INTRODUCTION

 

            This book is an anthology of articles written during th 1990s and early 2000s for The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies (with the exception of Chapter 1, published in Conservative Review and Chapter 6, published in Mankind Quarterly).  Each article studies in detail a contemporary issue important to understanding America today.  For the serious student, they should be understood in the context of the books the author wrote during the preceding three decades.  Those books explored, first, the principles of an individualistic society; and thereafter, the sources for, and nature of, ideological division within the modern age.  Emergent Man states a rationale for a classical liberal society.  Understanding the Modern Predicament and the ensuring three volumes on the modern ideologies explain the intellectual convolutions that have typified the modern era.

            Both the books and the articles have sought honest scholarship, fully open to ideas and facts.  At the same time, they have been informed by the author’s classical liberal value system.  (He prefers, actually, to call it “neo-classical liberal,” because he doesn’t fully identify with classical liberalism as it has been formulated.  He has thought the philosophy of a society based on individual liberty has not been developed nearly as adequately as it needs to have been.  This has caused him to formulate a philosophy that today might be called more a “systems theory” of a free society; i.e., one that seeks to be assured that the society, taken as a whole, works well on behalf of its ideals and the people in it.  This differs markedly from the deduction-from-axioms method that is commonly used in arriving at libertarian theory.)

            An anthology necessarily brings forward work done at some time in the past.  Thus, the pieces occasionally speak in the context of facts and circumstances as they were just a short time ago, but that have been rapidly replaced by others.  Chapter 2, on immigration, for example, gives detail as of the mid-1990s.  The criterion for inclusion has been “Does the discussion remain relevant?”  We believe, as to each essay included, that it does – with perhaps even greater force than at the time of original publication.