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January 8, 2009
Tibor Machan
Professor, Chapman University
in a lively conversation:
Enemies of Private Property Rights
A Survey of Old and New
Attacks on the Right to Private Property
Tibor R.
Machan is Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, Alabama, and holds the R. C. Hoiles Endowed Chair in Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University.
He's research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Machan was smuggled out from Hungary in 1953, when he was 14 years old. After immigrating to the U.S. in 1956, he served in the U.S. Air Force, and then earned BA (Claremont McKenna College), MA (NY University), and Ph.D. (University of California at Santa Barbara) degrees in philosophy.
Machan wrote The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (1974), Human Rights and Human Liberties
(1975), The Freedom Philosophy (1987, in Sweden), Marxism: A Bourgeois Critique (1988)
Individuals and Their Rights (1989) Liberty and Culture: Essays on the Idea of a Free Society
(1989), Capitalism and Individualism: Reframing the Argument for the Free Society (1990),
The Virtue of Liberty (1994), and Private Rights and Public Illusions (1995).
He edited The Libertarian Alternative (1974), The Libertarian Reader
(1982), The Main Debate: Communism versus Capitalism (1987) and Commerce and Morality (1988).
He co-edited Rights and Regulation (1983), Recent Work in Philosophy (1983) and
Liberty for the 21st Century (1995).
A Primer on Ethics was published by the U. of Oklahoma Press in 1997 and his
Generosity; Virtue in Civil Society by the Cato Institute in early 1998. He also wrote
Classical Individualism for Routledge in 1998.
He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals, including the American Philosophical
Quarterly, Philosophy of Science, Inquiry, Journal des Economists et des Estudes
Humaines, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Theory and Decision,
Philosophia, the Review of Metaphysics, American Journal of
Jurisprudence, Business and Professional Ethics Journal, Philosophy,
Journal of Value Inquiry, the Journal of Applied Philosophy, the
International Journal of Applied Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Res
Publica, the International Journal of Social Economics, Public Affairs Quarterly
and Think.
He has written columns for The New York Times, the Los Angeles
Times, the Chicago Tribune, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer,
The Journal of Commerce, the Houston Chronicle, Asia Times,
The Wall Street Journal, and, as a regular columnist for three decades, The Orange County
Register.
His essays have appeared in National Review, Barron's, The
Humanist, World & I, This World, Free Inquiry, Chronicles of
Culture, The American Spectator, Policy Review, Economic
Affairs, The Freeman, The American Scholar, Jobs and Capital
and Reason magazine.
Machan co-founded Reason magazine. He's on the advisory boards for several foundations and think tanks, and has also served on the founding Board of the Jacob J. Javits Graduate Fellowship Program of the U.S. Department of Education.
Machan has been a guest on "Firing Line" and numerous other interview programs. He co-hosted, with the late Sidney Hook, a pilot television program, "For the Love of Work," on the ideas of Karl Marx.
He was featured on the ABC-TV special, "John Stossel goes to Washington," in January, 2001. He's been interviewed on National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as well as the Argentine television program "Boom, Boom" and PBS-TV.
He's lectured in Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Poland, Belgium, The Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Austria, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Germany for the Institute for Economic Affairs, Europe, and for other organizations.
In 1999 Machan was appointed editor for the Hoover Institution Press series, Philosophical Reflections on the Free
Society. The series has published 10 volumes, among them Business Ethics in the Global Market
(1999), Education in a Free Society (1999) Morality and Work (2000),
The Commons: Its Tragedy and other Follies (2001), Individual Rights Reconsidered
(2001), Liberty and Hard Cases (2001), Liberty and Equality (2002),
Liberty and R&D (2002), Liberty & Democracy (2002) and Liberty
and Justice (2005).
Machan's books Initiative: Human Agency and Society and Ayn Rand were also published in 2000.
A Primer on Business Ethics, co-authored with James E. Chesher was published in late 2002 and
The Passion for Liberty and The Liberty Option in 2003. Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature's
Favorites, was published in May, 2004.
Neither Left nor Right: Selected Columns, came out in January 2004, from the Hoover Institution Press, while Ashgate Publishing Group in the UK brought out Machan's
Objectivity: Recovering Determinate Reality in Philosophy, Science, and Everyday Life
in July, 2004. His memoirs, The Man Without a Hobby, was published by Hamilton Books in November, 2004. His
Libertarianism Defended appeared in 2006, published by Ashgate, and he co-edited
Anarchism/Minarchism: Is Government Part of a Free
Country, also for Ashgate.
Machan's next book is The Promise of Liberty: A Non-Utopian Vision (Lexington Books, 2009).
Machan was the 2003 President of the American Society for Value Inquiry, and delivered the presidential address on December 29, 2002, in Philadelphia, at the Eastern Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association, titled "Aristotle & Business."
For two years he was on the board of the Association for Private Enterprise Education.
He is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
Professor Machan was visiting professor of philosophy at the United States Military Academy in 1992-93, and John M. Olin Professor at Adelphi University, in Garden City, NY, in the fall of 1994.
He lives in Silverado, California.
Machan last
spoke at Junto in November 2004.
For
more information on this Junto event, including time,
location, and other features of the meeting see the January
Junto page.
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