The George Buchanan Forum

Digital communication technology has exceeded its optimal scale, establishing a radical monopoly over human interaction. Internet platforms intermediate private relationships, extract value through surveillance capitalism, and reduce people to quantifiable metrics. However, certain digital tools can subvert the architecture of the corporate internet to safeguard individual freedom and human flourishing within digital environments.

Two digital tools embody this conviviality in particular: open source software and asymmetric cryptography. Open source software empowers users to understand, modify, and control their tools rather than being controlled by them, while asymmetric cryptography enables private communication over untrusted networks, as well as credible exit through digital signatures. Together, these tools offer a bottom-up approach to incrementally reclaiming control over our digital lives making small-scale resistance against intermediation and surveillance more feasible within the hostile environment of the modern internet.

George Buchanan was a late 16th-century Scottish Reformed thinker who used Scripture, history, and the natural law to argue for the restraint of civil rulers, the resistance to tyranny, and the freedom of Christian citizens. Like its namesake, the George Buchanan Forum is a community of liberty-minded Christians seeking to integrate theology, political theory, economics, and history.

Learn more at... https://www.tgbf.org

Plato's Republic is regarded by many as the foundational text in the history of western political philosophy. Yet with its totalitarian and communistic "ideal" or "noble" city at its heart, the Republic might seem to contain little of value to the libertarian. A careful reading of the opening two books of the work, however, shows Plato wrestling with a number of issues of critical libertarian interest: the antithesis of persuasion and coercion as forms of social relation, the ruler as in the employ of the ruled, a rejection of the principle of might-makes-right, the origins of the political community in economic need and voluntary exchange, and more. This paper surveys the opening two books of Plato's Republic, highlighting its insights, and also some of its confusions, from a libertarian perspective.

George Buchanan was a late 16th-century Scottish Reformed thinker who used Scripture, history, and the natural law to argue for the restraint of civil rulers, the resistance to tyranny, and the freedom of Christian citizens. Like its namesake, the George Buchanan Forum is a community of liberty-minded Christians seeking to integrate theology, political theory, economics, and history.

Learn more at... https://www.tgbf.org

What happens when priests obtain “the whole regiment of the realm,” with “[the Devil’s] own son” as the head of this ecclesial usurpation? In this talk I will present the views of John Knox, George Buchanan, and David Hume on the killing of Cardinal Beaton (d. 1546) at St Andrews Castle. Was this notorious episode from the Scottish Reformation a justified if irregular quasi-judicial proceeding, a cold-blooded murder, or something else entirely? Did it involve the right of resistance to tyranny or a purported right of revolution? The talk will seek to address prudently the topic of political assasination from a historical and historiographical perspective.

George Buchanan was a late 16th-century Scottish Reformed thinker who used Scripture, history, and the natural law to argue for the restraint of civil rulers, the resistance to tyranny, and the freedom of Christian citizens. Like its namesake, the George Buchanan Forum is a community of liberty-minded Christians seeking to integrate theology, political theory, economics, and history.

Learn more at... https://www.tgbf.org

Paul Kingsnorth's recently released book Against The Machine pushes the discussion on modern cultural and religious disintegration in a significantly helpful direction. His analysis places the blame for global dehumanization largely upon technocracy, individualism, and the pursuit of progress-for-the-sake-of-progress. Capitalism is likewise indicted. This talk aims to bring a corrective to Kingsnorth's critique of capitalism, showing that it is foundational and proper to the human nature he wants to see freed from The Machine.

George Buchanan was a late 16th-century Scottish Reformed thinker who used Scripture, history, and the natural law to argue for the restraint of civil rulers, the resistance to tyranny, and the freedom of Christian citizens. Like its namesake, the George Buchanan Forum is a community of liberty-minded Christians seeking to integrate theology, political theory, economics, and history.

Learn more at... https://www.tgbf.org

Plato's Republic is regarded by many as the foundational text in the history of western political philosophy. Yet with its totalitarian and communistic "ideal" or "noble" city at its heart, the Republic might seem to contain little of value to the libertarian. A careful reading of the opening two books of the work, however, shows Plato wrestling with a number of issues of critical libertarian interest: the antithesis of persuasion and coercion as forms of social relation, the ruler as in the employ of the ruled, a rejection of the principle of might-makes-right, the origins of the political community in economic need and voluntary exchange, and more. This paper surveys the opening two books of Plato's Republic, highlighting its insights, and also some of its confusions, from a libertarian perspective.

George Buchanan was a late 16th-century Scottish Reformed thinker who used Scripture, history, and the natural law to argue for the restraint of civil rulers, the resistance to tyranny, and the freedom of Christian citizens. Like its namesake, the George Buchanan Forum is a community of liberty-minded Christians seeking to integrate theology, political theory, economics, and history.

Learn more at... https://www.tgbf.org

Technological advances naturally tend to consolidate power in the hands of those who govern it, giving them an ability to selectively confer power on others through the techniques they control. This ability is generally seen as an economic function of the free market, but the instrumental use of the technique for practical ends is mirrored by the emergence of an environment which produces certain types of people. The result is a type of work and culture that are mediated by the value systems that produce and are perpetuated by the "platforms" that reify them. This type of system need not coerce in order to capture its users economically, psychologically, and physically. How might we optimize for technological systems that instead promote individual freedom, and competency in the context of an overwhelmingly mediated information economy? Four tools present themselves as convivial tools capable of subverting mediated systems for the good of their users: encryption, zero knowledge proofs, LLMs, and sound money.

George Buchanan was a late 16th-century Scottish Reformed thinker who used Scripture, history, and the natural law to argue for the restraint of civil rulers, the resistance to tyranny, and the freedom of Christian citizens. Like its namesake, the George Buchanan Forum is a community of liberty-minded Christians seeking to integrate theology, political theory, economics, and history.

Learn more at... https://www.tgbf.org

What happens when priests obtain “the whole regiment of the realm,” with “[the Devil’s] own son” as the head of this ecclesial usurpation? In this talk I will present the views of John Knox, George Buchanan, and David Hume on the killing of Cardinal Beaton (d. 1546) at St Andrews Castle. Was this notorious episode from the Scottish Reformation a justified if irregular quasi-judicial proceeding, a cold-blooded murder, or something else entirely? Did it involve the right of resistance to tyranny or a purported right of revolution? The talk will seek to address prudently the topic of political assasination from a historical and historiographical perspective.

George Buchanan was a late 16th-century Scottish Reformed thinker who used Scripture, history, and the natural law to argue for the restraint of civil rulers, the resistance to tyranny, and the freedom of Christian citizens. Like its namesake, the George Buchanan Forum is a community of liberty-minded Christians seeking to integrate theology, political theory, economics, and history.

Learn more at... https://www.tgbf.org

Paul Kingsnorth's recently released book Against The Machine pushes the discussion on modern cultural and religious disintegration in a significantly helpful direction. His analysis places the blame for global dehumanization largely upon technocracy, individualism, and the pursuit of progress-for-the-sake-of-progress. Capitalism is likewise indicted. This talk aims to bring a corrective to Kingsnorth's critique of capitalism, showing that it is foundational and proper to the human nature he wants to see freed from The Machine.

George Buchanan was a late 16th-century Scottish Reformed thinker who used Scripture, history, and the natural law to argue for the restraint of civil rulers, the resistance to tyranny, and the freedom of Christian citizens. Like its namesake, the George Buchanan Forum is a community of liberty-minded Christians seeking to integrate theology, political theory, economics, and history.

Learn more at... https://www.tgbf.org

According to the natural law tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Old Testament civil law wasn’t merely political, but was also “figurative” or symbolic in nature. Yet in his actual interpretation of the judicial precepts, Aquinas treats them almost entirely as political, an error that results in an overly broad and (ironically) theonomic understanding of the general equity principle of Old Testament civil law. In this paper, I critique Aquinas’s account, and argue that a narrower, libertarian interpretation of the general equity of the judicial precepts (along the lines of the Non-Aggression Principle) is able to more consistently appreciate their biblically figurative character.

George Buchanan was a late 16th-century Scottish Reformed thinker who used Scripture, history, and the natural law to argue for the restraint of civil rulers, the resistance to tyranny, and the freedom of Christian citizens. Like its namesake, the George Buchanan Forum is a community of liberty-minded Christians seeking to integrate theology, political theory, economics, and history.

Learn more at... https://www.tgbf.org

Behind Roman Catholic and Reformed debates over soteriology, or the doctrine of salvation, lie conflicting views of man’s pre-fall nature. The donum superadditum, or “superadded gift,” is the Roman Catholic doctrine that when Adam was created, he had to be given a special, supernatural grace just to harmonize his spiritual and bodily natures. The Reformed theologians rejected this idea, believing it implied a degrading view of man’s original, unfallen nature, and taught instead that man’s original righteousness, while created by God, was not alien but integral to his natural state. But aside from its implications for the doctrine of salvation, what might be the political and social ramifications of these divergent anthropologies? This paper will examine early modern Reformed and Roman Catholic views of the image of God and the donum superadditum, attending to the ways in which these competing visions imply different notions of the naturalness of political society.

George Buchanan was a late 16th-century Scottish Reformed thinker who used Scripture, history, and the natural law to argue for the restraint of civil rulers, the resistance to tyranny, and the freedom of Christian citizens. Like its namesake, the George Buchanan Forum is a community of liberty-minded Christians seeking to integrate theology, political theory, economics, and history.

Learn more at... https://www.tgbf.org