Hey, us Brenda Strong admirers have to stick together!
Has she not had on a sweater under that bra... 
I'd still be crashing my car!
Posted on 08/19/2007 6:06:46 AM PDT by tpaine
Heinlein the Libertarian
"Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me," shows yet another side to the Heinlein paradox.
As a literary influence on the emerging libertarian movement, Heinlein was second only to Rand.
Yet his statement about self-sacrifice and duty to the species seems as un-Randian as you can get. Heinlein, a human chauvinist, always believed freedom and responsibility were linked. But he would never have thought it proper to impose the duty he saw as the highest human aspiration.
Heinlein once told a visitor, "I'm so much a libertarian that I have no use for the whole libertarian movement." Although never in lockstep with every libertarian attitude, Heinlein's fictions seemed derived from libertarianism before the modern movement even fully existed. Before books like Rand's Fountainhead and F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom sparked the modern libertarian movement in the mid-'40s, Heinlein had published a novelette, "Coventry," about a world whose government was based on a freely entered covenant that said that "no possible act, nor mode of conduct, was forbidden to you, as long as your action did not damage another."
Heinlein's other contributions to the libertarian zeitgeist include one of the epigrams of the gun rights movement, "an armed society is a polite society" - a line first published in his 1942 serial Beyond This Horizon.
He was also a direct intellectual influence on many important libertarians. David Friedman, author of the anarcho-capitalist classic The Machinery of Freedom, considered Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress vital to his intellectual evolution. (One of Moon's heroes was a professor advocating "rational anarchy," partially based on Heinlein's one-time neighbor, Robert LeFevre, founder of the libertarian Rampart College.) David Nolan, founder of the Libertarian Party, got his start in political activism in 1960 sporting a self-made "Heinlein for President" button. Another Heinlein devotee was Robert Poole, longtime editor of Reason and founder of the Reason Foundation, one of the first institutions to try to effect libertarian change in the real world in a practical manner. Poole's efforts could be seen as a legacy of Heinlein's interest in the nuts and bolts of how his imagined societies would actually function.
Even though he adopted the Milton Friedmanite phrase "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" as a slogan for his revolutionaries fighting colonial oppression in Moon, Heinlein was not deeply embedded in the economic strain of libertarianism, which stresses the importance of spontaneous order, the failures of central planning, and the efficiency of free markets. As the economist Robert Rogers has argued, Heinlein's fiction seemed to believe that it took Great Men or a single mind (sometimes human, sometimes computer) to make sure economies ran well. In a 1973 interview with the libertarian writer J. Neil Schulman, Heinlein was doubtful when Schulman referred to the greater efficiency of free markets. "I don't think the increase in efficiency on the part of free enterprise is that great," Heinlein said. "The justification for free enterprise is not that it's more efficient, but that it's free."
Heinlein was, then, his own kind of libertarian, one who exemplified the libertarian strains in both the Goldwater right and the bohemian left, and maintained eager fan bases in both camps. A gang of others who managed the same straddle, many of them Heinlein fans, split in 1969 from the leading conservative youth group, Young American for Freedom, in what some mark as the beginnings of a self-conscious libertarian activist movement. In a perfectly Heinleinian touch, the main sticking point between the libertarian and conservative factions was one of Heinlein's bêtes noires: resistance to the draft, which he hated as much as he loved the bravery of the volunteer who would fight for his culture's freedom or survival.
Heinlein the Iconoclast
The prominence of his juvenile novels and his galvanizing effect on so many adolescent fans have led many critics to condemn Heinlein's work as inherently unworthy of serious adult attention. As one scholar, Elizabeth Anne Hull, has written, "In an attempt to account for the extraordinary popularity and influence of the novels of Robert Heinlein, it would be all too easy to assert that the masses are asses and let it go at that. Those of us academics who read Heinlein are likely to admit it with an apology [and consider] our weakness in enjoying his work a minor character defect."
Heinlein is indeed best approached when young, because his work appeals to that eternal youthful question: How should you live as you grow into a culture you did not make?
Heinlein does this best via his defining characteristic, one that bridges the apparent divides in his work. As William Patterson, the author of a forthcoming two-volume biography of Heinlein, told me, the best way to understand Heinlein in toto is as a full-service iconoclast, the unique individual who decides that things do not have to be, and won't continue, as they are.
That iconoclastic vision is at the heart of Heinlein, science fiction, libertarianism, and America.
Heinlein imagined how everything about the human world, from our sexual mores to our religion to our automobiles to our government to our plans for cultural survival, might be flawed, even fatally so.
It isn't a quality amenable to pigeonholing, or to creating a movement around "What would Heinlein do?" As Heinlein himself said of his work, it was "an invitation to think-not to be-lieve." He created a body of writing, and helped forge a modern world, that is fascinating to live in because of, not in spite of, its wide scope and enduring contradictions.
Bump that.
It was not "my" list but a listing from "The Works of Robert A. Heinlein " website...
Also not listed are several works Heinlein published under pen names including Anson McDonald, Lyle Monroe, Caleb Saunders, John Riverside, and Simon York...
I read For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs and can well agree with Heinlein's reasons for not publishing it while he was alive. I seem to recall his comment on it as being along the lines of "We all stumble when learning to walk, but some stumbles are better forgotten than others..."
Yet I enjoyed it even if it was not up to his best effort. However, when you realize it was among his very first efforts, it does tell a lot about the fantastic writer he did become.
Hey, us Brenda Strong admirers have to stick together!
Has she not had on a sweater under that bra... I'd still be crashing my car!
Still am, Blackie... Still am!
So far my personal Heinlein collection consists of the following (in no particular order):
The Star Beast
Farnham's Freehold
Glory Road
The Puppet Masters
Between Planets
The Worlds of Robert Heinlein (short stories: Free Men, Blowups Happen, Searchlight, Life-line, Solution Unsatisfactory)
The Rolling Stones (concept for Star Trek's "tribbles" shamelessly ripped off from this story)
Friday
Tunnel in the Sky (always wondered if the "stobor" mentioned in the story was just "robots" spelled backwards??)
Space Cadet
Waldo & Magic, Inc.
Citizen of the Galaxy
Time for the Stars
Starship Troopers
Time Enough for Love
Expanded Universe
Revolt in 2100
I Will Fear No Evil
Methuselah's Children
The Menace From Earth
Podkayne of Mars
6 X H (short stories: The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag, The Man Who Traveled in Elephants, "All You Zombies", They, Our Fair City, "And He Built a Crooked House")
Red Planet
Assignment in Eternity (short stories: Gulf, Elsewhen, Lost Legacy, Jerry Was A Man)
Stranger in a Strange Land
To Sail Beyond the Sunset
Farmer in the Sky
Job: A Comedy of Justice
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Orphans of the Sky
The Number of the Beast
The Man Who Sold the Moon
Starman Jones
Rocket Ship Galileo
So not quite a complete collection yet, but it gives me something to do when I have a chance to prowl around used book stores. I take my list with me and if I find something by Heinlein that I don't already have, I nab it.
That’s why I inserted ‘are’. :)
I remember reading some of his books way back when.
There’s much to like about him and his writing.
I toyed with leaving it to one of the colleges of which I was an alum, but with the mental powers of the yutes I see about today, I am much happier with the heavy cash it brought in to fund my poor efforts at feeding crappie and red snapper...
I'll say one thing for them, though; the Alumni Association has a lot of chutzpa to keep sending me letters asking for money after some of the scathing letters I've sent them telling them exactly how I felt about what has become of my alma mater (or maybe they're just stupid).
Do ya think? };^b)
Given the interest here as indicative of RAH fans, wouldn’t a “100th Anniversary Collected Works” edition be great? Something nicely bound, like the Dickens collecions one sees.
I’ve not much doubt that RAH will be seen as the Mark Twain of the 20th century in times to come, long after the Capotes and Anjelous are forgotten. He defined a genre.
I’m going to have to start searching the Brooklyn Public Library catalogue and start reserving some books ...
Galahad: To bring this wide-ranging speculation back on topic :-) I think Heinlein would join me in being very much in the freedom to camp!
I think Heinlein would join the Constitutional 'camp', -- which specifies we have freedom of religion, - and, -- a freedom from legislators making laws that respect specific religions.
Thus, -- there is no constitutional dichotomy.
-- that dichotomy certainly is an active ingredient in political and social discourse.
TrueKnightGalahad
No doubt that there is controversy. -- But the Constitution is clear; - "Congress shall make no law" does not give State legislators the power to 'respect' specific religions in the making of law; -- they too must use due process of law in legislating.
gcruse:
I think the Constitution contains the dichotomy.
The BOR limits Congress as a freedom 'from'; with "Congress shall make no law." Everything else is freedom 'to' as far as the feds are concerned. That is, 'to' is not enumerated.
You lost me. The BOR's applies to State legislators, as well as to Congress. -- We see this principle in Utah's fight for Statehood, wherein Utah was prevented from entering the Union as a State that was 'respecting' a specific religion.
Unfortunately, beginning at least with FDR's 1935 decision that a farmer growing and consuming his own food affected interstate commerce, federalism has been killed off and freedom 'to' dies a little more each day.
I've been arguing that the feds are forbidden from enacting prohibitions on commerce for the last 9 years on FR. -- We agree.
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AutoCad as well (Drafting Dan).
You were very lucky to start there.
“Stranger in a Strange Land” is his best Satire. It will be the “Gulliver’s Travels” for the late 20th Century.
Go to Amazon.com as they have lots of used Heinlein novels (both paper and hardback) for 1 cent plus $3.99 shipping or go to any good used book store...
I’m sure there are lots of used book stores in the NYC area...
But I’ve been told you have to eat salsa made there or across the river!
Aren’t you forgetting the remote material manipulation devices that later, when finally developed, the “inventors” of them called them “Waldoes”, in full deference and tribute to RAH and “Waldo and Magic, Inc.”, the true inventor?
Yes, I pat myself on the back often for choosing that one to begin...
However, just about any of his 'juveniles' are better than 95% of the science-fiction (juvenile or adult) written then or now...
I've never found any sci-fi writer that make me want to read his each and every published word except for Heinlein.
Isaac Asimov came close as did Arthur C. Clarke and H. Beam Piper...
Joe Haldeman's 1974 The Forever War gave me hope of a writer in Heinlein's style, but his later works did not do it for me. A friend once suggested John Varney as a Heinleinish writer, but his works were very pale in comparison.
Guess I just got spoiled early by Bob Heinlein, but I feel I am a better person for it!
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