Welcome to the Bleeding Heart Libertarians symposium on “Libertarianism and Land!”

The symposium will run from today, Monday April 23rd, through Friday April 27th. Each day of the symposium will feature an essay by one of our lead authors – Eric Mack, Hillel Steiner, Fred Foldvary, Kevin Carson, and David Schmidtz, in that order. Zac Gochenour will guest-comment on Fred Foldvary’s essay, and the regular BHL bloggers might chime in with posts of their own. But we encourage readers to participate as well, either in the comments thread here or with posts at your own blogs.

This is an important and rich topic and, as far as we can tell, a fairly novel format for presenting original philosophical debate. So it should be an interesting week in a number of ways! We hope you’re as excited as we are about the conversation.

Look below the fold for more information about our participants and their papers.

Eric Mack (Ph.D., University of Rochester) is a Professor of Philosophy. His primary philosophical interests are in the foundation of moral rights, property rights and distributive justice, and the legitimate scope of coercive institutions. He has related interests in doctrines of negative responsibility, just war theory, anti-positivist conceptions of law, retributivism, philosophical anarchism, and the history of libertarian thought. He has received grants from NEH, the Earhart Foundation, the Center for Social Philosophy and Policy, and the Bradley Foundation, and has participated in and organized many philosophical conferences. Eric’s essay, “Natural Rights and Natural Stuff,” will run today.

Hillel Steiner is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Manchester and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1999. The main focus of Hillel’s teaching and publications is contemporary philosophical work on freedom, rights and social justice. His major work is An Essay on Rights which won the Political Studies Association’s best book prize for 1994 and which advances a theory of distributive justice that has come to be known as left-libertarianism. Hillel’s essay, “Left-Libertarianism and the Ownership of Natural Resources,” will run on Tuesday.

Fred E. Foldvary received his B.A. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University. He is the author of The Soul of Liberty, Public Goods and Private Communities, Dictionary of Free Market Economics . He edited and contributed to Beyond Neoclassical Economics and, with Dan Klein, The Half-Life of Policy Rationales. Foldvary’s areas of research include public finance, governance, ethical philosophy, and land economics. Fred’s essay, “The Geolibertarian Ethics of Land Rent,” will run on Wednesday.

Kevin Carson holds the Karl Hess Chair of Social Analysis at Center for a Stateless Society, a left-wing market anarchist think tank where he writes research papers and news commentary.  He’s the author of The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.  His forthcoming book is tentatively titled The Desktop Regulatory State. Kevin’s essay, “A Defense – Such As It Is – Of Usufructory Land Ownership,” will run on Thursday.

David Schmidtz is Kendrick Professor of Philosophy, joint Professor of Economics, and founding director of Arizona’s Freedom Center. He works mainly in ethics, environmental ethics, rational choice, and political philosophy. He is the author of numerous books, including Rational Choice and Moral Agency, The Elements of Justice, and (with Jason Brennan) A Brief History of Liberty. David’s essay, “Land From the Ground Up,” will run on Friday.