Posts tagged Colin Woodard

Freedom against Liberty, Liberty against Freedom: a Discourse on Rights

A right is a particularized (and reified) liberty or freedom. By “particularized,” I mean that your freedom of speech doesn’t give you freedom of movement or freedom of worship. Each one is a specific thing. By “reified”, I mean that it is an immaterial thing that’s treated as a discrete object that one is able to possess: presumably, we’re endowed with these rights at a certain time (by our creator, or at age of majority.) It’s specifically, in my opinion, the reification that’s the problem with “rights” as a concept – it’s something conceived of as separate from the person, rather than as an attribute of the person.

Commentary, Written by: CameronCameron SummersMay 25, 2022American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, Colin Woodard, David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People's History of the United States, Rights, Liberties, Freedom, The Ecology of Freedom, Murray BookchinComment

Cameron's Book Reviews: Early 2021

I tend to set my reading goal a lot lower than Edgar, for a variety of reasons. One of them is the fact that I think aiming to read a large number of books over the course of a year means that you engage less deeply with them. Or, at least, when I do that, that’s how it works for me. Still, I have read a few extremely good books this year.