My name is John F. Welsh.  I am a libertarian and individualist writer living in the southwestern United States.

The purpose of this website is primarily to help promote my two recent books:

Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).

and

After Multiculturalism: The Politics of Race and the Dialectics of Liberty (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).

I am a strong proponent of the idea that "Free Minds, Free Markets, and Free Lives" are inseparable. You cannot have one without the others.

Therefore, I am also interested in disseminating my other writings on libertarianism, egoism, and individualism. This site includes resources and references to literature pertaining to libertarianism, individualism, and egoism. 

I consider myself to be a radical libertarian and an egoist thinker. I am not associated with any particular political party or group, although I am eager to work with others to promote the cause of individual liberty under the right circumstances.

In my view, libertarianism is the political philosophy that places individual liberty above all other political values. As such, it may or may not be adequately represented at any point in time by a given political party, even those that call themselves "libertarian."

I understand egoism to be the philosophy that (a) human behavior is rooted in the self, not society, culture, or nature, and (b) persons can legitimately resist all social, cultural, or political processes that demand their subordination.

Taken together, both ideas convey the notion that the person is the totality and cannot be legitimately reduced to any sort of abstract category.

Over the past forty years, I have written and published extensively on a variety of topics. I am primarily interested in developing and articulating perspectives on politics, society, and culture that can be called "dialectical libertarianism" or "dialectical egoism," which is the application of dialectical methods of inquiry in the service of libertarian, individualist, and egoist goals.

Much of this website is devoted to these concepts and the relationship of my work to them. If the terms are new to you, please take a look at the section entitled, "The Dialectics of Liberty." That section of the web site provides my perspective on  libertarianism and  egoism. It also discusses their roots and applications.

Visitors to my web site will see that I am very concerned about the political and cultural realities of the world we live in. In my view, our society and world are in need of fundamental transformation. Our primary social institutions are failing in many respects. Our culture has become dumbed-down to the lowest common intellectual and moral denominator. Our social system is horrid. Persons are routinely abused by other individuals and by organizations. Our government, particularly, is weak, corrupt, and authoritarian.

What is precious about the United States are not so much the realities of polity, society, and culture in our historical period, but the ideas that the nation was founded on. In my view, these ideas need to be defended and supported wherever they appear: individual liberty, personal responsibility, freedom of commerce and association, and government that is limited to the protection of individual rights from either internal or external threats. It is regrettable that the realities of our society have departed so far from them.

Despite the many problems America confronts, the rest of the world is worse. Most of the world is governed by brutal, authoritarian, and collectivist regimes that function primarily to dominate and exploit for the benefit of a small political class.  These regimes legitimate their oppression through mysticism and uncritical ideologies that demand individual sacrifice to the state for the benefit of economic, political, and cultural elites. Unfortunately, even the western democracies are increasingly adopting the governance models of authoritarian national states and the collectivist policies of their social and economic systems. The rights and liberties of individuals are being undermined by the collusion of governments, large corporations, and other large organizations in the name of abstractions such as "national security," "economic development," and "social justice."

The best descriptor for the age we live in is "state capitalism."  The prevailing regimes today are not exactly capitalist, socialist, or fascist, although they have elements of each. Despite their differences, these regimes are characterized by the domination of the economic, social, and cultural life of nations by the apparatus of the state, usually to maximize political control and capital accumulation.

In totalitarian dictatorships such as China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, the fusion of state, society, and economic organization is nearly total.  Total state capitalism is a form of social organization in which state, society, and economy are collapsed and the state totally controls and directs economic and social life through the imposition of an absolute ideology, such as communism or Islamofascism. 

In the western democracies, such as the United States, and the oligarchical feudal societies, such as Russia, the interaction between state and economy is somewhat different because political and economic power are less monocratic and relatively less centralized. Fragmented state capitalism is a form of social organization in which the fusion of state, society, and economy is not total. Unfortunately, the United States seems to be accelerating the pace toward total state capitalism under our current regime.  Under the domination by the Unity Party and its leader, Vladimir Putin, Russia is increasingly becoming more of a total state capitalist society, very close to a nationalist fascist state, although it still lacks a unifying ideology.   

What unites all of these types of regimes is that the state functions as the dominant social institution charged with the maximization of capital accumulation and social control. Culture and social life tend to be organized around the interests of maximizing capital accumulation and enforcing the subordination of individuals to the state. This is the world we live in: government dominates social life and individuality.  My interest is in developing a critique of the global reality of state capitalism and the ideologies of those who defend it and seek to expand its systems of control.

The basic purpose of this web site is to promote my writings and my interpretation of political and cultural dynamics to those who are interested.  I realize that my point of view differs somewhat from the prevailing perspectives, but it think it is important to attempt to get some of these ideas into political discourse in the United States. I hope that this web site enables me to communicate with other individualists, egoists, and libertarians who are interested in challenging this global social formation.

My Writings

I have been a libertarian since my youth.

These days my political thought is primarily influenced by individualists such as Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand, although I have significant differences with each of them.

I also find the work of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Frank Chodorov, Lysander Spooner,  Benjamin R. Tucker, Dora Marsden, Emile Armand, and James L. Walker also very helpful. 

I have published widely in a variety of academic and popular journals, including articles and opinion-editorials that have appeared in newspapers. My very first publication was a discussion of the political philosopher William Godwin and the relevance of his work for interpreting the social crises that faced the United States in the early 1970s. That essay appeared in a 1973 edition of the radical libertarian monthly The Match!

I have authored or co-authored several books and research monographs on political and social theory. Most of my publications appeared in social science and higher education research journals, including the Journal of Higher Education, Race, Ethnicity and Education, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, Journal of College Student Retention, Community College Review, Community College Journal of Research and Practice, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, Campus-Wide Information Systems, Community College Enterprise, Trusteeship, Cultural Logic, Quality Assurance in Education, Connection: The New England Journal of Higher Education, Midwest Quarterly, Humanity and Society, Free Inquiry, and Quarterly Journal of Ideology.

In addition, I published chapters in recent books on topics including dialectical inquiry, the future of public education, innovation in information technology in higher education, how the war on terror is affecting higher education, and the dialectics of race and liberty. Each of these was informed by a libertarian perspective.   

My new book, Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation will be published by Lexington Books in September 2010. It will be available in hardback, paperback, and e-book formats. It is available for pre-orders at Lexington Books and Amazon.

My previous book was After Multiculturalism: The Politics of Race and the Dialectics of Liberty (Lexington Books, 2008), which is available at Lexington Books and Amazon.

Thank you for visiting my site. I hope that you will find interesting and provocative information and perspective herein. Please feel free to comment on my postings.  You can send me an e-mail at john@johnfwelsh.com.