Robert Andelson, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Auburn University, died this past weekend. I met him at one of the early Austrian Scholars Conferences of the Mises Institute in the 1990s and immediately became friends with him. He was a warm, genial person, with a wealth of hilarious stories about people and incidents in his life. All of his anecdotes he delivered in his characteristic slow voice, barely cracking a smile.
His stories reflected a key feature of his personality: he was a very careful observer of the world, with a keen eye for incongruity. His fastidious taste led him to study aesthetics and value theory, his specialties at Auburn. He was a firm believer in objective values: “I may not be able to say why a painting by Rembrandt is better than an Andy Warhol soup can,” he would say, “but I know the difference between art and trash.” (You had to hear the way he pronounced “Warhol” to get the full impact of his comment.) His most important contribution to philosophy, Imputed Rights, is a defense of objective value in ethics.
As his comment about art indicates, Bob Andelson was a man of firm opinions. This trait became apparent early in his life. As a student, he rejected the leftist orthodoxy that prevailed in American academic life. He held the unfashionable view that Communist infiltration of the schools posed a genuine problem, a position that occasioned much trouble for him when he studied theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. E. Merrill Root, in Collectivism on the Campus, devoted several pages to Andelson’s battles with his leftist professors. Although he was compelled to terminate his studies at Chicago, he later received a PhD in philosophy at the University of Southern California.
Bob achieved his greatest fame as a political philosopher. Like Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov, he was attracted to the doctrines of Henry George. He regarded the Georgist position, not as an alternative to classical liberalism, but as its best-developed expression. He wrote and edited a number of books defending this view, including the monumental Critics of Henry George. He attained great prominence in the Georgist movement. “If Georgism can be said to have a Pope,” he once said to me, “I suppose I’m it.”
Bob Andelson’s strong attraction to classical liberalism led him to friendship with Ralph Raico and George Reisman, both of whom he met when they were of high school age. He never forgot these friends and eagerly looked forward to seeing them at the Scholars Conferences, over forty years after he had first met them. Those of us who were fortunate enough to know Bob Andelson will miss the company of this fine scholar and good man.
