Phillip W. Magness

272 Words

My contribution to a larger project on the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address: It is surely among the great paradoxes of the human condition that liberty attains its clearest meaning at its most imperiled hour. At its safest moments, liberty is lived and acted upon and enjoyed and praised, and yet largely unrecognized. It is […]

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Clearing the air on secession

The libertarian Cato Institute recently released a admirable video project addressing some of the philosophical implications of the Civil War and critiquing libertarian support for the Confederacy. I was pleasantly surprised by the direction it went, having previously criticized its narrator Jason Kuznicki for a counterproductive and somewhat philosophically troubling foray into this same issue

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If not Frederick Douglass, who was the first black visitor to the White House?

This weekend marks the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s first meeting with Frederick Douglass, an encounter summarized here and detailed in multiple published accounts by Douglass himself. While Douglass was probably the most famous African American visitor to the Lincoln White House, he was not the first to be received in an official capacity despite

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On libertarian stupidity and the Civil War

Ideologically-driven history begets bad historical interpretation, typically of the type that selectively casts about for bits and pieces of a story to confirm a fixed bias. Or that which carelessly passes over complications to the same. In either case a desired narrative leads the evidence, sometimes unwittingly. Yet ideological constructs are also informed by history,

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History and the “Social Justice” debate

At risk of venturing into political philosophy, I have to admit my intrigue with an ongoing dialogue between David Friedman and a group of commentators for the always-insightful Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog on the question of “social justice.” As an advance warning the debate is primarily philosophical and addresses this concept in the abstract. Though the

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