Can Libertarians Reclaim Dialectics?
by Ari Armstrong [The following article originally appeared in the November/December 2001 edition of Colorado Liberty.] Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) is the third volume in his trilogy on the subject. Wait! Don’t recoil in horror, and don’t let your eyes glaze over! Sciabarra’s book is neither an endorsement of Hegel nor an irrelevant academic exercise. Instead, it offers a great many useful insights for the practical activist as well as for the more philosophically inclined. Sciabarra single-handedly revived my interest in Ayn Rand with his book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. His earlier book, Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, argued that Marx’ ideas were utopian and ultimately unworkable, whereas Hayek developed a rich theory of social evolution and unintended consequences. Sciabarra has long held libertarian views. In graduate school at New York University, Sciabarra found a mentor in the Marxist B
