Andrews seems to have been one of those people whose mind is so open that all his brains fall out. FULL ARTICLE by Jeff Riggenbach
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/16309/stephen-pearl-andrewss-fleeting-contribution-to-anarchist-thought/
Stephen Pearl Andrews’s Fleeting Contribution to Anarchist Thought
Previous post: Public Service Is an Ignoble Calling
Next post: What’s a Job Good For?
{ 3 comments }
I think it was the author John Brunner who came up with “the trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along and putting things in it”.
Mr. Lawrence ~
On your quoted quote, “the trouble . . . putting things in it”. Thank goodness, life would be so boring without that benefit from my fellow man.
It ties in with something I have believed for many years, “Man’s biggest fault is that he fails to consider he just might be wrong.”
Steven Pearl Andrews had a powerful, inquisitive, and energetic mind. He also had no doubt strong libertarian and anarchistic instincts, although he lacked the logical rigor, and the capacity for critical and skeptical thought to articulate a complete libertarian system a la Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and Auberon Herbert, and, in a later generation, Ludwig von Mises, H. L. Mencken, and Murray Rothbard.
I suppose the pity was, in this otherwise engaging narrative about a very interesting man, that he wasn’t born a century or so later, when the fundamentals of libertarian thought had been made available, especially in economics and politics, and he could have gone on from there.
I agree that he was definitely searching for something, and that probably was libertarianism, in one form or another. If he lived and worked at a time when he could have been enlightened by e.g. Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock, and Frederic Bastiat, he would, no doubt, have been a fine addition to our anarchist or libertarian ranks!
PEACE AND FREEDOM!!
David K. Meller
Comments on this entry are closed.