I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Eric Mack 225
the market anarchist and the minimal statist in which both parties tend to ignore the special
problems of securing voluntary funding for rights-protective services.
Also, during my year at Harvard, I read another book that has had a very considerable
effect on my views, the recently published first volume of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and
Liberty. I had already read most of Hayek’s Individualism and Economic Order, which I had
found much more helpful than Mises’s Socialism. But what most impressed me about Law,
Legislation, and Liberty was its very suggestive extension of the idea of spontaneous order
not merely to social order in general but also to such intellectual orders as law and morality.
Hayek has sensitized me to a type of hyper-rationalism which often appears among academic
political philosophers. More importantly, Hayek’s emphasis on rules and the rationality of
rule-governed conduct has reinforced my own anti-consequentialist orientation.
In August of ’75, I headed down to the Big Easy, to take up a new position in the
Philosophy Department at Tulane University. And I have taught at Tulane—in Philosophy
and in Political Economy—ever since. Around the time of my arrival at Tulane I began my
long and very rewarding relationship with the Liberty Fund. A very large proportion of what
I have learned since the mid-70s, I have learned through my participation in and organization
of Liberty Fund colloquia on topics in economics, history, law, philosophy, and political
theory. I have edited two books for Liberty Press: Auberon Herbert’s The Right and Wrong of
Compulsion by the State and other Essays and Herbert Spencer’s The Man versus the State.
A good deal of my work over the past couple of decades has coalesced around two main
themes. The first is (still) the grounding of rights theory in an individualistic conception
of value. My more recent work in this area, which began with my “Moral Individualism:
Agent-Relativity and Deontic Restraints” (in Social Philosophy and Policy, Autumn 1989),
may have been reignited by my encounter with Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community
by my walkabout buddy Loren Lomasky. The second theme is the grounding of property
rights and the articulation and defense of a plausible Lockean proviso. My work in this area
began with my “Self-Ownership and the Right of Property” (in The Monist, October 1990)
and “The Self-Ownership Proviso: A New and Improved Lockean Proviso” (in Social
Philosophy and Policy, winter, 1995). My work on this second theme has in part been a
response to the left (i.e., Georgist) libertarianism of Hillel Steiner and to the Marxist criticisms
of libertarianism offered by G.A. Cohen. It certainly has been the use of the language
of “self-ownership” by Steiner (who affirms self-ownership) and G.A. Cohen (who rejects
it) that has brought me back to the self-ownership terminology that was embraced by
Rothbard. Quite a number of my essays on these and related themes have appeared in the
journal of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University. The
Center is the wonderful creation of Jeff Paul, Ellen Paul, and Fred Miller.
During most of the nineties, I had the rewarding experience of teaching at the summer
seminars of the Institute for Humane Studies. And, in a partial and very qualified
trip back to my roots, I have recently lectured regularly at The Objectivist Center’s summer
seminars.
Eric Mack is professor of philosophy and faculty member of the Murphy Institute of Political Economy
at Tulane University.