The Long Library

This episode, Roderick and I discuss his essay "The Justice and Prudence of War: Toward a Libertarian Analysis." Written during the Iraq War, but unfortunately timelier than ever, this essay navigates the messy conceptual battlefield of wartime ethics and avoids the pitfalls of both purely nonviolent pacifism on the one hand and violent aggression on the other. Why must the justified use of force...

On this episode of The Long Library, Cory Massimino interviews Roderick Long about his essay "They Saw It Coming: The 19th-Century Libertarian Critique of Fascism" (link: https://c4ss.org/content/15126 ). Written over ten years ago about arguments written over one hundred years ago, this essay is as timely as ever here in 2025. Roderick shows that 19th-century libertarians such as Gustave de Molin...

Today I talk with Roderick about his 2013 blog post " Eudaimonism and Non-Aggression ," one of many early 2010s blog posts across the libertarian ecosystem debating the pros and cons of the non-aggression principle, or NAP. As usual, Roderick thinks both sides make some good points, but ultimately lands on the side of the NAP. Though in order to avoid the common pitfalls of the NAP, such as downgr...

"Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now" was the lead essay of Cato Unbound's 2008 discussion "When Corporations Hate Markets" and later included in C4SS's "Markets Not Capitalism." The essay is one-half political economy, sketching out the basic ideas behind freed-market anti-capitalism, and one-half political psychology, exploring the various pitfalls leading virtually everyone,...

In our first episode I talk to Roderick about his 2004 monograph " Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections. "  This is one of the first things I had ever read by Roderick and greatly hastened my journey to anarchism. It remains one of the most concise, accessible, wide-ranging, and good faith introductions to libertarian anarchist arguments and I always include it among the zines when I...