“The beginning and end of all philosophy is – freedom.”

This meetup is dedicated to doing close readings of philosophical works from the traditions of Classical Liberalism and Socialism. More specifically works on Communism (Marxism, Maoism, Leninism, etc.), Libertarian-Socialism/Anarchism (Anarcho-Communism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Anarcho-Collectivism), and the works of liberal thinkers of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

Examples of authors considered are: Smith, Locke, Hume, Mill, Humboldt, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Bakunin, Chomsky, Bookchin, Proudhon, Rocker, among many others.

These philosophical texts are holistic in their approach to every aspect of human existence. They will not be looked at as primarily economic texts, as almost none of the major works in these fields are.

The goal is to gain a deeper knowledge of and deeply critical perspective on the texts that have shaped human social life over the last few centuries. While most people fight vociferously over ideas derived from these works, few people actually bother reading them.

Any member may choose a book she would like to read with a group of other people. This member is not a 'leader' or an 'expert' on the text, but merely facilitates the regular meeting of the group, making sure it has a place to meet, etc. Rather than engaging in endless debates on current and historical events, each reading group endeavors to ground all comments and questions in the text being read. Books are read in their entirety, usually over 15-30 weeks. Readers come with passages they found difficult from the reading, and the group reads these aloud, endeavoring to work them out as a group. All of this takes place over snacks and wine.

Here are some excerpts from two works of Noam Chomsky, chosen not for their ideological stance but because they discuss so many of the authors above:

"...These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt's Limits of State Action, Kant's insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable. This is clear, for example, from the classic work of Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, which anticipated and perhaps inspired Mill. This classic of liberal thought, completed in 1792, is in its essence profoundly, though prematurely, anticapitalist. Its ideas must be attenuated beyond recognition to be transmuted into an ideology of industrial capitalism."

"I didn't do any research at all on Smith. I just read him...He's pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith...Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into stupid and ignorant creatures...He did give an argument for markets, but the argument was that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to perfect equality [and that] "merchants and manufacturers," make certain that their own interests are "most peculiarly attended to," no matter what the effect on others who, he argued, suffered from their policies."