Yale historian of modern Europe Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands, &c.), reflecting on his conversations with the late English-born NYU historian Tony Judt, published in 2012 as Thinking the Twentieth Century:

“Both Tony and I think that when you teach or write history, you ought to be giving people a coherent picture of a series of events. You want to aim for understanding rather than deconstruction. Historians and literary critics and psychologists and others are fond of saying, ‘Those things you think you know–well, you don’t really know them. They aren’t really true.’ And as important as that exercise can be, it’s not clear to me that’s what we should be saying and publishing, at least initially: it destroys the very few reference points people already have.”

Kerry Howley, in “Are Property Rights Enough?”, a 2009 reason symposium with Todd Seavey and Daniel McCarthy:

“Seavey worries that libertarianism will be even less popular if we point out the confluence between it and other philosophical leanings. This is silly. I write this response from a café in southern Guatemala, where you can’t walk into a Catholic church without being confronted by Mayan animist iconography. Unimpeachably devout Catholics cart booze and cigarettes to an effigy of Maximón, a badass, cigar-smoking saint I promise you will not find in the Vatican.

“The most successful missionaries did not come to Guatemala and insist that their religion had nothing whatsoever to do with the lives of those they sought to convert. They tried to convince the locals that they had been Catholics in spirit all along. Every evangelist on earth knows his task is to find connections between old, entrenched beliefs and whatever newfangled doctrine he is looking to sell.

“Perhaps it would be instructive to consider a hypothetical conversation between Seavey and a potential libertarian.

Potential Libertarian: What’s libertarianism?

Seavey: A philosophy of freedom and property rights.

Potential Libertarian: Oh, right. Freedom like civil rights?

Seavey: No, not that kind of freedom.

Potential Libertarian: Oh. Freedom like the freedom to be openly gay?

Seavey: No. That has nothing to do with liberty.

Potential Libertarian: Oh. Um…

Seavey: Let’s talk about easements!” …

I think here of the response of a friend of mine two years ago to a recent article on the 1970s decentralist E.F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful):

“See, I feel this is where people, both pro- and con-, often get this wrong: it is not about, it is never about, returning to the past, were such a thing possible. It is, I think, about saying that anything done can be undone, that any question seemingly answered definitively in the past can be asked again and a new answer arrived at, and any decision made can be revisited. Because the die is never cast, because human beings can change, because we do have a choice.

“And, I always try to remember what [Lewis] Mumford said in The Conduct Of Life:

“‘It is not enough to say, as Rousseau once did, that one has only to reverse all the current practices to be right… If our philosophy is well-grounded we shall not merely react against the ‘air-conditioned nightmare’ of our present culture; we shall also carry into the future many elements of quality that this culture actually embraces.’”

In my role as private-police dispatcher at the desk of my self-assigned precinct in the Austro-literarian Quarter of New Web City, I often declaim over the World’s Tiniest Microphone carrying my All-Points-Bull, “Be on the lookout” for just that very sort of author, whether your goal, for whatever reason, is that of what some candle-burning, world-saving pietist do-gooders like to call “meaningful social change”, or, as in my case, simply inhaling great drafts of the sweet, sweet smoke of that old-time mind expansion in ways yet to be declared actionable at law. Much as Henry Hazlitt, while for over fifty years drawing his paychecks from within the very heart of the much-demonized “mainstream media”, not least on their divers books pages, did likewise, while with fine discrimination criticizing the halfway-housed enemies of tyranny for their varied vulnerabilities if not to the fires of Bolshevism, to the termites of social democracy – see, e.g., in The Free Man’s Library from 1956, his tub-thumping on behalf of such distinguished men and women of metropolitan letters as Joseph Wood Krutch (for his award-winning anti-scientism critique The Measure of Man), Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism), Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, the latter two at once praised for their stark unmaskings of murderous Leninist-Stalinist tyranny – and scored for the surviving utopian idealism of their sustained commitments to the dream of socialist deliverance. Then there was “old Ludwig von”, whose many exquisite footnotes (Leipzig: 1797, Brockhaus ed., n.s.), fruit of his long apprenticeship in the groves of fin de siècle Austro-Hungarian scholarship, are chockablock with gateway drugs to bibliographic freiheit in an only partly-wertfrei world.

Now if only some of our latter-day “thoroughly mainstream authors” would begin to embrace not just spontaneous order but … Invisible Order as well, and, as they pass their hands over the Wellsian space between the collars and floating hats of its principals’ web-page avatars, deposit into those collars a goodly percentage of the sales receipts of their forthcoming bestsellers.

All is God’s. But give Caesar his pittance. Something about the original Aramaic that was almost taunting (to Caesar as it relates to him on the coin, and to the Pharisees as it relates to their asking the question) in tone, but not explicit enough in it’s defiance to warrant intervention.

I believe that the sermon is somewhere on our church website.

Good ideas, on the other hand, are as rare as hen’s teeth.

And to think it all started at the little hole in the wall of my old deleted blog, over a high-tectonic plate of manicotti and steak, which power lunch thus stands at #3 among bubbling, Googling servings of that Austro-hungryin’ restying of a formerly Italian standard.

“But more often than not, [popular historians] do not even show an awareness of the relevant issues or how the substantive arguments affect economic history”

However proverbial the greater glamour and cachet trailing the writers of fiction, poetry and drama, it stands as long since apparent that much of the best mainstream writing talent has for decades appeared within the precincts of narrative nonfiction, and never more so than the minute you realize that the latest marquee world-is-flat doorstoppers of our reigning chestbeating op-ed gasbags need not, thank the gods of Grub Street, suck all the air out of the bookstore aisles, and that, Austrian-friendly or no, within that vast bibliographic mainstream there is nothing approaching a doctrinal or sectarian unanimity, however much the talk-radio philistines like with broad brush to paint all save those “writers” serving up the latest GOP-base fodder as forming one great “liberal” monolith (thus, as has been long remarked, do the ‘wingers invert the comic paranoid schematics of the old-time Marxists)..

So who, we may ask ourselves, among the vast sea of at least semi-popular historians, science journalists, essayists, and social scientists, these last c. 25 years, appearing or reviewed regularly on the books pages of the leading Anglo-American newspapers and magazines, displays a becomingly above-average awareness as a factor in multi-layered history of the role of the market, the division of labor, technological advance, capital accumulation, secure private-property rights, and the rising standards of living to which they in combination lead? Matt Ridley, in, e.g., The Rational Optimist, comes to mind, but I know there are many others, as such “Books of the Year” lists as those at, e.g., The Economist will indicate And as one market-friendly sidelight here, we recall that in 2011 the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction went to Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62, by Frank Dikötter, who in the wake of his book’s publication acknowledged in its writing a strong debt to F.A. Hayek.