Government is Force!: Why individual rights demand limited government and constitutional democracy
Plato wrote that each of us is driven by what we most love. Adam Abair’s love of philosophy speaks to us from every page of his writing.  But he is a thinker, not a scholar. Most self-described philosophers are in fact scholars, cautiously and methodically studying the philosophical thoughts of others, not offering new philosophical thoughts of their own. Thinkers, on the other hand, boldly and dangerously confront the big problems, creatively uninhibited by what others have said. No amount of formal education can prepare someone to be a philosopher because philosophy is the most basic of all disciplines — the beginning and the end of all inquiries — questioning their most fundamental assumptions about what really exists (metaphysics), about the best way to discover what really exists (epistemology), and about what to do with that knowledge after it is discovered (ethics). Waving no formal degrees or affiliations, Abair doesn’t offer the reader his authority.  Rather, in the best tradition of science and the Enlightenment, he offers reasons and invites the reader to think for herself and not merely accept what she is told to think by officially sanctioned experts.  Before the great conversation about individual rights and constitutional democracy, then, he stands institutionally unadorned — a positive asset, since genuine creativity often springs from those adventurous thinkers standing outside a formal academic discipline, who are able to view its seemingly intractable problems unencumbered by respectable professional assumptions and methodologies. Poignantly, Einstein once observed that we cannot solve problems at the same level of thinking at which those problems were created.  Viewing the political world afresh and turning it at perhaps a different angle for us, Abair offers some very innovative and invigorating ideas on some very old and jaded topics.