I have learned that my friend and colleague, Robert Hessen, died on April 15, 2024, at the age of 87. The Bronx-born economic and business historian earned his B.A. from Queens College, his M.A. from Harvard, and his Ph.D. from Columbia.
In the early 1960s, he was drawn to Ayn Rand’s work and became a contributor to both The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist. Some of those essays were republished as part of Rand’s book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Upon Rand’s death in March 1982, Bob told the New York Times that Rand’s “moral defense” of capitalism “had an electrifying effect on people who had never heard capitalism defended in other than technological terms.” Rand “made it clear that a free society is also a productive society, but what matters is individual freedom.” For this reason, Bob maintained that “Rand has had and will have an enduring influence on people in numerous fields.”
I had my first personal exchanges with Bob when he joined the Board of Advisors of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS), commencing with the second of our 23 volumes, in the Fall of 2000. I never had the pleasure of meeting him in-person, but our correspondence and phone conversations over the years were always warm and informative. He had a wonderful sense of humor and was a gentle soul. He was intensely supportive of the critical, interdisciplinary work we were publishing in JARS. Our last phone call, in the spring of 2023, was memorable not only for its length but for the extent to which he encouraged me in all my future endeavors, as JARS was winding down after 2+ decades of publication.
The Hoover Institution posted additional information in a memorial notice:
“Bob is survived by his wife of almost 29 years, Karin Bricker, who was with him at his passing. Bob’s first marriage, to the late Beatrice Minkus Hessen, lasted 26 years until her death in 1989 and produced two devoted children, Laurie and John, who survive him. Bob was a loving stepfather to Devi Bricker and the late David Bricker, and the beloved grandfather of five. He was a profoundly kind, decent and thoughtful man, a lover of books, music and movies, a wonderful husband, father, grandfather and friend. He passed at Stanford Hospital following a period of illness. The family is planning a memorial celebration for later this year.”
For me, Bob will always be remembered as a source of inspiration, and I will miss him very much. My deepest condolences to his family and friends during this difficult time.
Additional comments and condolences can be found on my Facebook page.
I’m convinced that John Sterling, long-time radio announcer for the New York Yankees, has pinstripes running through his veins. He called 5,420 regular season Yankee games and another 211 postseason games. Retiring, effective immediately, he’ll be recognized in a pregame ceremony this Saturday before the Yanks host the Tampa Rays at The Stadium. I’ll miss his iconic calls and warm sense of humor.
For an extra special treat, check out Sterling’s hilarious (and creative) home run calls …
On this date in 1930, psychotherapist and writer Nathaniel Branden was born. Back on December 3, 2014, upon his death, I wrote a heartfelt tribute to him: “Nathaniel Branden: Love and Friendship Eternal.” The generosity and support that he showed me and my family during some of our most difficult days is something I will never forget. He was a kind, humane and brilliant counselor, and a caring, loving friend.
I was first exposed to Nathaniel’s writings in my encounter with the nonfiction works of Ayn Rand. His pioneering exploration of the nature of self-esteem and its centrality to the project of human freedom and personal flourishing was both insightful and inspiring. And in the aftermath of his departure from the Objectivist movement, his eclectic therapeutic strategies were enormously helpful to countless numbers of individuals, who sought guidance for a life of authenticity and interpersonal visibility.
In later years, on the urging of Barbara Branden—another very dear friend—Nathaniel read a draft of my book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, and made wonderful suggestions along the way. We spent countless hours on the phone and later met in New York City. Eventually, he made his way to Brooklyn with his then-wife Devers (who also became a cherished friend), and I took them for my celebrated tour of the borough. (And yes, they sampled everything from Nathan’s Hot Dogs to the Sicilian slices of L&B Spumoni Gardens!) In 1999, my sister and I joined them both at their Beverly Hills home for a delightful evening.
Long before Nathaniel died, I told him that The Journal of Ayn Rand Studieswould publish a symposium dedicated to his work. Sadly, he never lived to see its publication in 2016. That 300-page double-issue, co-edited by Robert L. Campbell and me, was the first anthology to assess Branden’s contributions. “Nathaniel Branden: His Work and Legacy” (still available as a Kindle edition) featured sixteen contributors, including writers in academic and clinical psychology, who offered personal reflections and critical studies of Branden’s corpus.
I honor Nathaniel’s memory. I loved him and miss him very much.
Below are a few photos to mark today’s anniversary. Clockwise from the top left: Nathaniel and I were on the Boardwalk in Coney Island; together in Beverly Hills; in my Brooklyn apartment; and with Devers, in the shadow of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.
Postscript: In the Facebook discussion that followed this post, I added the following points:
Many folks remember his years with the Objectivist movement, when he was a stern gatekeeper. Others are still fighting over the schism of 1968. My exposure to him as a writer and dear friend was far removed from those years. And my experiences with him were far from unique. I discovered his work when I was 17. As a senior in high school, the first book of Rand’s that I read was Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and Branden’s essays were some of the most illuminating in the volume, including his discussion of “Alienation” (upon which he expanded in The Disowned Self).
I had the occasion to comment on several of his books in manuscript in the 1990s and 2000s, and I always told him that his approach had become even more profoundly dialectical over the years, insofar as it stressed the fuller context of process and system.
One could find this even in his attempts to redress the balance of reason and emotion from his earlier work. The Disowned Self emphasized the importance of never disowning one’s emotions. While Rand certainly recognized the integration of reason and emotion, Branden stressed that not only was it important to think in order to feel, but it was necessary to “feel deeply … to think clearly,” rejecting any “notion that thinking and feeling are opposed functions and that each entails the denial of the other.” His work is chock-full of important insights.
There’s a reason why Branden is considered “the father of the self-esteem movement”—except his own deeply philosophical and psychological exploration of self-esteem is far ahead of any of the fad-like books commonly associated with the topic. The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem is an outstanding example of his wider, evolving corpus.
This weekend is the Brooklyn Tech High School Homecoming. Back on June 6, 1984, I was privileged to provide a mixtape for Prom Night at Les Mouches, a dance club in Manhattan, for the Brooklyn Tech High School Class of 1984. (Yeah, I had connections with Ski! 😉 ) I was just starting out with my mobile DJ’ing … and it was fun!
In honor of the 40th anniversary of that event, I digitized a 13+ minute segment from one of those mixtapes, which packed the dance floor. It’s on my YouTube channel. Check out the memories …
Today, March 27, 2024, to mark the actual date of the Sassy Centennial, an audio recording of Sarah Vaughan’s appearance with Mel Torme on The Merv Griffin Show, which aired on Metromedia Channel 5 in NYC (circa 1976-77), has been posted to my YouTube channel. Merv Griffin’s musical director, Mort Lindsey, leads the band. The only track that has been seen in video format on YouTube is the song “Oh, Lady Be Good!” I recorded this from my TV when it originally aired. The montage presents the songs performed on that show in their entirety for the first time:
Clearly, this is a subject matter that has preoccupied Ed for many years. In this lecture, Ed draws from the neo-Aristotelian realist core in the works of Carl Menger, founding father of the Austrian school. Ed sees fruitful connections between Menger’s approach and that of Ayn Rand. He makes a case for integrating the praxeological insights of Ludwig von Mises with a larger normative (and meta-normative) vision, drawn not only from Rand but from the neo-Aristotelian philosophers, Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl. (It should be noted too that Ed and the Dougs were all on the Advisory Board of JARS for years, so it’s nice to see continuing cross-pollination!) And he addresses the thought of Murray Rothbard, who sought to reconfigure Mises’s Kantian-influenced praxeology on surer Aristotelian footing. As Ed puts it, the neo-Aristotelian and Objectivist worldviews can provide a more robust context for Austrian economic insights. And there is much to be gained from the intellectual exchange of these perspectives.
The only Austrian theorist not discussed in Ed’s presentation is Friedrich Hayek. Hayek departs from Misesian praxeology and is not generally considered a neo-Aristotelian. But there is much affinity between Hayek’s critique of constructivist rationalism and Rand’s rejection of rationalist thinking. On this basis alone, I have long argued that an engagement between Hayekian and Randian perspectives can be fruitful—and I’d strongly encourage integration of key Hayekian insights in any attempted integration of Austrian theory and Objectivism. (I explore Hayek’s views in depth in my book, Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, and I engage the Hayekian and Randian perspectives in my book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, especially chapter 8.)
Coincident with the release of Ed’s lecture is a YouTube presentation by two dear friends: Ryan Neugebauer (Ryan N) and Ryan McGaughey (Ryan M), or as I like to call them: “Ryan Squared” (I can’t provide a superscript ‘2’ here, but you get the idea!)
The Ryans begin with a discussion of my work on dialectical libertarianism, specifically Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism and its critique of Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism (ancap). With dialectics—the art of context keeping—as methodological backdrop, they seek to promote the project of human freedom and personal flourishing with a recognition of the conditions that exist. They oppose reductionists on either side of the dualistic divide—those anarcho-capitalists who envision the market’s absorption of all governmental functions and those socialists or communists who propose the government’s absorption of the market. This false alternative leads the purists in both camps to embrace what Karl Popper once called “canvas cleaning.” The ancap would ‘push a button’ to eliminate the state as surely as the communist would ‘push a button’ to demolish the market, no matter how many bodies are left in the wake of wiping the slate clean. Moreover, even if such a button could be pushed, the proposed resolution ignores the need for a cultural transformation that might nourish and support any such radical social change.
The ‘mixed economy’—that catchall term for various mixtures of markets and states—has existed for eons and there is no foreseeable future in which this phenomenon will wither away. Indeed, it is no coincidence that classical economics was viewed as the study of political economy, for politics and economics have been inextricably intertwined in various ways. Ultimately, the question is: What kind of mixture is optimal for the nurturing of freedom and flourishing?
Before even considering this question, however, the Ryans’ focus here is on the ways in which the Austrian school of economics has helped us to understand the nature of a market economy. As Ryan M puts it, the Austrian school has provided core notions that were essential not just to the marginal revolution spearheaded by Carl Menger, but to the tradition he founded. Among those ideas was Menger’s insistence that value is not inherent in material objects, but in the subject’s valuation of those objects. This is the kind of ‘subjectivism’ that Ed Younkins views as fully compatible with Menger’s Aristotelian realism and Rand’s Objectivism, insofar as material objects are evaluated in an agent-relative manner that is fully engaged with the world, rather than cut off from it. (Rand distinguished her Objectivist alternative from the classical objectivist position, which she dubbed “intrinsicism,” insofar as it placed intrinsic value on the objects in the material world, rather than value-as-evaluated-by-a-conscious-subject.)
Other core notions in the Austrian tradition include an appreciation of the epistemic role of markets and an understanding of the non-neutrality of money. In his works, Hayek explained the function of the price mechanism in transmitting inarticulate (tacit) knowledge across social networks as a means of coordination. And, as Ryan M emphasizes, the Austrian view of the non-neutrality of money is crucially important to Austrian business cycle theory. Austrian theorists cast light on the differential ways that inflationary infusions of money redistribute wealth to those who are its first beneficiaries. In his 1938 work, Theory of Money and Credit, Mises pioneered this view in a way that fully embraced the discipline of political economy. While Austrians long championed the notion that money as an institution evolved through the division and specialization of labor, they also recognized the state’s intimate involvement throughout history with coinage, banking, and structural variations in the supply of money. Hence, to say that money is not neutral is not merely an economic observation; it is a profoundly political one as well. Mises’s approach was a scathing indictment of static equilibrium models in favor of a process orientation. It also pointed to a class dimension in the business cycle, a dimension explored more comprehensively by Mises’s student, Murray Rothbard.
This intermingling of economics and politics shows up in both Austrian economics and libertarian politics. Indeed, as Ryan N observes, it is often difficult to separate Austrian economics from the purest libertarian politics upheld by certain Austrian economists. Some Austrians, most notably Hayek, departed from these purist demands, favoring political means for the provision of social safety nets. The Ryans wish to utilize the economic tools of Austrian theory in ways that might bolster the case for a mixed economy. They are not unsympathetic to anarcho-libertarian ideals. But in the real world, those ideals have never been actualized. They might be implicit in some real-world social relations, but the rules of the game have been corrupted throughout human history. What is called “capitalism” today is not the “unknown ideal” of its advocates. In “capitalism: the known reality,” as I’ve called it, the structures of property ownership were historically constituted by the enclosure of the commons, conquest, and colonialism such that any notion of Lockean ‘just acquisition’ is rendered almost incomprehensible. To this extent, the dichotomous view of market and state is ahistorical, for the economic and the political have always been organically linked.
The Ryans maintain that those of us who are concerned with justice can’t rewind history and undo the damage of centuries of wealth and land redistribution. But we can attempt to make up for it. And that is the springboard for what the Ryans propose. Given the context that exists, how might Austrian insights be used to improve our society?
Moving forward—in building the case for a mixed economy, indeed, for a better mixed economy—I’d encourage my friends to address issues raised in the Austrian literature by two of its contemporary representatives: Don Lavoie and Sanford Ikeda. In National Economic Planning: What is Left? (1985), Lavoie is concerned with those state-centered mixed economies that tend toward the militarization of economic life, bolstering not only the welfare state, but the warfare state as well. This organic conjunction of welfare and warfare is something that has been a part of U.S. history, but it has had a global impact. And it has deep class dimensions.
Critiques of the mixed economy have been offered by Marxist, public choice, and Austrian thinkers. Marxist theorist Paul Mattick published a 1964 essay, “Dynamics of the Mixed Economy,” that explored these issues. Ikeda’s work, Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism (1996), draws from both public choice and Austrian insights to address the “spontaneous order” that is distinctive to political processes in real existing mixed economies.
Any case for the mixed economy should grapple more fully with this literature.
I very much enjoyed both Ed Younkins’s lecture and the Ryan Neugebauer-Ryan McGaughey presentation and I highly recommend both YouTube videos to Notablog readers. Links below.
Next Wednesday, on March 27, 2024, we mark the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of legendary jazz vocalist, Sarah Vaughan. My article in tribute to the Sarah Vaughan Centennial makes its debut on Medium today: “Sassy 100: Celebrating the Sarah Vaughan Centennial.”
Just as important, today is the debut on my YouTube channel of the full audio recording of Vaughan’s 1974 concert appearance, “In Performance at Wolf Trap,” which has not been heard or seen in its entirety in nearly fifty years. My Medium article discusses the concert, but Notablog readers can see the video montage I created here:
As of this date, despite the presence of various third-party candidates in the 2024 election cycle, it is virtually inevitable that either Donald Trump or Joe Biden is going to serve another term in the White House. But there are other political visions that are awaiting an audience.
As an advocate of dialectics—the art of context-keeping—I have long stressed that even the loftiest of political goals must begin with the conditions that exist. Or, as I like to paraphrase good ol’ Don Rumsfeld: We plan our way toward a better future based on the conditions that we have, not on the conditions we wished we had. There is no magic button that we can push to suddenly transform our society into one that nourishes human freedom and personal flourishing. This can be daunting for those of us who advocate radical social change—that is, change that emerges from a deeper understanding of the systemic and historical roots of a society’s problems as the means to resolving them.
There are many different strains of libertarian thinking that have lent themselves to this radical project. Today, my very dear friend Ryan Neugebauer has published on Medium what he calls “A Dialectical Left-Libertarian Political Platform.” While there are many different dialectical left-libertarian approaches to contemporary problems, here, Ryan attempts to bring together a wide variety of practical, real-world strategies that would “unshackle society.”
I’m sure that readers coming from diametrically opposed political perspectives will be both attracted to—and abhorred by—various proposals that Ryan puts forth in this paper. There is no doubt, however, that Ryan’s political program is panoramic in its approach. He provides a check list of ways to free-up markets, by shrinking the intellectual property regime, tackling restrictive zoning laws, and addressing land value taxation. He discusses public options in healthcare, universal basic income or negative income taxes, education, gun control, drug prohibitionism, police accountability, restorative justice, immigration, energy policy, foreign policy, diplomacy, and global trade. Along the way, he also discusses “bottom-up” libertarian municipalism and cooperatives, while embracing a laissez-faire policy on contentious social issues.
However you receive any proposal put forth by Ryan, he is clearly committed to focusing on the “overall socioeconomic and political systems that we currently have” as the foundation for all that might be—while using eclectic strategies at our disposal in an effort “to increase freedom, equality, justice, and flourishing” within that context. On that basis alone, he’s passed the dialectical test resoundingly. Check out his essay here.
