Roderick T. Long

Roderick T. Long is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute and a professor of philosophy at Auburn University. He runs the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society. His website is Praxeology.net.

Articles

When Murray Rothbard founded the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977, publishing opportunities for libertarian scholarship, especially radical  libertarian scholarship, were even rarer than they are today. Certainly the intellectual climate was beginning to improve. New books and conferences, along with the Nobel prizes for Friedrich A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, had all combined to give broadly libertarian approaches a higher academic profile. In Rothbard's vision, libertarianism represented not simply a set of policy proposals, but a wide ranging and diverse body of social theory articulating an integrated understanding of human agency and social interaction underlying such policy proposals. That's why it's the Journal of Libertarian Studies and not just the journal of libertarianism.

Publications

Media

Roderick T. Long

Claims of ultimate ends, like happiness or well-being, are impossible, says Hobbes. In this life, the fact that you are still acting shows that you have not achieved any ultimate end. Does action really express dissatisfaction? You can act to keep something happening, rather than to try to change things.