Liberalism and The Road to Serfdom

I think it is useful to post about the books we have read, if anyone thinks there is a better way or if mine need to be shorter please let me know. I will say one thing about each of these two books

1. The Road to Serfdom- In this book Hayek points out the Socialist roots of Nazism, as many people at the time he wrote it thought that Nazism was the last gasp of a dying capitalist system. Economic planning was in vogue (it was 1943) and many were calling for the continuation of planning past the war. Hayek notes the necessity of a free market society for the continuation of social liberty, such as free speech and press. He also noted the need for laws that are predictable and relatively unchanging for society to be just, as people need to be able to plan their actions. He was fighting against an intellectual orthodoxy that called for "scientific" governance, and basically pointed out that this was not going to work, I recommend this book highly.

2. Liberalism, by L.T. Hobhouse- Sociologists should not write books on political theory. Period.

3. OK, seriously, the intellectual orthodoxy obsessed with planning seems to have a large portion of its roots in Hobhouse and his contemporaries, although his emphasis is on the "general will" which showed up in Rousseau and many enlightenment writers. Basically his is a liberalism that justifies itself more on the basis of democracy than on rights and is very fond of economic and social engineering. In fact, his refutation of rights is quite disingenuous, as he does not really focus on the theorists who described rights and more on the vague assertions of the French Revolution. The social engineering part is actually very creepy, as he talks about influencing (conditioning) people to be socially proper. I would not really recommend this book, parts of it, such as his section on the history of English Liberalism is useful, but other parts are a train wreck.

I'll post on Marcus Aurelius' Meditations tomorrow.

Crystal's list

The books I've finished so far have been light reading:
--The Giver - Lois Lowry
--The Pilot's Wife - Anita Shreve (yeah, I know.)

The books that are now in my purse every day:
--Bible (ESV)
--The Loveliness of Christ (excerpts from Samuel Rutherford's letters)
--Christian Apologetics - Cornelius Van Til
--Seeing with New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition Through the Lens of Scripture - David Powlison

Stuff I never finished reading in undergrad that I want to read now:
--Purgatorio and Paradiso - Dante
-- Confessions and City of God - Augustine
-- The Midnight, The Nonconformist's Memorial, and Singularities - Susan Howe
-- The Office of Soft Architecture - Lisa Robertson
-- Augustine of Hippo (biography) - Peter Brown

Other stuff I might get to:
-- Some Yeats, Eliot, Frost, and Bukowski
-- The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
-- The Concept of Anxiety - Kierkegaard

I haven't unpacked my books yet. I might have to update this list later.

I feel completely outdone by the postings on here so far. Crystal, you need to put up your reviews from summer conference! :o)

My reading list thus far includes:

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
The Pursuit of Godliness by Jerry Bridges
Moo by Jane Smiley (academic satire as a graduation gift from my advisor)

Of more distant interest:

Middlemarch by George Eliot
works by Virginia Woolf
works by Eudora Welty
Canticle for Leibowitz
The Sound and the Fury by Soren Kierkegaard (if I feel particularly adventurous)

Also, as lighter reading:

Ted Dekker's Circle trilogy
novels by Stephen Lawhead

Sophie's World and The Pursuit of Godliness are currently in my backpack that I'm taking overseas, so they'll be read first. They're both good so far. Sophie's World is a leisurely philosophical novel, and I've only read the first couple of chapters of Bridges's book, in which he stresses that our search for living Godly lives must be based on an understanding of grace and the help of the Spirit.

That's all for now.

Gavin's Reading List

Here are my selections, ranked by importance, those before the first break are most important, those after it are second, and those at the bottom are last. Some of these books contain views that are contradictory to my own, just a disclaimer.

1. The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek
2. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume
3. The Complete Works of Shakespeare
4. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
5. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, By Adam Smith
6. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, by Joseph Schumpeter
7. Small Footprint, Big Handprint (A Book for Church)

8. The Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle
9. From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya
10. Cool It, by Bjorn Lomborg
11. The Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
12. The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis
13. On Liberty, by J. S. Mill
14. Invitation to Sociology (Sociology text)
15. Window on Humanity (Anthropology Text)
16. Democracy's Discontent, by Michael Sandel
17. Liberalism, by L. T. Hobhouse
18. Symposium, by Plato
19. On the Free Choice of Will, by Augustine
20. Discourse on Free Will, by Erasmus and Luther
21. The Religious Philosophy of Quakerism
22. On Law, Morality, and Politics, by Thomas Aquinas
23. Small Christian Communities Today
24. The Essence of Faith According to Luther, by Feuerbach
25. Wild at Heart, (I know, I know, but it's not that long and I'm curious)
26. Jeet Kune Do, by Bruce Lee
27. The Epicurus Reader
28. De Rerum Natura

29. Evil for Evil, by K. J. Parker
30. Escapement, by K. J. Parker
31. Turpentine, by Spring Warren
32. The Night Climbers, by Ivo Stourton
33. Illusions, by Richard Bach
34. Out of Egypt, by Anne Rice
35. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
36. Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier
37. All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
38. Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
39. The Autumn of the Patriarch, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
40. 2010: Odyssey Two, by Arthur C. Clark
41. Prelude to Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
42. Pontius Pilate, by Paul Maier

Sorry for the length, I am clearly a bibliophile masochist.

Rachel's List

Here are the dozen books I picked out to read over the summer, organized topically.

Literature
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw

Religion
The Everlasting Man by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
George Whitefield by Arnold A. Dallimore
Living the Cross-Centered Life by C. J. Mahaney

Thought
Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Art and Physics by Leonard Shlain

Economics
An Introduction to the Theory of Interest by Joseph W. Conard
A General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes

Entertainment
Manalive by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: A Novel by Susanna Clark

It should be possible to read all of these books before August by reading one book each week. If there are other books that the group would like to read together and discuss, I would be happy to add them to my list.

I look forward to hearing about the books that you all read over the summer!

On Liberty

Well, I have finished my first book for the Summer, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Granted, I had already started this book, but nonetheless it is book number one, so I will start the discussion part of the blog. There were two things that were most interesting to me.

1. Mill gives a very concise critique of the Christians of the time, which my roommate Isaiah thought was very good also. The point that he made was that early Christians followed the precepts of Christianity closely, but that while Christians of his time gave reverence to the sayings of Christ, they just followed in most cases the mores of current civilization. I think this is applicable in our time also, not merely for marginal Christians, but for many others. People do not often really analyze the way in which many of the commandments in the Bible apply to their own lives, as they should.

2. Mill makes a distinction between the requirement by the state that individuals educate their children and state education of children. I believe that this is important in that the state generally assumes the role of the educator in the United States, which means that parents do not have very much say in the education of their children if they are a minority in their area and disagree with the methods used or the curriculum taught. Mill suggests requiring education, subsidizing those who cannot afford to give their children education, and then giving examinations in indisputably factual disciplines such as mathematics, history, and grammar while not exercising direct control over schools. I would suggest that this is an excellent way of doing things that would be great for Christian education and would allow religious education in schools while preventing the government from fiddling with religion. Further, the decentralization of education would insulate the system from a proliferation of errors caused by the acceptance of erroneous ideas by central authorities.

Well, that's my take on the book, and a shameless plugging of my political ideals in the second point. (Though of course the book aligns with my political ideas pretty closely)

This is the reading blog of the salt-and-vinegar crisp club at the University of Tulsa. Our club began informally when Crystal started to come over to Evelyn and Rachel's apartment in the evenings. Evelyn's friends in Northern Ireland had posted her salt-and-vinegar crisps, and when she discovered that Crystal and Rachel liked them, too, they started to eat them together routinely during study sessions.

After the RUF Christmas dance, Gavin came up to our apartment and was inducted to the salt-and-vinegar club. We drank Earl Grey tea and port and ate salt-and-vinegar crisps, and we discussed economics, random computer games, internet jokes, films, and England.

Thus was born The Salt and Vinegar Club.

Sadly, the time has come for us to disband, at least in physical reality since three of the four of us are graduating. However, tonight we have decided to use the internet to keep our club alive. Because Gavin has a desk job over the summer, he has forty-two books on his reading list. The rest of us want to read lots of books, too, so we have resolved to keep track of the books we read over the summer.

We will each post a list of the books we want to read this summer, and then we will post our reviews of or comments on the books we read.

We may also decide to read books together and discuss them on this blog.