Total Freedom -- Freedom Book of the Month from Free-Market.Net: The Freedom Network

Total Freedom

Freedom Book of the Month for January 2001:

Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Penn State Press, 2000, 467 pp.

This month, there are no surprises.

I've been awaiting Chris Sciabarra's new book for some time; I expected it to be a slam dunk for this feature; and I'm not disappointed. "Total Freedom" completes a trilogy chock full of important implications for libertarian ideas.

Sciabarra has built his career, thus far, on evaluating how the new wine of libertarian ideology might have been poured from the old skin of dialectic method. In "Marx, Hayek and Utopia," he compared the approaches of two very different economic thinkers to utopian ideas. In "Ayn Rand: the Russian Radical," he exposed the root of the Objectivist icon's thought in both dialectics and in Russian Silver Age philosophy.

Now, in "Total Freedom," he moves on to an analysis of the methodology of Murray Rothbard, and in doing so begins to construct what he hopes is "not a full-blown social theory, but a metatheoretical foundation upon which to build such a theory."

That's a pretty tall order. Sciabarra seems to have two specific goals in mind. The first is to reclaim dialectics -- "an orientation toward contextual analysis of the systemic and dynamic relations of components within a totality" -- from the authoritarian Left. Working forward from its origins in ancient Greece, he is essentially rescuing a valuable philosophical method from the corruptions introduced to it by the Young Hegelians, especially Marx and Engels, and from their successors.

Thus rescued, the tool is too valuable to be left idle. In part two of "Total Freedom," Sciabarra uses the work of Rothbard to expose "the dialectical strengths -- and nondialectical weaknesses -- in contemporary libertarian social theory." This exercise, of course, can be seen as the first step in correcting those weaknesses.

Now it's confession time: "Total Freedom" is not an easy book to read. I don't mean that it is so thickly and academically constructed as to be incoherent. On the contrary, Sciabarra has always had a knack for making the impenetrable jungle of philosophy ... well, penetrable. He does yeoman's work here on that end of things. Not being an academic or philosopher (other than the armchair type) myself, I was pleased at the surface readability of the book.

Keep in mind, however, that our author is covering a lot of ground here. He surveys the history and meaning of dialectics in less than 200 pages; and relates it to libertarianism and the work of Rothbard in another 200. "Total Freedom" is incredibly compact given its subject matter, and that means that each sentence and each paragraph has been put to good, thought-provoking use. If you're not stopping, re-reading and thinking -- hard -- every page or so, you're probably not getting as much out of the book as you could. It's a gold mine.

We are ending a century that has seen the initial triumph and final failure of Karl Marx's attempt to apply dialectical materialism to the social order. It's fitting that we begin the new century with a new attempt, and "Total Freedom" is a provocative first sortie.

Order "Total Freedom" from Laissez Faire Books for $19.50.

Order "Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical" from Laissez Faire Books for $24.95.

Order "Marx, Hayek and Utopia" from the SUNY Press for $20.50.

Order "Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand" (edited by Sciabarra and Gladstein) from Laissez Faire Books for $15.95.

Visit Chris Matthew Sciabarra's Dialectics and Liberty site.

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edited by Thomas L. Knapp

Past Winners:

Freedom Book of the Year 2000: Forge of the Elders by L. Neil Smith

December 2000: The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto

November 2000: Escape from Leviathan by J.C. Lester

October 2000: The Art of Political War by David Horowitz