Review of Moller’s Governing Least

I’ve reviewed Dan Moller’s Governing Least: A New England Libertarianism at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. For other responses, see :

Bryan Caplan

That’s the only response I can find, at the moment, but here’s some related material from Moller:

podcast on libetarianism.org

Bleeding Heart Libertarian post

plus a one-sentence-per-chapter summary of the book that I wish I’d read first.

One thought on “Review of Moller’s Governing Least”

  1. Hi Andrew.
    I read this review last week and, unsurprisingly, quite liked it.
    In some ways, though, your discussion of Moller felt a bit like (as I believe Yogi Berra once said) “déjà vu all over again.” Namely: Libertarian X makes certain claims about the importance of property rights and non-libertarians (not just egalitarians) reply that those claims rest on an interpretation of those rights that either is implausible or inadequately defended (I vaguely recall this as one of Nagel’s main objections to Nozick’s ASU decades ago…). A few years later Libertarian Y does precisely the same thing, then Libertarian Z, etc.
    I generally avoid interacting (in my written work at least) with libertarians for this reason — it just feels like they keep begging the question (over and over again).
    (Classical liberals like Hayek, Gaus, et al., are quite different in this respect. I disagree with them, of course, but at least they provide arguments for their interpretations of property rights.)

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