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Total Freedom
Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism
480 pages | 18 illustrations | 6 x 9 | 2000
ISBN 978-0-271-02048-8 | cloth: $82.00 sh
ISBN 978-0-271-02049-5 | paper: $32.00 sh
Building upon his previous books about Marx, Hayek, and Rand, Total Freedom completes what Lingua Franca has called Sciabarra's "epic scholarly quest" to reclaim dialectics, usually associated with the Marxian left, as a methodology that can revivify libertarian thought. Part One surveys the history of dialectics from the ancient Greeks through the Austrian school of economics. Part Two investigates in detail the work of Murray Rothbard as a leading modern libertarian, in whose thought Sciabarra finds both dialectical and nondialectical elements. Ultimately, Sciabarra aims for a dialectical-libertarian synthesis, highlighting the need (not sufficiently recognized in liberalism) to think of the "totality" of interconnections in a dynamic system as the way to ensure human freedom while avoiding "totalitarianism" (such as resulted from Marxism).
"Chris Sciabarra's Total Freedom is an astonishing work, astonishing in the depth and breadth of its scholarship, in its evidence of the use of the dialectic process by philosophers such as Aristotle, in its discovery of dialectics in the work of economists such as Murray Rothbard, and—most of all—in the first-handedness of its author. Unlike so many other scholars and historians, Sciabarra looks at the history of philosophy through his own eyes and his own understanding. As a result, this beautifully and clearly written book will make the reader reexamine the history of philosophy and the history of dialectics by means of a new epistemological perspective: the perspective of dialectics. Total Freedom is a landmark in philosophical studies and interpretation." —Barbara Branden
"In a lucid, scholarily, and daringly original exercise in truly independent thinking, Chris Sciabarra reclaims the concept of dialectics and makes its methodology the foundation for a radical defense of 'the libertarian vision.' In his originality, Sciabarra is a man ahead of his time. He stimulates us with fresh and provocative perspectives, and challenges us to join him at the intellectual heights he so persuasively traverses. Must reading for all those committed to the ideal of a truly free society." — Nathaniel Branden
Chris Matthew Sciabarra has been a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Politics at New York University since 1989. His previous publications include Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (PSP, 1995), Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (SUNY, 1995), and Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (edited with Mimi Reisel Gladstein, PSP, 1999).