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A Left-Libertarian Primer: Karl Hess documentary is now online

Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 17 years ago, in 2007, on the World Wide Web.

Many thanks to Wally Conger (2007-04-04) for pointing this out. The 1980 short documentary Karl Hess: Toward Liberty can now be watched in three parts on YouTube. It’s a fascinating and sympathetic look at Hess — once a Republican columnist and speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, who after 1964 became, by turns, a movement libertarian, anti-war radical, tax resister, anarchist revolutionary, and advocate of decentralism and what we might now call sustainable technology. It’s also a great primer on many of the ideas behind individualist anarchism and left-libertarianism.

My favorite bit from the documentary comes in part 2. Hess says something really profound here which I want to say something about sometime soon. I don’t have all the words for it yet, but I think that this has a close connection — probably a much closer connection than even Hess himself realized — with the solution to the problem that he mentions in another of my favorite Hess quotations — this one from 1982 documentary Anarchism in America. I hope I’ll have more to say about this later, or maybe even sooner.

The ideological revolutions, the kind that we’ve mostly had lately, have as their purpose to seize power. It occurs to me that the really American revolution, would be to destroy power. See, I don’t think of society as some big thing… society is people together making culture, and I think the most crucial part of all the considerations about social matters, is scale: society, in fact, is neighborhoods, and I think it should be that in practice.

–Karl Hess, interviewed in Karl Hess: Toward Liberty (1980)

Anyway, enjoy!

Further reading:

5 replies to A Left-Libertarian Primer: Karl Hess documentary is now online Use a feed to Follow replies to this article · TrackBack URI

  1. Discussed at david.opishposh.com

    the view from below » Video Roundup:

    […] Hess – Toward Liberty (1980 Oscar Winner) Part 1 of 3 (Hat tip to Charles Johnson and Wally […]

  2. Discussed at www.bradspangler.com

    BradSpangler.com » Blog Archive » Odds and Ends:

    […] Hess — As others have noted, YouTube now hosts the Oscar winning 1980 documentary Karl Hess: Toward Liberty, detailing […]

— 2008 —

  1. Discussed at radgeek.com

    Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-06-24 – U.S. out of Las Vegas!:

    […] GT 2007-04-05: A Left-Libertarian Primer: Karl Hess documentary is now online […]

  2. Discussed at radgeek.com

    Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-09-26 – Metropolitan secession:

    […] GT 2007-04-05: A Left-Libertarian Primer: Karl Hess documentary is now online […]

— 2009 —

  1. Discussed at radgeek.com

    Rad Geek People’s Daily 2009-04-28 – Hoverbikes:

    […] GT 2007-04-05: A Left-Libertarian Primer: Karl Hess documentary is now online […]

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