 Reflections on Victor Hugo's Les Miserables
by Edward W. Younkins
This essay is not a review of Tom Hooper’s recently released film of the tremendously popular 1980s stage musical. However, the release of this film has given me the occasion to read and to reflect upon the original text of Victor Hugo’s 1862 classic, Les Misérables, a mosaic of social indictment, history, social philo... (Read more...)
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Wednesday
December 19, 2012 |
Workplace Freedom and Right to Work Laws
by Edward W. Younkins
On Tuesday December 11, 2012 Michigan, the birthplace of the nation’s organized labor movement, became the country’s 24th right-to-work state. This short excerpt from pages 81-83 of my 2002 book, Capitalism and Commerce, explains the propriety of right-to-work laws. Before the Norris-La Guardia and National Labo... (Read more...)
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Sometimes a Great Notion: The Story of a Family Who Would Never Give an Inch
by Edward W. Younkins
Ken Kesey’s novel, Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), is a complex and integrated historical background and relationship study of the Stamper family, a prideful logging clan living in Wakonda, Oregon. This big story involves a man, his family, a town, the country, a period of time, and the effects of time. All of the ele... (Read more...)
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Flourishing and Happiness in a Nutshell
by Edward W. Younkins
By integrating features found in the writings of Aristotle, Austrian economists, Ayn Rand, and a number of contemporary thinkers, we have the potential to develop a powerful, reality-based argument for a free society in which individuals have the opportunity to flourish and to be happy. Modern contributors to this appr... (Read more...)
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Objectivist Virtue Ethics in Business
by Edward W. Younkins
Virtuous actions can lead to the achievement of values. When one’s context is reduced to business, virtue theory contends that pursuing virtuous principles, strategies, and actions can result in firms realizing their values including their mission, purpose, profit potential, and other goals. Virtuous employees tend to ... (Read more...)
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Henry Hazlitt's Time Will Run Back: A Tale of the Reinvention of Capitalism
by Edward W. Younkins
Henry Hazlitt’s novel, Time will Run Back, was originally published in 1951 as The Great Idea. It teaches that if capitalism did not exist, then it would be necessary to invent it. It makes the case that the discovery of capitalism is one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. In his nonfiction works Hazlitt is a ... (Read more...)
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Glengarry Glen Ross: A David Mamet Word Play
by Edward W. Younkins
David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross, is about the struggles of four shady small-time salesmen in a small branch of a larger real estate company located in Chicago. Taking place over two business days, the play portrays the dog-eat-dog world of real estate and the ends ruthless salesmen w... (Read more...)
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Cash McCall: The Story of a Heroic Corporate Raider
by Edward W. Younkins
Cash McCall (1955) is a novel by Cameron Hawley that is positive about business and free-market capitalism. It explores many of the same themes as does Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged but it is not nearly as philosophical. Like Atlas Shrugged, Cash McCall is populated with a range of good and bad characters. It is also a 195... (Read more...)
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Executive Suite: A Story of Corporate Success and Succession
by Edward W. Younkins
For over a quarter of a century, Cameron Hawley had two simultaneous successful careers—as a businessman and as a writer of short stories in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, and Good Housekeeping. For several years, he was an advertising executive in Minneapolis. This was followed by a 24-year car... (Read more...)
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Saturday
December 31, 2011 |
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: A Case of Self-Delusion
by Edward W. Younkins
One of the best known fictional depictions of business is Arthur Miller’s 1949 play, Death of a Salesman, which tells the story of a traveling salesman who has reached the end of his road. Several fine films have been made of this drama, and in 1984 Dustin Hoffman starred in an acclaimed revival of it. The story is tol... (Read more...)
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The Rise of Silas Lapham: A Story of Self-Identity, Self-Respect, and Morality
by Edward W. Younkins
William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) was the first important realistic novel to focus on an American businessman. The author intended his highly regarded novel to provide moral education to the readers. Early in the novel Howells presents an essential business-related moral dilemma that has repercussi... (Read more...)
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Creating a Virtues-Based Business
by Edward W. Younkins
Virtue ethics can contribute importantly to a comprehensive theory of business and supply a context in which actions can be taken to attain the mission of a particular business. At the same time, the virtues can play a pivotal role in establishing a corporate culture (and related climate) that provide meaning and purpo... (Read more...)
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An American Romance: King Vidor's Epic Film of Immigration and the American Dream
by Edward W. Younkins
The advent of railway and steamship transportation during the mid-19th century started a mass intercontinental and transcontinental migration unequaled before or since. Between 1860 and 1920, more than 45 million people left overpopulated Europe with over half of this number arriving in the United States. Many ... (Read more...)
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Other People's Money: A Tale of Capitalism and Creative Destruction
by Edward W. Younkins
Jerry Sterner’s 1989 play, Other People’s Money, plays to different groups of people as key players battle for the principles on both sides of a corporate takeover attempt. Both the play, and director Norman Jewison’s 1991 film based on the play, present, in dramatized form, both the arguments for and against corpo... (Read more...)
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Taking a Look at Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward
by Edward W. Younkins
Edward Bellamy’s popular novel, Looking Backward 2000-188, is frequently cited as one of the most influential books in America between the 1880s and the 1930s. This novel of social reform was published in 1888, a time when Americans were frightened by working class violence and disgusted by the conspicuous cons... (Read more...)
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Wednesday
September 7, 2011 |
 Preface to Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society
by Edward W. Younkins
Preface The central premise of my argument is that human beings are moral agents who ought to live to achieve happiness in their lives here on earth, with this happiness understood to involve their success as rational yet also unique natural beings. Each person has as his or her proper go... (Read more...)
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 Unity and Integrity in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
by Edward W. Younkins
Atlas Shrugged concretizes through hierarchical, progressive, and inductive demonstration Rand’s systematic philosophy of Objectivism. (Read more...)
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Government Stimulus Packages are Attempts to Deny Reality
by Edward W. Younkins
Many economists and politicians think that the effective way to increase output is by means of a fiscal stimulus package (i.e., by increasing the overall spending in the economy). They do not understand that there must first be a flow of real savings if producers are to fund the purchase of capital goods and other good... (Read more...)
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Ayn Rand, Human Flourishing, and Virtue Ethics
by Edward W. Younkins
During the last forty years or so, there has been a revival of scholarly interest in the virtues in general and in virtue ethics in particular. Many thinkers have turned their attention to a neo-Aristotelian version of virtue ethics, but none has made a better or more consistent case for a virtuous life than has Rand (... (Read more...)
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Atlas and Economics
by Edward W. Younkins
Text of a talk delivered October 6, 2007 in Washington D.C., in celebration of Atlas Shrugged’s 50th Anniversary sponsored by the Atlas Society. Atlas Shrugged is widely recognized as a masterpiece of philosophy and of literature. However, not so widely recognized, but equally true, is that Atlas Shru... (Read more...)
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A Review of Andrew Bernstein's "The Philosophic and Literary Integration in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged"
by Edward W. Younkins
This is a timely review of Andrew Bernstein’s 1995, 8.5 hours long, 7 tape, audio course, The Philosophic and Literary Integration in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It is timely because the year 2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Ayn Rand’s masterpiece and many people will be wanting either to revisit Rand’s magnum o... (Read more...)
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Capitalism: The Only Moral Social System
by Edward W. Younkins
A social system such as capitalism is a system of relationships and cannot be moral or immoral in the sense that a person can be—only individuals can be moral agents. However, a social system can be moral in its effects if it promotes the possibility and likelihood of moral behavior of mindful human beings who act with... (Read more...)
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Toward a Paradigm for a Free Society
by Edward W. Younkins
What can we learn from a survey of political and economic philosophies throughout history? Can we put them together by drawing from many or all of them to construct a powerful emergent libertarian synthesis that is a true reflection of the nature of man and the world properly understood? Is it possible to reframe the a... (Read more...)
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Natural Rights as Derived from Ethical Egoism: Tibor R. Machan's Randian Approach
by Edward W. Younkins
Unlike Rasmussen and Den Uyl, prominent philosopher of human flourishing, Tibor R. Machan, approaches the derivation of natural rights by way of ethical egoism. For Machan, rights are a moral concept rather than a metanormative one. His strong case for natural rights and the legitimacy of the minimal state rests on a c... (Read more...)
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Wednesday
November 22, 2006 |
Human Flourishing and Natural Rights
by Edward W. Younkins
Natural law is an older concept than the idea of natural rights. John Locke and his predecessor, Hugo Grotius, are frequently credited with ushering in the modern concept of natural rights. Historically, the doctrine of natural rights appears to have developed either within, or at least consonant with, the framework of... (Read more...)
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