomistic realist worldview.
Yes, there are many such instances of what you just said. People assume a word directly translates into the meaning they assume, and start using it in a different context from the original one. Such as “social evolution”, which is sometimes conflated to be “social natural selection” - even though the former rather refers to ideas about how biology does not fully explain morality and ethics and why philosophy and religion fill that gap in man’s evolutionary history.
The word “left wing” itself has been distorted from what it once referred - the Jacobins in the left side seating of the French National Assembly. The closest thing to Jacobins today are Arab Ba’athist leaders and African military dictators. To be a Jacobin is to simply be a political murderer and the destroyer of an ancien regime on the path of power. (Mix in some idealizing of Spartans or some ancient society). That’s all it ever meant. It was meant to be an insult to call someone left-wing, so heavens knows why some even accepted it.
It has been my experience that LL’s tend to associate with Prodhoun as something of a mascot, while not addressing (though admitting to) his faulty economic scheme. They tend to run as far away from Stirner as possible when they actually run into a non leftist Stirnerite. They seem more keen to use these peole as “cool” avatars or political labels, and not social scientists and philosophers.
They are more interested in their manifestos and “supporting the correct cause” than acknowledging and identifying what can and can not be said about reality. Which is to be expected, tha is what an intellectuals comparative advantage is. It is amusing when you take away their chincy left wing (Sartre, Cadmus) existentialists from them and watch them stammer about on how “no one can be truely objective” (what the hell are the talking about) or “morality matters”. It doesn’t help one wit for any productive cause, because we are culturally drenched in left of center tropes that show no sign of going away, but it is amusing none the less.
Good call on the Aristotilian type framework. This is something I have been meaning to delve into a bit more as of late.
Sartre is terrible, Camus is a mixed bag and Kierkegaard doesn’t have any coherent philosophy to speak of. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Stirner and Bergson are good but they are quite different from most people called ‘existentialists’.
Heidegger, Stirner and Bergson are mainly concerned with the ontology and teleology of the individual, Nietzsche with the moral and purposive elements; Sartre and his kind seem mostly to live on crypto-Marxism and leftist ‘alienation’ fixations.
Sartre’s style has always bothered me as well. As you can tell by my sig, I’m a big fan of Camus’ personal philosophy. He has a lot of ideas that libertarians may agree wtih politically, even though he was a syndicalist. I think more than being associated with the Left however, he was more opposed to what he considered to be totalitarianism more than anything else. That’s the part I appreciate most, probably.
I like Camus… I like some Sartre… I like his ‘bad faith’ thought and his ‘condemned to be free’ thought mostly, which stresses that we should be responsible for our actions without excuse… but most of what I like about Sartre was already said by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
I hope you aren’t saying anything bad about existentialism… i love existentialism
I am saying I simply don’t understand why Sartre or Cadmus are considered as anything worthwhile. If they add anything “new” to anything it is left wing diatribes (and how new is that?). Honestly, who cares about a whiney version of romanticizing obvious reality. More over, I am saying once you expose these guys as obvious non issues by showing that ontological reality actually means something and has non cutesy left wing romantic notions, fringe leftists types who were on that band wagon, turn into even greater stammering stuttering idiots
P.S. I love Kierkegaard and to a degree Nietzsche I just tend to catagorize them as semi-philosophers or something like that. I would consider myself a Stirnerite (though I don’t know if he would be considered an existentialist, I think he is above all that and I certainly would not consider him post-struc), and I while I have read Beig and Time once, it was perhaps the most difficult thing I have ever read (sans the few sections of Hegel I have read) so I can’t comment much on that.
On that note both Stirner and Kierkegaard to me seem to be very strongly Aristotlean/ Thomistic in thought.