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A Brie f History o f Liber tar ianism

Matt Zwolinski

Philosophy, University of San Diego

John Tomasi

Political Science, Brown University

Chapter 1: What is Libertarianism?

Origins of “Libertarianism”

We think that libertarianism is best understood as a family of political

philosophies rather than a single coherent theory. Like any family, the

libertarian family has different branches, each with unique characteristics. Here

we find a family line that carries the chin of a studious great-uncle. There, a

branch with the dark eyes of a difficult aunt. Elsewhere, we find new lines

begun by young scholars eager to develop versions of libertarianism all their

own.

Imagine that we were asked to design facial-recognition software to

identify all members of the libertarian family (the kind of thing, for example,

that some governmental agency might wish to do). Is there an idea or set of

commitments that might be used to zero a view as libertarian?

The word “libertarian” is built on the word “liberty,” so that might seem

a promising place to begin. And that, indeed, is where the word itself

apparently did begin. In its earliest uses in the late 18th century, the term

 

 

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“libertarian” referred simply to one who believed in human liberty. But not,

originally, to political or economic liberty. Rather, the libertarian was one who

believed in liberty of the will.1 Libertarians opposed the doctrine of

“necessitarianism” (what we would now call “determinism”) and thus believed

that human beings possess the power of free will.

It would not be long, however, before the meaning of the term was

extended from metaphysics to social philosophy. The Oxford English Dictionary

reports the first usage of the word in the sense of “an advocate or defender of

liberty (especially in the political or social spheres)” to have occurred in

England in 1796.2 A few similar references can be found scattered about the

first half of the 19th century. But for the most part, the term was applied in a

somewhat dismissive way to the views of others rather than as a self-description,

and mostly in the limited context of English debates over the French

Revolution.3

However, as we shall see when we examine the later history of the word,

there is a serious problem in trying to define a political creed in terms of a

fundamental commitment to liberty. After all, saying that a libertarian believes

in liberty is only helpful is we have a common understanding of liberty to fall

back on. And we have never had such a common understanding. Or, rather, we

                                                                                                                         1 The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first usage of the word “libertarian” to William Belsham in 1789, who asked in his Essays, Philosophical, Historical, and Literary, “What is the difference between the Libertarian...and the Necessarian?” (Third Edition, November 2010). 2 “Lately marched out of the Prison at Bristol, 450 of the French Libertarians,” London Packet 12 February, 1796 (Third Edition, November 2010). 3 Stephan Kinsella, for instance, reports the following 1802 usage in The British Critic: “The author’s Latin verses…mark him for a furious Libertarian (if we may coin such a term) and a zealous admirer of France, and her liberty, under Bonaparte, such Liberty!” See The British Critic, volume XX, London, 1802, p. 432. From the authors’ own search, this appears to be the earliest use of the term in this sense recorded in Google Books.

 

 

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have never had a common single common understanding. Montesquieu

exaggerated only slightly when he noted that “There is no word that admits of

more various significations, and has made more varied impressions on the

human mind, than that of liberty,”4 and Lord Acton stretched the truth only a

little more when he claimed that liberty “is an idea of which there are two

hundred definitions, and that this wealth of interpretation has caused more

bloodshed than anything, except theology."5 Different persons and sects have

used the word “liberty” to refer to radically different ideas and so, if all that

“libertarian” means is “an advocate…of liberty,” we should expect the term to

rapidly degenerate into confusion as it comes to be embraced by disparate

political parties with little in the way of substantive political, moral, or

philosophical commonalities.

And this, in fact, is precisely what we find. Many contemporary

American libertarians, for instance, who are familiar with the term “libertarian”

only as a reference to individuals like Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Murray

Rothbard, will be surprised to learn that their modern label derives from a term

(“libertaire”) coined and self-applied by a French anarcho-communist.6 For

Joseph Déjacque, private property and the state are simply two different ways

in which social relationships became infused with hierarchy and oppression.7 A

consistent defender of liberty, he thus thought, must seek the complete

                                                                                                                         4 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, volume 1, translated by Thomas Nugent (London: The Colonial Press, 1900), p. 149. 5 Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, “Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History,” in Lectures on Modern History (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1906), p. 12. 6 Joseph Déjacque coined the term in an 1857 letter to the French mutualist anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon, in which he criticized what he regarded as the latter’s refusal to support the freedom and rights of women. See his “De l’être-humain mâle et femelle,” May, 1857. (http://joseph.dejacque.free.fr/ecrits/lettreapjp.htm). He later went on to 7 The etymological discussion here and in the remainder of this section owes much to several conversations between Matt Zwolinski and Charles Johnson.

 

 

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abolition of both. Déjacque popularized these ideas, and his new label for

them, through his influential anarcho-communist newsletter, Le Libertaire,

which he published out of New York from 1858 to 1861, and the term

“libertarian” saw a marked increase in use in the English language around this

time.

The term caught on among anarchists in Europe and the United States,

spreading in the latter half of the 19th century from communist anarchists like

Déjacque, who opposed private property, to individualist anarchists like

Benjamin Tucker, who favored it. Both groups believed that opposition to the

state was a necessary corollary of libertarianism, but the word “libertarian”

itself was still used in a broad sense, as a kind of antonym to “authoritarian.”8

And it was this broader sense of the word that would ultimately triumph. Thus,

while the anti-statism of Déjacque and Tucker would remain an important

element of libertarianism, the term was also used in the late 19th century to refer

to those who opposed the excesses of state authority without opposing the state

as such,9 and by the early twentieth century was used to refer even to a kind of

cultural support for liberty that had nothing directly to do with the state at all –

                                                                                                                         8 Tucker uses the term in several of the essays collected in Benjamin Tucker, Instead of a Book: By a Man Too Busy to Write One(New York: Elibron Classics, 2005)., always with this broad meaning. See, for instance, “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherein They Differ” (1888: “There are two socialisms…one is dictatorial, the other libertarian”), “A Libertarian’s Pet Despotisms” (1887), and “Liberty and the George Theory” (1887: “But the divorce laws, instead of being libertarian, are an express recognition of the rightfulness of authority over the sexual relations”). 9 In 1878, for instance, Sir John Robert Seeley described a libertarian as one “who can properly be said to defend liberty” by opposing tyranny and “resist[ing] the established Government.” Life and Times of Stein or Germany and Russia in the Napoleonic Age, volume 3 (Cambridge University Press, 1878), p. 355.

 

 

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a kind of precursor, perhaps, to the contemporary idea of “civil

libertarianism.”10

One of the most important figures behind the development of the

contemporary American usage of the word “libertarian” was Charles T.

Sprading, a wealthy landowner and libertarian activist who lost much of his

fortune in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. In his 1913 book, Liberty and

the Great Libertarians, Sprading made a self-conscious effort to promote the

word “libertarian” as a way of referring to a broad spectrum of anti-statist ideas

and personalities.11 Indeed, he begins his book by noting that the libertarians

excerpted in it were “chosen from all different political parties and economic

schools” including “Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Single-Taxers,

Anarchists, and Women’s Rights advocates.”12 So broad was the libertarian

tent, for Sprading, that the “Individualist and the Communist” could both find

a home in it. Providing, that is, that neither group attempts to impose its views

by force on the other.

Plans voluntarily accepted by individuals or groups of individuals and

not forced upon others are in no way a violation of liberty. They would

be if others were forced to do so by the seizure of "all means of

production and distribution," as the State Socialists purpose to do,

thereby excluding non-conformers from their use. It is not the

                                                                                                                         10 In 1901, Frederick William Maitland characterized the English as “individualists and libertarians” for their dislike of the thought of “an editor [having to defend] his proof sheets sentence by sentence before an official board of critics.” From “William Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford,” The English Historical Review, vol. 16, no. 63 (Jul, 1901), p. 419. 11 Charles T. Sprading, Liberty and the Great Libertarians(Los Angeles: Golden Press, 1913). 12 Ibid., 5.

 

 

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difference in taste between individuals that Libertarians object to, but the

forcing of one's tastes upon another.13

In making opposition to the initiation of force central to his definition of

libertarianism, and welding that opposition to the affirmation of private

property,, Sprading paved the way for the current American meaning of the

term, in which people like Rand, Friedman, and Rothbard are seen as

paradigmatic libertarians, while anarcho-communists like Peter Kropotkin,

Emma Goldman, and Murray Bookchin, are either forgotten altogether or

denied the label of “true” libertarian.

But if Sparding paved the way for the contemporary usage, it was

Leonard Read who applied the sealant. Read, a California businessman and

general manager of the Los Angeles branch of the U.S. Chamber of

Commerce, is best known in libertarian circles today for his creation of the

Foundation for Economic Education in 1946, an organization that sought to

promote a philosophy of free markets and limited government in a variety of

ways, perhaps most significantly through its publication, The Freeman.14 Read

and his organization worked closely with most of the important figures in the

post-war libertarian movement in the United States, including Ayn Rand, Rose

Wilder Lane, Freidrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Henry Hazlett. He is

generally credited, and has credited himself, with popularizing the label of

“libertarian” as a shorthand way of referring to “the free market, private

property, limited government philosophy and the moral and ethical tenets

                                                                                                                         13 Ibid., 6. 14 See, for a discussion of Read and the Foundation for Economic Education, Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement(New York: Public Affairs, 2007), chapter 4.

 

 

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which underlie these institutions.”15 And, indeed, The Freeman did publish one

of the earliest explicit calls to embrace the name “libertarian” for the

burgeoning free-market movement. Lamenting the fact that the word “liberal”

had been “corrupted” by leftists, Dean Russell called on his readers to “reserve

for our own good use the good and honorable word ‘libertarian,’ which he

defined as the belief that “government should protect all persons equally

against external and internal aggression, but should otherwise generally leave

people alone to work out their own problems and aspirations.”16 This

identification of libertarianism with an opposition to “aggression” would later

be seized upon by Murray Rothbard, who would take it so far as to identify the

“Nonaggression axiom” as the defining principle of libertarian thought.17 But

while Rothbard’s usage resonated with certain radical elements of the

libertarian movement, it never quite penetrated into popular usage, where the

term “libertarian” still serves to identify a principled commitment to something

like Read’s “free market[s], private property, [and] limited government,”

without specifying the particular moral foundations on which that commitment

must rest.

                                                                                                                         15 Leonard Read, Talking to Myself (Irvington-on-Hudson: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1970), 120-21. See also Read’s 1975 interview with Reason magazine in which he says “I’m the one who brought about and popularized the word ‘libertarian.’” “Educating for Freedom: An Interview with Leonard Read,” Reason, April, 1975, p.5. Ironically, Read goes on to complain that the word has now been “taken over” by “anarchists [and] out-and-out socialists.” I am indebted to Stephan Kinsella for the references. See his “The Origin of ‘Libertarianism,’” http://archive.mises.org/18385/the-origin-of-libertarianism/. 16 Dean Russell, “Who is a Libertarian?” The Freeman, May 1, 1950. http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/who-is-a-libertarian#axzz2d1BZd095 17 “The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the ‘nonaggression axiom.’ ‘Aggression’ is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.” Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty(New York: Collier, 1978), 27.

 

 

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Libertarianism and Liberty

The term “libertarian” has, in the United States at least, thus come to

refer to something more specific than simply one who “advocates liberty.”

Libertarians advocate not just liberty but a particular vision of liberty as applied

to economic and political questions. But the precise details of that vision, and

its role in the system of libertarian thought, have often been misunderstood.

It has often been said, for instance, that libertarianism is distinguished by

its exclusive focus on what has been called negative liberty (freedom from), as

opposed to positive liberty (freedom to).18 On this view, an individual’s liberty is

violated if others forcefully interfere with her doing what she wants to do – if,

say, men with guns threaten violence to prevent her from crossing a national

border. But it is not violated if she merely lacks the internal or external means

necessary to do what she wants – if, say, she is too weak from disease to walk

across the border, or if the border is a river that she has no boat to cross.

But this common characterization of libertarianism is inadequate in two

distinct ways. First, it is inaccurate insofar as it suggests that libertarians are

necessarily unconcerned with positive liberty, or even that they are less concerned

with positive liberty than with negative liberty. Libertarians do, it is true, believe

that negative liberty is the only form of freedom that can legitimately be

                                                                                                                         18 The locus classicus of this distinction is Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty, ed. Isaiah Berlin(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). It is worth noting that Berlin, too, uses the word “libertarian” in something like the broad sense that prevailed in the 19th century, referring to those thinks such as “Locke and Mill in England, and Constant and Tocqueville in France,” who thought that “there ought to exist a certain minimum area of personal freedom which must on no account be violated” p. 124.

 

 

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demanded from others as a matter of moral right.19 But this is compatible with

believing that positive liberty is a significant moral value,20 and even with the

claim (which some contemporary libertarians have endorsed) that negative

liberty is valuable only because and to the extent that it serves as a means of

obtaining what really matters for its own sake – the positive liberty to do what

one most wishes to do.21

But there is a second and even more serious way in which this

characterization is inaccurate. If negative liberty is understood merely as freedom

from forceful interference, then libertarianism turns out not to be committed

to negative liberty after all!22 After all, libertarians are ardent supporters of

rights of private property and, as many of libertarianism’s critics have pointed

out, property rights seem to entail and require limitations on the negative

freedom of others.23 After all, part of what it means to own an object – perhaps

the most important part – is to have the right to forcefully exclude others from

                                                                                                                         19 Eric Mack and Gerald Gaus, "Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism: The Liberty Tradition," in Handbook of Political Theory, ed. Gerald Gaus and Chandran Kukathas(London: Sage, 2004), 116-17. 20 See, for instance, David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan, A Brief History of Liberty(New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 21 Tyler Cowen, “The Paradox of Libertarianism,” Cato Unbound, March 11, 2007 http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/03/11/tyler-cowen/paradox-libertarianism. 22 Precisely how negative liberty should be characterized turns out to be a rather difficult matter, involving questions about just what kinds of interference are to count as violating it (force, sure, but what about a non-violent boycott? Or a threat to reveal embarrassing information?), questions about what sorts of things are being interfered with (Actions? Desires? Fully-informed desires?), whether interference must be intentional, and so on. For our purposes here, though, these details do not matter much. So long as negative liberty is understood in a non-moralized way, the problems identified in this paragraph will pertain. See, for an overview, Carter, Ian, "Positive and Negative Liberty", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/liberty-positive-negative/>. 23 For example, see G. A. Cohen, "Freedom and Money," in On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. G. A. Cohen and Michael Otsuka(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

 

 

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using it without one’s consent.24 Freedom from interference with one’s

property is therefore secured only by the threat of interference with others.

Libertarians thus do not believe that all forceful interference with others

is wrong. A kidnapper who seizes you and imprisons you in a cabin is

wrongfully interfering with your freedom. But a property owner who forcefully

prevents a traveller from walking across his land (or through his house) is not.

The difference, of course, is that the property owner has a right to

exclude others from using his land without his consent, whereas the kidnapper

does not have a right to seize and imprison your body. The kind of freedom

that libertarians are concerned to protect, then, is not just non-interference as

such, but non-interference with one’s rights. Or, as John Locke wrote, it is “a

liberty to dispose and order as he lists his person, actions, possessions, and his

whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and

therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his

own.”25 Such a view of liberty is social rather than mechanistic, insofar as it

focuses on the interpersonal relationships between human beings rather than

the mere physical impediment of lack impediment of things.26 But it is also a

conception that, unlike the view of freedom as non-interference, allows the

libertarian to view the protection of all individuals’ freedom as compossible:

protecting the property of one person might require interfering with the desired

activity of others, but protecting the rights of one individual does not necessitate

infringing the rights of others. Thus, the libertarian who adopts this conception

                                                                                                                         24 See David Schmidtz, "The Institution of Property," Social Philosophy and Policy 11, no. 2 (1994). 25  Locke,  Second  Treatise,  §  57.  26 See George H. Smith, The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapter 7. Smith contrasts the Lockean, social concept of freedom with the Hobbesian, mechanistic one.

 

 

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of freedom can consistently hold that the realization of libertarian ideals would

yield a maximum of freedom for everyone.

Something like this conception of freedom seems to be central to

libertarianism. But while it is central, it cannot be fundamental. It cannot be

fundamental because according to this understanding, we cannot even know

what freedom is until we know what rights people have. And so, on this

account, a theory of rights must come logically prior to a full theory of

freedom.

This does not mean, however, that a theory of rights is itself basic. For

some libertarians, it might be. But other libertarians will attempt to ground

rights themselves in some other more basic value or belief – a commitment to

respecting autonomy, for instance, or to treating persons as ends in themselves,

or even to the maximization of human welfare. The libertarian account of

rights, then, like the libertarian account of freedom, will thus be something on

which libertarians converge, but not necessarily the idea on which libertarianism is

based.

E Pluribus…?

Is it possible to identify a precise set of beliefs on which libertarianism

must be based? Is it possible even to identify a set of beliefs that all libertarians

and only libertarians share? Unfortunately, at least from the perspective of

philosophical tidiness, there is good reason to doubt that either of these goals

are achievable.

After all, contemporary libertarians are an extraordinarily diverse group!

Some, lsuch as Ayn Rand, believe that the government should be strictly

 

 

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limited to the provision of police, courts, and military protection.27 Others, like

Murray Rothbard, believe that the only justifiable government is…no

government at all.28 Some, like Friedrich Hayek, believe that taxation may

legitimately be used to fund public education, public goods, and even “a

comprehensive system of social insurance.”29 Others, like Robert Nozick, view

all taxation of the earned income as morally “on a par with forced labor” and

thus almost always impermissible.30

All libertarians emphasize the importance of free markets and private

property, yet some, such as Lysander Spooner, oppose the institution of wage

labor,31 others, such as Benjamin Tucker, oppose as usurious the charging of

interest and rent,32 and still others, such as Herbert Spencer and Henry George,

oppose the full private ownership of land.33

Some libertarians, such as Ayn Rand, are militant atheists,34 while others,

such as Leonard Read, are devout believers.35 Some libertarians, like Volteryne

                                                                                                                         27 Ayn Rand, "The Nature of Governement," in The Virtue of Selfishness(New York, NY: Signet, 1964), 109. 28 See Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty(New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1982), especially part III. 29 On Hayek’s support for social insurance, see Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, ed. Bruce Caldwell, vol. II, The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 148. For his support of the state provision of public goods and public education, see The Constitution of Liberty(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 223 and chapter 24, respectively. 30 See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia(New York: Basic Books, 1974), 169. 31 See Lysander Spooner, “Poverty: Its Illegal Causes and Its Legal Cure,” and “A Letter to Grover Cleveland.” 32 See Benjamin Tucker, "State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherein They Differ," in Instead of a Book: By a Man Too Busy to Write One(New York: Elibron Classics, 2005). 33 See Herbert Spencer, Social Statics(New York, NY: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1995), chapter IX; Henry George, Progress and Poverty(New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1886). 34 See Playboy’s interview with Ayn Rand, March, 1964.

 

 

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de Cleyre, are cultural liberals with deep concerns about patriarchy and the

oppressiveness of traditional marriage,36 while others, like Charles Murray, are

cultural conservatives who lament the decline of traditional marriage as a

symptoms of “cultural decline.”37 And some libertarians, like Murray Rothbard,

are both extreme liberals and extreme conservatives, depending on which

decade they happened to be writing in!38

Finally, when it comes to moral foundations, libertarians stake out claims

all over the philosophical map, Some, such as Milton and David Friedman,

ground their beliefs in broadly consequentialist appeals to economic

efficiency,39 others (like Jan Narveson) appealing to contractarian logic,40 others

(like Randy Barnett) basing their libertarianism on the idea of natural rights,41

others (like Douglas Rasmussesn and Douglas Den Uyl) seeking justification in

Aristotelian principles of perfection,42 and still others (like Tibor Machan) in

ethical egoism.43

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         35 See Leonard Read … ? 36 See Voltairine de Cleyre, "Those Who Marry Do Ill," in Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine De Cleyre - Feminist, Anarchist, Genius, ed. Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005). 37 See Charles A. Murray, What It Means to Be a Libertarian(Broadway, 2010); Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980(Basic books, 1994). 38 For the left-wing Rothbard, see Murray N. Rothbard, "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (1965). For the right-wing Rothbard, see "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement," The Rothbard-Rockwell Report (1992). 39 See David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism, 2nd ed.(La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), especially part III; Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 40th Anniversary ed.(Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002). 40 See Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). 41 See Randy E. Barnett, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 42 See Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics(University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005). 43 See Tibor R. Machan, Individuals and Their Rights(Open Court LaSalle, Ill., 1989).

 

 

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Characteristics of the Libertarian Family

Given the diversity of libertarian positions, it is difficult to imagine any

way of completing the sentence “You are a libertarian if and only if…” Rather

than pursuing what we regard as a futile quest for a set of necessary and

sufficient conditions, then, we propose to define libertarianism in terms of the

somewhat looser notion of family resemblance. We believe that there are six

core ideas that are shared by paradigmatic libertarians. But, to continue with the

software metaphor with which this chapter began, we see these six ideas as

informal markers of membership.44 Attention to these ideas allows us to identify

what is common among the libertarian family, even given the uniqueness of

each and every libertarian face. Our six markers of libertarianism are:

commitment to rights of private property, skepticism of authority, appreciation

of free markets, individualism, cosmopolitanism, and a belief in the explanatory

and normative significance of spontaneous order.

Each of these six ideas can be understood in different ways. In a

moment we will specify the range of understandings that is characteristic of

libertarian theories. For now, note that a number of non-libertarian political

ideologies may also be committed to one or more of these six ideas, and may

be committed to one or another of these ideas even as they are traditionally

understood by libertarians. But libertarianism is a doctrine (or family of

doctrines) distinguished by its members’ commitment to all six ideas

                                                                                                                         44 We are not the first to propose defining libertarianism in these terms, though our particular selection of markers, and our characterization of them, is unique. See, for another example with a much more extensive set of characteristics, Mack and Gaus, "Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism: The Liberty Tradition."

 

 

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simultaneously, and to the belief that that they form an integrated framework for

understanding the world.45

Still, even the presence of all six ideas is not always enough for a positive

libertarian ID. For libertarians also deny that there is any other commitment---

say, to solidarity, to material egalitarianism, or to cultural integrity---that is more

primary than these six. Imagine running our software on a candidate that

exhibits all six “libertarian” characteristics as relatively minor features—

earlobes and cheeks, say, hairline and brow. Yet imagine that this candidate’s

face is dominated by some distinctly non-libertarian feature---say a swollen,

indeed a probuscular, commitment to the ideal of cultural integrity (the idea that

the state should above all prevent cultural change, say by prohibiting the use of

rival languages on signs or in schools, providing tax-funded support for

entertainers and art forms judged to be “native,” and so forth). Despite the

presence of the other markers, our software would screen out that candidate as

non-libertarian, and rightly so. After all, such a view has a non-libertarian

commitment front and center, dominating all the rest. So our software would

pick out as libertarian only views that exhibit a simultaneous commitment to a

particular interpretation of our six core ideas, and for whom that conjunctive

commitment is dominated by no rival commitment or idea.

Let us turn, then, to an examination of the six core ideas of

libertarianism: commitment to rights of private property, skepticism of

authority, appreciation of free markets, individualism, cosmopolitanism, and a

belief in the explanatory and normative significance of spontaneous order. In

what particular way do libertarians understand each of these ideas?

                                                                                                                         45 We shall have more to say about this second claim later in the chapter.

 

 

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Property

We will begin our analysis with the libertarian commitment to rights of

private property, not merely because we have to start somewhere, but because this

idea comes closer than any other to constituting an essential condition of any

libertarian view. If the six core ideas that we have described can be thought of

as markers of membership in our libertarian facial recognition software, then a

commitment to rights of private property is like the nose on the face.

All liberals value the civil and political rights of individuals: the right to a

fair trial, freedom of expression, political participation, personal autonomy, and

so on. And all liberals agree that rights to personal property – like the right to

own your own car and your own furniture – are an important component of

personal autonomy and are worthy of political protection.46 What distinguishes

the libertarian view of property from other merely liberal views is the scope, the

weight, and the basicness that they assign to private property rights.

Libertarians are, first of all, distinguished from other liberals by their

belief that individuals should be able to acquire rights of private property in a

wider array of objects.47 At a minimum, libertarians believe that rights of property

                                                                                                                         46 This is true even of the 20th century’s most important anti-libertarian liberal philosopher, John Rawls. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 1st ed.(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), 61. 47  At  least,  as  a  general  rule.  In  some  ways,  libertarians  favor  property  in  a  smaller  range  of  objects  than  others.  Many  libertarians,  for  instance,  are  highly  critical  of  intellectual  property  rights.  See,  for  example,  Tom  G  Palmer,  "Are  Patents  and  Copyrights  Morally  Justified-­‐the  Philosophy  of  Property  Rights  and  Ideal  Objects,"  Harv.  JL  &  Pub.  Pol'y  13(1990).  More  generally,  libertarians  are  opposed  to  “property  rights”  that  have  their  origin  in  violence  and  theft,  rather  than  occupation,  use,  and  peaceful  exchange.  See,  for  an  important  discussion,  Thomas  Hodgskin,  The  Natural  and  Artificial  Right  of  Property  Contrasted  [1832].  

 

 

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should extend beyond personal property like cars and clothes to encompass

productive property like factories and land.48 But many libertarians go farther still,

and argue that we should regard people’s relation to their own body parts as a

kind of private property, and that various forms of currently public property

like roads, parks, and oceans should be converted to private property as well.49

Libertarians also differ from other political liberals in the moral weight

they assign to rights of private property. Again, there is a range of views to be

found within the libertarian camp. But, at a minimum, libertarians have argued

that rights of private property should be treated as morally on a par with the

other civil and political rights of citizens. Rights of property, like civil and

political rights, are basic rights, and whatever social and juridical weight is

accorded to the latter should be accorded in equal measure to the former as

well. On this view, property rights are component parts of a multifaceted,

liberty-protecting scheme. Like freedoms of speech and religion, the economic

freedoms of citizens merit foundational protection. But “foundational” does

not mean “absolute.” Any system that admits a plurality of basic rights must

allow for the possibility of conflict between those rights, and unless one kind of

right is held to be somehow more basic than the others, must allow for a process

of weighing and balancing to determine which right trumps in each particular

situation. Sometimes property rights will win out, but not always.50

In contrast to this view, some libertarians have adopted the position that

property rights are more basic than other rights. At the limit, this view suggests

                                                                                                                         48 Though, as we will explore in more detail in the next chapter, some libertarians have taken heterodox positions on the issue of land ownership. 49 Kidney sales, privatize roads, parks, oceans 50 The view expressed here has much in common with the classical liberal idea of the “presumption of liberty,” discussed Smith, The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism, chapter 1.

 

 

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that civil and political rights are not merely less weighty than property rights:

such rights are themselves types of property rights.51 So, for example, libertarians

of this sort might hold that rights of free speech hold only because and to the

extent that the speaker has a property right in (or permission from the property

right holder to use) the various physical objects utilized in the act of speech.

You have the right to write what you want in the newspaper you own, but not

to say whatever you want in the mall, park, or sidewalk that belongs to

somebody else. Freedom of speech, like freedom of religion, freedom of

movement, and every other kind of freedom, is derivative of and dependent for

its force and justification on the underlying rights of property. On this view,

then, property rights always trump because, in the ultimate analysis, there are

no other kinds of right with which they could possibly conflict!

Libertarians base their support of private property in a variety of moral

arguments. Perhaps the most well-known libertarian argument, however,

grounds property rights in physical objects like houses and money in a more

fundamental property right held by each person in his or her self. Because each

of us owns our bodies, we therefore own the labor that our bodies produce.

And so, libertarians argue, when we expend our labor upon things that are not

yet owned by anybody else, we can, under certain conditions, come to own

them too.52 Our property rights in things like houses and money are thus

ultimately produced and justified by our more basic property right in our

person. And, therefore, when our property rights in things like houses and

                                                                                                                         51 See, for example, Jan Narveson, who equates liberty with property and writes that is is therefore “plausible to construe all rights as property rights.” Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, 66. 52 The most famous version of this argument, of course, is found in chapter five of John Locke’s Second Treatise. More contemporary, and more distinctively libertarian, versions can be found in Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia; Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty.

 

 

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money are infringed upon, the libertarian holds that it is really our basic

property in our self that it infringed upon. Thus the libertarian slogan, “taxation

is slavery!”, is not meant merely as a provocative bit of rhetoric. It is meant to

expose a deep but often difficult to discern truth about the basis and meaning

of property.

But while an appeal to self-ownership is probably the most famous

libertarian strategy for defending rights of private property, it is by no means

the only one. Some libertarians have sought to base their defense on different

but equally deontological grounds such as an appeal to negative liberty, or to

autonomy.53 Other libertarians have sought to provide a more consequentialist

justification, by showing how private property replaces the zero- (or negative-)

sum transactions of the commons with the positive-sum transactions of a

market economy.54 Or by showing how rights of private property are

instrumentally valuable in securing other important civil and political rights.55

For the most part, though, individuals in the libertarian intellectual tradition

have refrained from drawing sharp distinctions between consequentialist and

deontological arguments, believing instead that respect for private property is

both a moral duty and a wise social policy.56 Libertarians, especially those

                                                                                                                         53 For the former, see Narveson, The Libertarian Idea. For the latter, see Horacio Spector, Autonomy and Rights(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 54 See Schmidtz, "The Institution of Property." 55 See, for example, Gerald Gaus’s survey of the empirical evidence in Gerald F. Gaus, "Coercion, Ownership, and the Redistributive State: Justificatory Liberalism's Classical Tilt," ibid.27, no. 1 (2010). 56 That fact that justice and utility both point in the same direction in so many libertarian arguments is surely a fact that calls out for explanation. One possible explanation is the skeptical one. The reason justice and utility line up for libertarians, this line of reasoning goes, is because libertarians frame their arguments to fit their conclusions, rather than the other way around. See, for a somewhat sympathetic expression of this skepticism, Jeffrey Friedman, "What's Wrong with Libertarianism?," Critical Review 11, no. 3 (1997). However there are other, less skeptical explanations available as well. For instance,  

 

 

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outside the discipline of academic philosophy, have thus tended to help

themselves generously to both sorts of arguments, without always

distinguishing clearly between them.

Skepticism of Authority

If property can be thought of as the “nose” on our libertarian face, our

second characteristic, skepticism of authority, is more of an attitude or, if you

like, a distinguishing look on the face of libertarians. When a political leader says

“Trust me,” the libertarian twists her mouth to one side and raises an eye in

way that says: “I don’t.”

At a minimum, this libertarian skepticism is directed at political

authorities. Drawing on the work of Friedrich Hayek and others, libertarians

doubt that political authorities are as wise as they sometimes claim to be.57 And

drawing on the work of public choice theorists, libertarians doubt that political

authorities are as benevolent as they purport to be.58 Politicians, bureaucrats,

soldiers and police officers might not be any worse than the common run of

humanity, but they certainly aren’t any better. They suffer from the same

ignorance, the same vanity, the same biases, and the same self-interestedness as

the rest of us. But by virtue of the political power they wield, those common                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          perhaps justice and utility do not come into conflict because the content of justice is partly a function of utilitarian considerations? See, for a discussion of many such possible explanations, and an endorsement of one, Roderick Long, "Why Does Justice Have Good Consequences?," http://praxeology.net/whyjust.htm. 57 See, for instance, Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945); "The Pretense of Knowledge," in New Studies in Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas(London: Routledge, 1978). 58 See, for instance, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962); Gordon Tullock, R. D. Tollison, and C. K. Rowley, The Political Economy of Rent Seeking(Boston: Kluwer, 1988).

 

 

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defects have the potential to do far more damage than most people could hope

or fear to accomplish.

Libertarians thus doubt that political actors are “authorities” in the sense

of people who are especially competent, virtuous, or wise. But, as a result of

this skepticism and of other more philosophical considerations, libertarians are

also generally skeptical about political authority in another, deeper sense. They

are skeptical that political actors have authority in the sense of the right to rule

over others, and to command their obedience.

At a minimum, libertarians believe that politicians and governments lack

the broad authority they claim. Libertarians believe that many of the things that

governments currently do are illegitimate. They are activities that government has

no business being involved in, and indeed no right to be involved in. No

libertarian, for instance, believes that the government of the United States has

the authority to forcibly prevent private businesses from offering to deliver

mail in competition with the United States Post Office, or indeed in running a

post office at all.59 Nor do most libertarians believe the government has the

authority to ban drugs such as marijuana and cocaine, to draft citizens in time

of war, to transfer wealth from some classes of citizens to others, to

monopolize the printing of currency, and so on. Most of these actions are, of

course, perfectly legal. But even if governments have the legal authority to

pursue these policies, libertarians believe that they lack the moral authority to do

                                                                                                                         59 One famous libertarian – Lysander Spooner – even set entered into a legal battle with the United States government after setting up his own quite successful competing mail service, the American Letter Mail Company, in 1844.

 

 

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so. And when law exceeds the boundaries established by morality, libertarians

believe, it is simply naked force, and nothing more.60

Indeed, some libertarians take this reasoning a step further and deny that

governments have any authority at all. For these libertarians, there is no such

thing as the right to rule over others in the way that governments claim. The

only way that such a right to rule could have come about is through consent –

through one group of people agreeing to follow the commands of another. But

most people over whom governments claim authority never consented to it.

The idea of a “social contract,” libertarians have pointed out, is a myth, a

fiction that serves to hide government’s true origins in conquest and

exploitation.61 Thus all governments, even the most benign, are illegitimate, and

the extreme form of the libertarian skepticism of political authority is

anarchism.62

Appreciation of Free Markets

Libertarians’ enthusiasm for free markets is without a doubt their most

well known characteristic. But it is also, and perhaps for this reason, the most

misunderstood one. It is widely believed, for instance, that libertarians are                                                                                                                          60 Many libertarians follow Locke, for instance, in defining tyranny as “the exercise of power beyond right.” Second Treatise, chapter XVIII, section 199. 61 On the myth of the social contract, see Lysander Spooner, "No Treason No. Iv: The Constitution of No Authority," in The Lysander Spooner Reader, ed. Lysander Spooner and George H. Smith(San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1992). For one representative libertarian account of the so-called “conquest theory” of the state, see Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State(San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1994). Nock draws heavily on the work of the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, especially his The State(San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1997). 62 For a recent and highly sophisticated exposition of this position, see Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey(Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

 

 

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cheerleaders for American capitalism; that they deplore socialism; and that they

base their doctrine on a narrow economic vision of humanity that focuses

exclusively on the rational pursuit of self-interest to the neglect of sociality,

community, and respect for tradition. And there is, in each of these claims, a

certain element of truth. But these common beliefs also reveal certain

widespread misunderstandings about the nature of libertarianism, some of

which run deep.

To begin, it is worth stressing that most libertarians support free markets

only because and only to the extent that they are a form of voluntary,

cooperative social organization. But not everything that we call a “market” is

truly a form of voluntary, cooperative social organization. And, of course, not

every form of voluntary, cooperative social organization is a market.

Karl Polanyi famously described a "market society" as one in

which “instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social

relations are embedded in the economy."63 And critics of libertarianism often

seem to assume that the libertarian support of free markets entails support for

market society in this sense.64 But this assumption is supported neither by the

logic of the libertarian argument for free markets, nor by what libertarians

themselves have said about the relationship between markets and other forms

of social organization. Libertarians who support markets because they respect

the right of individuals to engage in voluntary cooperative organization likewise

support other forms of voluntary cooperative organization into which

                                                                                                                         63 Karl Polanyi, "The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time Author: Karl Polanyi, Publisher: Beacon Press Pa," (2001): 57. 64 Consider, for example, the titles of two recent anti-libertarian books, both of which suggest this misunderstanding: Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets(Macmillan, 2012); Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets(Oxford University Press, 2010).

 

 

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individuals can and do enter – families, friendships, monastic orders, kibbutzim,

mutual-aid societies, clubs, and others that are governed by norms and values

quite different from those governing the market order.

Nor are libertarians who support markets for more consequentialist

reasons barred from endorsing these other forms of social organization. If

markets produce good consequences, it is because they are a good tool for

solving a certain kind of social problem. But not every social problem is the

same, and there is no reason to think that the kind of organization that works

to coordinate the behavior of strangers on a large scale will be the best way of

coordinating behavior among families, neighborhoods, or religious

communities, where norms of altruism and solidarity play a much greater and

effective role. Indeed, there is every reason to think that the attempt to impose

the norms and values of the market on these other organizations would be

disastrous. Society requires both the “extended order” of the market and the

various sub-orders that compose it even though, as Hayek warned, the attempt

to navigate both worlds simultaneously can lead to difficulties:

If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos

(i.e. of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-

cosmos (our wider civilisation), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings

often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply

the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would

crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once.65

So, libertarians do not support turning everything into a market. But nor do

they support every institution that we call a “market” today. After all,                                                                                                                          65 Friedrich A. Hayek and W.W. Bartley III, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 18.

 

 

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libertarians support free markets, and many if not most real world markets are

rigged in ways that systematically advantage certain classes to the disadvantage of

others.66

We shall have much more to say about such rigging in chapter four. But

before we discuss the cases in which libertarians don’t support markets, we

ought to say at least a little bit about the reasons why they often do. As with

each of the other characteristics, libertarians reach their conclusions about

markets by a variety of different routes. But we can broadly, and roughly, divide

the arguments in to two categories.

In the first category are arguments that make reference to the beneficial

consequences of free markets. The most important single argument of this sort

is based on the mutually beneficial nature of market exchange. Because both

parties must consent in order for a market exchange to take place, such

exchanges will generally be mutually beneficial in the sense that both parties will

walk away with something that they value more than whatever they gave up.

This fact establishes a very strong moral presumption against third parties

(including governments) blocking or interfering with those exchanges. And, on

a larger scale, it is this fact that accounts for the ability of market economies to

create wealth on a massive scale. There basic physical building blocks of the

universe might be finite, but wealth is not, since wealth is a function of how

that stuff is arranged to satisfy our wants, not merely how much of it there is.

The consequentialist case for free markets can be fleshed out by Hayek’s

arguments on the ability of market prices to convey dispersed information to

                                                                                                                         66 See, for a discussion, Charles W. Johnson, "Markets Freed from Capitalism," in Markets Not Capitalism, ed. Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson(New York: Minor Compositions, 2010).

 

 

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market actors in a decentralized manner,67 by Deirdre McCloskey’s work on the

“bourgeois virtues” fostered by market societies,68 by Tyler Cowen’s research

on the beneficial effects of markets on art and culture,69 and other sources that

will be discussed throughout this book.

But the libertarian support for markets, like the libertarian support for

property, is based not only on appeals to consequences but on an appeal to

justice. Part of that appeal, of course, is based on the underlying justice of

property rights themselves. After all, if you owns something and would like to

trade it in exchange for something that one desires more, why should anyone

else have the right to stop you? What grounds could there possibly be for

forbidding “capitalist acts between consenting adults,” at least when those acts

are voluntary and do not violate the rights of third parties?70 Markets, then,

embody justice insofar as they respect a person’s ownership over her person

and her rightful possessions. To this basic case, libertarians have added a host

of subsidiary ones, such as the role of markets in embodying and promoting

reciprocity, in satisfying norms of desert, in instituting a relation among

persons as free and equal, in satisfying standards of social justice, and in

meeting people’s basic needs.71

                                                                                                                         67 Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society." 68 Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 69 Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture(Harvard University Press, 1998). 70 The characteristically delightful phrase comes from Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 163. 71 On markets and equality, see Roderick Long, "Equality: The Unknown Ideal," Mises Daily. On markets and social justice, see John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). And for a discussion of markets and need, reciprocity, equality, and desert, see David Schmidtz, Elements of Justice(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

 

 

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Spontaneous Order

The fourth characteristic of libertarianism is a belief in the explanatory

power and normative significance of spontaneous orders. Like social theorists

of any political stripe, libertarians recognize the importance of organization and

coordination in social life. But what sets libertarians apart is their belief that

such order can be, and usually ought to be, allowed to evolve from the bottom

up through the peaceful interactions of individuals, rather than being imposed

coercively by a technocratic elite. Order is best grown, not made. And it is

something that emerges, often in unanticipated ways, rather than something that

is designed in advance.

Suppose you wanted to design a college campus, and were trying to

decide where the sidewalks ought to go.72 One way to go about this task would

be to think in advance about where people were likely to want to go, and to

place your sidewalks so as to make travel between those places as efficient as

possible. This is order by design. An alternative approach would be to wait to

see where students wear down the lawn, and put the sidewalks there. This is

order by emergence.

Spontaneous orders are those which, in the words of the Scottish moral

philosopher Adam Ferguson [1767], arise as “the result of human action, but

not the execution of any human design.”73 Like the pathways across the

campus lawn, such orders arise out of the intentional actions of human agents.

But no agent designed or even foresaw the overall order that resulted from her

action and those of the many other individuals who participated in the process.                                                                                                                          72 The example has been attributed to Gary Wolfram. See Gus DiZerega, "Timothy Sandefur’s Criticism of Spontaneous Order," Studies in Emergent Order (2009). 73 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Part III, section II. See also Friedrich A. Hayek, "Kinds of Order in Society," New Individualist Review 3, no. 2 (1964).

 

 

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The vocabulary and grammar of language is an example of spontaneous order.

No one decided that “Google” would become a verb, and attempts to design

more “logical” languages from scratch have had little success. The use of

certain commodities such as gold as a medium of exchange in a barter

economy is another example.74

Perhaps the most famous example of a spontaneous order, however, is

Adam Smith’s description of the process of wealth creation in a market

economy. Individual actors in such an economy, Smith noted, do not intend to

make their society rich. In buying low and selling high, each agent intends only

to make himself wealthier. But because his own wealth can only be increased by

selling individuals goods that they value more than the money they pay for it,

he is “in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an

end that was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society

that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes

that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote

it.”75

Since the time of Smith and Ferguson, libertarians have taken the

concept of spontaneous order and run with it, finding examples in the

evolution of property rights,76 of common law,77 of the rules of pirate ships,78

                                                                                                                         74 See, for a discussion, Carl Menger, Principles of Economics(Institute for Humane Studies, 1976), 257-62. 75 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Edwin Cannan, ed., (London: Methuen, 1904). Vol. 1., CHAPTER II: OF RESTRAINTS UPON THE IMPORTATION FROM FOREIGN COUNTRIES OF SUCH GOODS AS CAN BE PRODUCED AT HOME 76 property 77 See, for a discussion, John Hasnas, "Toward a Theory of Empirical Natural Rights," Social Philosophy and Policy 22, no. 1 (2005). 78 Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates(Cambridge Univ Press, 2009).

 

 

29  

and of the state itself.79 As the examples have multiplied, however, the basic

concept of spontaneity has sometimes seemed less than fully clear.80 Can a state

really be a spontaneous order if part of its evolution involves the violent

imposition of rules upon recalcitrant individuals? Can Wikipedia really be a

spontaneous order if the resulting product – a reliable reference source – was a

predetermined goal of that was then consciously and deliberately pursued by

the individuals who contributed to it?

To answer these questions, it is useful to follow Charles Johnson in

distinguishing between three different ways in which order can be

spontaneous.81 An order can be spontaneous in the sense of being 1) consensual

rather than coerced, 2) polycentric rather than directive, or 3) emergent rather than

consciously designed. Some orders, such as the network of pathways on the

college campus, are spontaneous in all three senses. They arise from the

consensual activities of different individuals; those individuals act on their own

independent judgment; and the resulting pattern is not part of the intention of

any of the individuals who contribute to them. But orders can be consensual

without being emergent (Wikipedia), polycentric without being consensual (the

common law), and so on.

Thus, when libertarians discuss the spontaneity of market orders, they

do so both in order to stress the voluntary nature of those orders, and in order

to point the way in which those orders exceed in many ways the power of

conscious human understanding. Even a lowly No. 2 pencil, Leonard Read

noted, results from such a complex amalgamation of human activity---

                                                                                                                         79 See Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, part 1. 80 See, for a discussion of some of the conceptual difficulties, Timothy Sandefur, "Some Problems with Spontaneous Order," The Independent Review 14, no. 1 (2009). 81 Charles W. Johnson, "Women and the Invisible Fist,"(2013).

 

 

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lumberjacks, miners, metal-workers, chemists, accountants, lawyers, etc.--- that

there is literally “not a single person on the face of this earth” who knows

everything it takes to make one.82 Likewise, there is no single person or group

of persons “in charge” of the diverse and intricate set of predictions, plans, and

actions necessary to feed the citizens of a complex metropolis like Paris. And

yet the people of Paris are fed, and fed well.83 When dealing with complex

systems, from ecosystems to market economies, the attempt to impose a

consciously designed order from above often backfires, and the unavoidable

narrowness of our perspective and knowledge causes our interventions to yield                                                                                                                          82 Leonard E. Read, "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read," Library of Economics and Liberty, http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html. 83 “On coming to Paris for a visit, I said to myself: Here are a million human beings who would all die in a few days if supplies of all sorts did not flow into this great metropolis. It staggers the imagination to try to comprehend the vast multiplicity of objects that must pass through its gates tomorrow, if its inhabitants are to be preserved from the horrors of famine, insurrection, and pillage. And yet all are sleeping peacefully at this moment, without being disturbed for a single instant by the idea of so frightful a prospect. On the other hand, eighty departments have worked today, without co-operative planning or mutual arrangements, to keep Paris supplied. How does each succeeding day manage to bring to this gigantic market just what is necessary—neither too much nor too little? What, then, is the resourceful and secret power that governs the amazing regularity of such complicated movements, a regularity in which everyone has such implicit faith, although his prosperity and his very life depend upon it? That power is an absolute principle, the principle of free exchange. We put our faith in that inner light which Providence has placed in the hearts of all men, and to which has been entrusted the preservation and the unlimited improvement of our species, a light we term self-interest, which is so illuminating, so constant, and so penetrating, when it is left free of every hindrance. Where would you be, inhabitants of Paris, if some cabinet minister decided to substitute for that power contrivances of his own invention, however superior we might suppose them to be; if he proposed to subject this prodigious mechanism to his supreme direction, to take control of all of it into his own hands, to determine by whom, where, how, and under what conditions everything should be produced, transported, exchanged, and consumed? Although there may be much suffering within your walls, although misery, despair, and perhaps starvation, cause more tears to flow than your warmhearted charity can wipe away, it is probable, I dare say it is certain, that the arbitrary intervention of the government would infinitely multiply this suffering and spread among all of you the ills that now affect only a small number of your fellow citizens.” Frédéric Bastiat, "There Are No Absolute Principles," in Economic Sophisms(Irvington-On-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1964).

 

 

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consequences that we never intended, and did not desire.84

Individualism

Libertarians are individualists through and through: ontologically,

normatively, and politically. Ontologically, libertarians hold that individuals are

the ultimate unit of analysis, and not groups like races, communities, or nations.

Only individuals are agents capable of choice, only individuals are the sites of

moral value, and only individuals can truly bear rights and responsibilities.85

Libertarians do not deny that groups exist and that they play an important role

in our lives. But they insist that when we talk, for instance, of the government

of the United States choosing a policy in order to benefit its citizens, this is

mere shorthand for what is really going on. Some particular individuals with

political power made choices that benefitted some other people (and likely

harmed some others).

Libertarianism is normatively individualistic in that it insists that each

person’s life if valuable in itself. According to libertarians, the value of every

person’s life is situated in the person living that life, rather than being situated

in some group of which that individual is a member. As a moral matter,

libertarians say, it is the interests or preferences of individuals---not those of

groups---with which we must always be concerned.

                                                                                                                         84 Though he does not use the terminology, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State serves as a useful study in the contrast between spontaneous and nonspontaneous orders, and his opening chapter on scientific forest management in Germany provides a poignant example of the unintended consequences that can arise from the attempt to impose a logical design on a complex ecosystem. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 85 See, for a discussion, Mack and Gaus, "Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism: The Liberty Tradition," 116.

 

 

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Because of their commitment to normative individualism, libertarians

tend to think that responsibility for the well-being of each individual resides

ultimately those individuals themselves. People write the stories of their lives

through the choices and efforts they themselves make. So too, normative

individualism leads libertarians to deny that individuals can be sacrificed for the

“greater good.” Libertarians resist policies that would impose costs on

individuals, however few, in the attempt to generate greater benefits for some

group, however large.86 Finally, normative individualism also sets libertarians on

a course to oppose victimless crimes. If prostitution, drug-taking, or

unorthodox sexual behaviors are to be outlawed, for example, such activities

must be shown to be bad for someone – more specifically, to be bad for

someone in a way that violates their rights. To limit the freedom of individuals

in these areas, it is not enough to claim that such activities constitute a kind of

“free floating evil,” or that they harm the interests (or offend the sensibility) of

the community or group. For libertarians, groups have no basic moral standing:

only individuals do.

                                                                                                                         86 Nozick’s account of libertarianism in Anacrhy, State, and Utopia was famously criticized by Thomas Nagel for simply assuming the truth of libertarian rights and failing to provide them with any moral foundation. See Thomas Nagel, "Libertarianism without Foundations," Yale Law Journal 85(1975). But Nozick actually did provide at least a sketch of a foundation. In a crucial passage, for instance, he addresses the issue of social trade-offs as follows: “there is no social entity with a good that undergoes sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more…To use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has. He does not get some overbalancing good from his sacrifice, and no one is entitled to force this upon him.” Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 32-33. Interestingly, John Rawls appeals to this very same idea as part of the moral foundation of his liberal-egalitarian account in A Theory of Justice, 27. How the same moral idea could be developed in such strikingly different political directions is something of a puzzle. See, for a discussion, Matt Zwolinski, "The Separateness of Persons and Liberal Theory," Journal of Value Inquiry 42, no. 2 (2008).

 

 

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Finally, libertarians are politically individualistic. Part of what this means

is simply that libertarians want their political institutions to reflect the moral

significance of individuals by enforcing a regime of exclusively libertarian

rights. But libertarians are also individualistic in the way they understand the

nature and grounding of political authority. For, libertarians believe that political

authority is something that must be justified to each individual as a separate

person. For, as Locke pointed out in his Second Treatise, there is nothing more

evident than

that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all

the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should

also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection,

unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest

declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an

evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and

sovereignty.87

Since there exists no natural or divine authority among men, the only

way by which any human being can come to have authority over another is by

justifying it, and justifying it to the person over whom he claims authority. In

traditional social contract theory, a doctrine to which many libertarians are

attracted, justification is obtained only upon receipt of the actual express

consent of the governed. Some contemporary libertarians soften this doctrine

somewhat to allow that authority might be justified when it is in the interest of

the governed, even if they have not explicitly consented. But that even this

lowered hurdle is still a relatively difficult one to clear is shown by the

attraction that philosophical anarchism holds to so many libertarians.                                                                                                                          87 Locke, Second Treatise, chapter 2, paragraph 4.

 

 

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Cosmopolitanism

Partly as a consequence of their individualism, libertarians ascribe little

moral significance to the existence of national boundaries. Individuals,

libertarians believe, have the same basic moral status no matter where (or

when) they reside. Governments have legitimate political power (if they can

have it at all) only insofar as they protect those rights. They are therefore morally

forbidden from violating the individual rights of their own citizens. But they

are equally forbidden from violating the rights of noncitizens, whether they

reside within the nation’s borders or without.

The libertarian position on international relations can thus be

understood by simply pretending that nations don’t exist at all, and thinking

about the ways that it would permissible or impermissible for individuals to treat

each other. If A and B are trading partners, would B be acting within his rights

to employ physical violence to stop C from taking B’s place? If not, then why

would it be permissible when states do it and call it “protectionism”?88 If A and

B don’t like living around people who speak some different language, could

they legitimately use physical violence to stop C from renting his house to D,

who speaks that language? If not, then why would it be OK for states to do it

and call it an “immigration restriction”?89 If A wants B’s land, can he kill him

for it? Can he kill C because C inconveniently stands in between A and B,

                                                                                                                         88 The 19th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat was fond of (and famous for) using such micro-level arguments to demonstrate the folly of protectionism. See, in particular, the essays collected in his Economic Sophisms(Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1964). 89 This style of argument is employed by the libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer throughout his article, "Is There a Right to Immigrate?," Social Theory and Practice 36, no. 3 (2010).

 

 

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whom A wants to kill? Can A kill 25% of the people who live in the same city

as D, just to stop D from unjustly attacking A?90 If not, then why would it be

permissible for states to do these things, and call them acts of “war”?

Libertarians are thus skeptical of the nationalistic sentiments that have

led so many to be willing to sacrifice individual rights – especially the individual

rights of the other – for the sake of the nation. That’s not to say that libertarians

can never be patriots. But when they are, it is a guarded and somewhat abstract

patriotism. Ayn Rand, for instance, wrote that “the United States of America is

the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral

country in the history of the world.”91 But as the quotation suggests, Rand’s

patriotism was a product of and limited by her judgment that the U.S better

satisfied the requirements of a timeless morality than any other country. When

those requirements are violated, libertarians have generally felt little need to

stick up for their country “right or wrong,” and had little respect for those who

do. Thus Herbert Spencer was only being unusually (though characteristically)

blunt when he wrote, in a short discussion of patriotism and military service,

that “when men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking

nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot

themselves.”92

A libertarian world order would thus be one characterized by free trade,

free migration, and peace. For those libertarians who base their theory on a

belief in natural rights, these doctrines are simply the logical consequence of

                                                                                                                         90 It is estimated that approximately 66,000 out of the 255,000 residents of Hiroshima, roughly 26%, were killed by the atomic bomb dropped by the United States in 1945. 91 Ayn Rand, "Philosophy: Who Needs It?," in Philosophy: Who Needs It?(New York: Signet, 1984). 92 Herbert Spencer, "Patriotism," in Facts and Comments(New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1902).

 

 

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respecting those rights consistently, for all human beings regardless of

nationality. And for those libertarians who ground their doctrine on

considerations of expediency, the same generalizations that make peaceful,

voluntary cooperation a good policy within a nation also make it a good one

between nations.

Libertarians thus disagree with those on the left who celebrate open

migration but condemn free trade. And they disagree with those on the right

who think free trade is a great idea – except when it comes to the free trade of

labor across borders. For libertarians, the immorality of protectionism, closed

borders, and war all rest on the more fundamental immorality of using

aggressive violence to achieve the state’s goals at the expense of individual

freedom. Those who reject such violence, libertarians argue, should reject it

consistently, for all policies, and for all persons across the board.

Varieties of Libertarianism

If libertarianism is a family defined by a combination of the six

characteristics described in the previous section, we should not be surprised to

find significant variation among the members of that family, depending on

precisely how those characteristics are interpreted and combined. In this section,

we explore three dimensions of variation within the libertarian family:

variations in the object of libertarian belief, variation in the moral ground of

libertarian belief, and variation in the form of libertarian belief.

Variations in Object: Thick vs. Thin Libertarianism

 

 

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So far in this chapter our focus has been on describing what we see as

the six defining characteristics of libertarian theory. But what, exactly, is

libertarianism a theory of? What is its proper object, or domain?

The answer to this question might seem obvious. Libertarianism is a

political theory, and so its object or domain is the realm of politics.

Libertarianism is a theory about the proper size and scope of the state: one that

tells us that the state ought to be limited to (at most) protecting people’s rights

to life and property, and prohibited from otherwise interfering in people’s

economic, religious, or personal choices.

But the inadequacy of this characterization becomes clear once we give it

a moment’s thought. Libertarians do, it is true, characteristically think the state

ought to do no more than protect people’s negative, individual rights, and that

it would be wrong for the state to, say, engage in the large scale transfer of

wealth from some citizens to others.

But why? Libertarians come to their conclusions about the proper size

and scope of the state for a reason. But what is that reason? For many

libertarians, the reason is to be found in an underlying theory of individual rights.

It is wrong for the state to force us to practice a certain religion, or to take away

our property without our consent, because each of us has a right not to be

aggressed upon in certain ways. The state is bound to respect and protect those

rights, and is forbidden from violating them.

But if this is the reason offered by the libertarian, then libertarianism

isn’t just about the proper size and scope about the state. For, after all, if it is

wrong for the state to do certain things because they would violate individual

rights, then it is wrong for anyone to do those things. Even Murray Rothbard,

who once wrote that the distinctive element of his work and that of other

 

 

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radical libertarians was a “a deep and pervasive hatred of the State and all of its

works, based on the conviction that the State is the enemy of mankind,”

sometimes recognized that anti-statism was not the sole or even the primary

focus of libertarian thought.93 Thus, he once wrote that

… libertarians had misled themselves by making their main dichotomy

"government" vs. "private" with the former bad and the latter good

…What we libertarians object to … is not government per se but crime,

what we object to is unjust or criminal property titles; what we are for is

not "private" property per se but just, innocent, non-criminal private

property. It is justice vs. injustice, innocence vs. criminality that must be

our major libertarian focus.94

As we will see below, not all libertarians base their political conclusions

in an underlying moral theory of natural rights. Some libertarians come to their

beliefs by way of an economic analysis of markets and of politics. For these

libertarians, the kinds of considerations that lead them to conclude that policies

of taxation and redistribution are generally wrong (e.g. considerations about the

inefficiency of bureaucracy, or of state aid) might apply only to the state, and

not to the action of private individuals.

For most libertarians, however, libertarianism will be a theory about

something more than just the state, as such. For those in the Rothbardian

natural rights tradition, libertarianism is fundamentally a theory about property

                                                                                                                         93 Murray N. Rothbard, "Do You Hate the State?," The Libertarian Forum 10, no. 7 (1977). 94 "Confiscation and the Homestead Principle," The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 4 (1969).

 

 

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rights and the proper use of force. Conclusions about the state follow from this

fundamental theory, but do not constitute the core of it.95

For some, the object of libertarian theory is even broader than this.

Charles Johnson, for instance, argues that we should understand libertarianism

as a “thick” doctrine rather than as a “thin” one about the use of force alone.96

After all, whatever moral, economic, and other kinds of reasons libertarians

draw on to support their political views will inevitably be ones that have

implications beyond libertarianism itself. They will, in other words, also be

reasons for endorsing other values, projects, and cultural practices beyond

strictly political ones. Similarly, the practical realization of libertarian political

institutions might turn out to depend on people holding certain moral beliefs

or engaging in certain cultural practices. In either of these cases, a libertarian

would have reasons qua libertarian to endorse certain values, ideas, or practices

beyond the narrow scope of politics.

To illustrate the difference between thick and thin libertarianism,

consider the issue of interracial marriage – an issue that, in most places in the

United States, is no longer an “issue” at all but an ordinary feature of everyday

life. Is the spread and cultural acceptance of interracial marriage something that

libertarians qua libertarians should celebrate? In their recent book on libertarian

politics, Reason Magazine editors Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch say that it is.

                                                                                                                         95 Thus the libertarian periodical Liberty was not changing the subject when it polled its readers about various aspects of libertarian thought, including questions about the moral permissibility of a number of individual actions, such as whether someone who fell off the balcony of a 50 story building and managed to catch a flagpole on the way down would be justified in trespassing across the flagpole owner’s property. See "The Liberty Poll: Who We Are and What We Think," Liberty, July 1988. 96 Charles W. Johnson, "Libertarianism through Thick and Thin," in Markets Not Capitalism, ed. Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson(New York, NY: Minor Compositions, 2008).

 

 

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Libertarianism is about freedom and personal choice, and so when choice is

expanded – whether because of an increase in political liberty or because of a

liberalization of cultural attitudes – this is something that libertarians as such

ought to celebrate.97 In his review of the book, however, the libertarian critic

David Gordon expressed skepticism. “What do you think of interracial

marriage? It would be hard, offhand, to think of a question less relevant to

libertarianism, as usually understood. Of course, no one has the right forcibly

to prevent such marriages. What more need a libertarian say about this issue?”98

Or consider some of the different ways in which the six characteristics

of libertarian thought might be interpreted. Should libertarians limit their

skepticism of authority to political authority? Or are (many of) the same

considerations that underlie that skepticism also good reasons for being

skeptical of parental, aesthetic, or ecclesiastical authorities?99

To consider a case in somewhat more detail, consider the libertarian

appreciation of spontaneous order. Thin and thick libertarians alike draw on

this concept to argue that government intervention in culture and the economy

ought to be limited or forbidden. But should libertarians qua libertarians draw

any implications beyond this political one? Many libertarians are cultural

optimists, believing that technological advances and cultural changes are

                                                                                                                         97 Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America(New York: Public Affairs, 2011). 98 David Gordon, "A Political Philosophy or a Social Attitude?," http://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/david-gordon/a-political-philosophy-or-a-social-attitude/. 99 Whether skepticism about governmental authority rationally entails skepticism about other forms of authority or not, at least one study purports to show that libertarians are as a matter of psychological fact significantly more skeptical than average about the moral relevance of authority as a general matter, and not just when it comes to politics. See Ravi Iyer et al., "Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians," PloS one 7, no. 8 (2012).

 

 

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generally working to make life better, not worse.100 Is this merely a coincidence?

Or is there something within libertarianism itself that leads libertarians to take

an optimistic stance regarding, say, the impact of new technologies such as

Facebook and text messaging on human relationships and sociality? A thick

libertarian is likely to think that there is. New technologies, it is true, destroy

old ways of pursuing and expressing certain kinds of values. But one of the

insights that comes from thinking about spontaneous order is that people find

ways of adapting new technologies to their lives, and using them to find new

and better ways of giving their lives meaning. From the bottom up, they mold

technology to enrich their lives. Because their use is bottom-up rather than

imposed by the technology itself, it is difficult for outsiders to observe.

(Spontaneous order, as James Scott notes, is often “illegible” to outsiders).101

And this can be cause for despair. But those who have learned the insights of

spontaneous order will take that pessimistic despair with a heavy grain of salt.

A ‘thick’ libertarian appreciation for spontaneous order leads naturally to a kind

of cultural optimism.102

These are merely two examples. Similar stories could, we suspect, be told

about the other core libertarian ideas – skepticism about power, individualism,

and private property. (Some people impressed with the power of property-

based markets to coordinate diverse and contending preferences, for example,

may for this reason be disposed to adopt market-like procedures in non-                                                                                                                          100 See, for example Julian Lincoln Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2(Princeton University Press, 1998); Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies(Free Press, 1998); Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves(HarperCollins, 2011). 101 See Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. 102 A weaker thesis is that such optimism is part of what Bryan Caplan has called the “libertarian penumbra” – a set of beliefs that is overrepresented among libertarians as a statistical matter, even if not logically or causally related to core libertarian beliefs themselves. See http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/02/the_libertarian_3.html.

 

 

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political sphere such as the domains of family and neighborhood, whereas

others might not.) Our point in making this distinction is not to argue that one

sort of libertarianism is superior to another – that, for instance, only thick

libertarians are real libertarians, or that they are somehow more libertarian than

their thin counterparts. Our point, rather, is to try to answer a fundamental

question that any theorist of libertarianism must address: what is libertarianism

a theory of? And our answer to that question is that there is not just one but at

least two answers, each of which has its virtues.

There is something important and worthwhile about conceiving of

libertarianism as a thin doctrine. It would be a good thing if people with diverse

religious, moral, and cultural commitments could agree on questions about the

role of the state without having to resolve or even raise the issue of their other

disagreements. Libertarianism, on this this reading, gains the attractions of

other “big tent” doctrines. We don’t need to agree on all the questions of how

to live our lives. We simply need to agree about those areas where

disagreement and diversity will be tolerated.

Still, some values seem so deeply in tension with the underlying spirit of

libertarianism, even if they are formally consistent with its thin political

institutions, that any sensible libertarian must reject them. A libertarian who

railed against infringements of negative liberty by the state but turned a blind

eye to infringements by private persons would seem to have a hard time

defending her values. A libertarian who decried the hierarchical and oppressive

structure of the state but who saw no problem with equally oppressive and

hierarchical structures that were socially rather than politically constructed

would appear to be in an equally difficult situation. To view opposition to the

 

 

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state’s use of force as the only issue of relevance to libertarianism is not merely

thin: it is anemic.

Variations in Ground: Rights, Consequences, Contract, and Flourishing

Philosophers often distinguish various types of libertarians in terms of

the basic moral ideas atop which they build their political views. Many

libertarians are consequentialists. For thinkers in this tradition, the right action

is the action that produced the greatest balance of desirable over undesirable

outcomes or consequences the world. By extension, a just political and

economic order would be one that tended to produce good consequences.

Members of this “consequentialist branch” of libertarianism might well offer

different accounts of what exactly counts as a good consequence. But they all

insistent that political institutions should be evaluated by considering the social

states-of-affairs that they produce.

For example, Ludwig von Mises is widely hailed as one of the grand old

men of the 20th century libertarian movement. Politically, Mises argued that the

primary role for the state was to protect property, trade, and a small set of civil

rights. Mises opposed taxation for welfare or aid programs of any kind, and

opposed public support for schooling.103 A fierce critic of the doctrine of

national sovereignty, Mises objected to economic tariffs and trade barriers of

any kind. Indeed, Mises thought that a consistent libertarianism called for a

                                                                                                                         103 Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition(San Francisco: Cobden Press, 1985), 115.

 

 

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policy of free migration, with all people living freely together under a single,

property-protecting global state.104

Why does Mises advocate this institutional approach? Ultimately, Mises

seems to care most about the happiness of citizens. Citizens are happy when

they are protected from interference from others and when they possess the

largest bundle of all-purpose material goods. Following in the tradition of

classical economists such as Adam Smith, Mises argues that the division of

labor is a devise that enables a society to put its resources to the maximally

productive use. For Mises, a just society is one that, while protecting people

from coercive influence of others, is set up so as to maximize the economic

productivity of its members.

For Mises, even personal freedom is justified in terms of the good

consequences that Mises expects freedom to produce. Thus, Mises offers two

reasons in support of the liberal doctrine of equal treatment under the law.

First: “In order for human labor to realize its highest attainable productivity,

the worker must be free, because only the free worker, enjoying in the form of

wages the fruits of his own industry, will exert himself to the full.” Second, the

rule of law helps maintain social peace. And social peace is important, Mises

says, because only in conditions of peace can the division of labor be maximally

extended and thus generate the largest possible economic product.105

On the natural rights approach, in contrast, libertarian institutions are

justified not by the outcomes that they produce but by the moral constraints

that they respect. For example, Robert Nozick argues his libertarian classic

Anarchy, State and Utopia that our belief that “individuals are ends and not                                                                                                                          104 Ibid., 137, ff. 105 Ibid., 28.

 

 

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merely means” supports a moral framework of strong individual rights.106

Those rights serve as “side-constraints,” which prohibit certain kinds of

infringement of the moral boundaries between persons, even when the

consequences of that infringement would be maximally productive of good

consequences.

Nozick then works out a view about the proper shape and scope of state

activity by asking how much room the natural rights of individuals leave for

state activity, and concludes that only the minimal state is morally justified. In

order to do enough so as to protect the rights of individuals, but also to avoid

doing so much as to violate those rights, the function of the state should be

limited to the protection of property rights, the enforcement of contracts, and

protections against force and fraud.107 Among the things a state notably may

not do is using its coercive apparatus to force some citizens to aid others, or to

prevent them from doing harm to themselves.

The contrast between consequentialist and natural rights approaches to

libertarianism is often stark. Natural rights theorists argue that the institution of

private property is justified precisely because that institution respects the

natural rights that people have to hold and use property. Consequentialist

libertarians such as Mises seem to disagree. Mises writes: “It is not because the

abolition of [the institution of private property] would violate property rights

that liberals want to preserve it.” Instead, Mises insists, the institution of private

property is justified only if, and because, it is an institution that works “for the

good and benefit of all.”108

                                                                                                                         106 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 30-31. 107 Ibid., ix. 108 von Mises, Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition, 30.

 

 

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But both as a logical philosophical matter and as a matter of intellectual

history, the contrast between natural rights approaches and consequentialist

ones are easily overstated. As we have seen, most figures in the libertarian

intellectual tradition have not drawn a sharp distinction between these two

justificatory approaches, preferring instead to help themselves to arguments of

both sorts in different contexts. And as we shall see in more detail in the next

chapter, when it comes to the right of property, both Locke and Nozick – two

paragons of natural rights libertarianism - make the beneficial consequences of

property central to their justification of it. On the flip side, even

consequentialists believe that individuals have at least one natural right – the

right to have their interests taken into account equally with the interests of

others in our consequentialist calculations. It is probably best, then, to think of

these two approaches as different strategies of emphasis, rather than radically

different and mutually exclusive forms of justification.

Natural rights and consequentialist lines of argument are probably the

best-known approaches to defending libertarian theory. But there are other

approaches as well. Some libertarians, for instance, seek to ground their

political views in considerations of virtue and human flourishing. Ayn Rand

was perhaps the most popular modern proponent of such theory, and while her

writings were largely ignored by academics, the core idea has since been picked

up and developed with greater sophistication by philosophers like Tara Smith,

Douglas Rasmussen, and Douglas Den Uyl.109

                                                                                                                         109 See Tara Smith, Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order(La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991); Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics.

 

 

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Teleological versions of libertarianism are in some significant respects

similar to consequentialist versions, insofar as they hold that political

institutions are to be judged in light of their tendency to yield a certain sort of

outcome. But the consequentialism at work here is markedly different from the

aggregative and impartial consequentialism of act-utilitarianism. Political

institutions are to be judged based on the extent to which they allow individuals

to flourish, but flourishing is a value that is agent-relative (and not agent-neutral

as is happiness for the utilitarian), and also one that can only be achieved by the

self-directed activity of each individual agent (and not something that can be

distributed among individuals by the state). It is thus not the job of political

institutions to promote flourishing by means of activist policies, but merely to

make room for it by enforcing the core set of libertarian rights.

Finally, some libertarians are contractualists. As a moral theory,

contractarianism is the idea that moral principles are justified if and only if they

are the product of a certain kind of agreement among persons. A set of political

and economic arrangements is just only if that set of institutions could be the

object of agreement among the people who are to live their lives under them.

Among libertarians, this idea has been developed by Jan Narveson in his book,

The Libertarian Idea, which attempts to show that rational individuals would

agree to a government that took individual negative liberty as the only relevant

consideration in setting policy.110 And, while not self-described as a

contractarian, Loren Lomasky’s work in Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community

                                                                                                                         110 Narveson, The Libertarian Idea.

 

 

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has many affinities with this approach, as it attempts to defend libertarianism as

a kind of policy of mutual-advantage between persons.111

Variations in Form: Anarcho-Capitalism, Minimal-Statism, and Classical Liberalism

All members of the libertarian family exhibit the six markers of

membership we have discussed. But each of those markers, as we have seen,

can be and has been interpreted in very different ways by different libertarians.

And the combinations to which they can give rise are almost infinite in their

variance. Some libertarians will hold a commitment to property rights to be

absolutely central to the libertarian worldview, with cosmopolitanism playing

only a subordinate and subservient role. For others, spontaneous order might

be thought to be the core concept around which a libertarian theory will be

built. And all of these sources of variance are only multiplied by the additional

variance that comes from the wide range of moral theories to which libertarians

appeal.

It should not be surprising, then, that when it comes time to answer

practical questions about the proper powers and scope of government,

libertarians often disagree. Some libertarians hold that the provision of police,

courts, and military is the only proper sphere of government activity. But

others hold that the state might legitimately do somewhat more, while still

others hold that it must do considerably less.

For classificatory purposes, we can distinguish between three broad

approaches that libertarians have taken to questions of this sort: minimal state

                                                                                                                         111 Loren E. Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community(Oxford: Oxford-Univ-Pr, 1987).

 

 

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libertarians, classical liberals, and anarcho-capitalists. As with so many of the

distinctions we have tried to draw in this chapter, this classificatory scheme

draws sharp lines on a terrain that is marked in reality only by vague and

sometimes imperceptible borders. But the ideal types that such a classification

yields can provide a useful framework for understanding some of the more

important divisions between libertarians, and some of the more significant ways

in which the markers of libertarianism have been combined to yield a

programmatic political ideology.

The minimal state libertarian holds the position that is probably most

paradigmatically associated with libertarianism as such. She believes that states

can in principle be morally justifiable, but only if they are very strictly limited in

their functions. Typically (though not necessarily), minimal state libertarians are

natural rights libertarians, and believe that the proper functions of the state are

limited to those necessary to the protection of individuals’ natural rights. So, a

police force is justifiable in order to prevent people from assault, theft, and the

like. A military is justifiable in order to defend the population from foreign

aggression. And a court system is justifiable in order to adjudicate disputes

among persons regarding putative rights-violations. Anything else falls outside

the proper sphere of the state, not merely in the sense of being something that

the state is not obligated to do, but in the stronger sense of being something that

the state is positively prohibited from doing. Thus, Robert Nozick, one of the 20th

century’s main exemplars of this position, writes not only that “the minimal

state is the most extensive state that can be justified,” but also that “any state

more extensive violates people’s rights.” For states to go above and beyond the

call of duty necessarily involves them violating their duty.

 

 

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Take, for example, the provision of public roads. Such provision is not

necessary in order to protect individuals’ natural (negative) rights. So it is not

within the proper sphere of activity of a just state. But moreover, any attempt

by the state to provide roads would be impermissible insofar as it would

necessarily involve the violation of libertarian rights. Roads cost money, after all,

and governments generally obtain their money through taxation. But minimal

state libertarians must hold that government taxation is a violation of rights, at

least when the money obtained is spent on anything other than those activities

which constitute the essential rights-protecting purpose of government.

Within the libertarian tradition, minimal state libertarians face challenges

from two sides. On one side are the anarcho-capitalists, who hold that no state

is morally justifiable. Existing states ought to be abolished altogether, and the

services they perform can and should be provided voluntarily through the

mechanisms of civil society or the market.112 Anarcho-capitalists are, again,

characteristically but not necessarily natural rights libertarians.113 But they

typically hold that they are more consistent in their application of natural rights

                                                                                                                         112 The most well-known anarcho-capitalist of the 20th century was certainly Murray Rothbard, who develops his position in Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty; For a New Liberty; Man, Economy and State(Los Angeles: Nash, 1970); Power and Market(Kansas: Sheed Andrews & McMeel, 1970). Other contemporary proponents of the doctrine include Randy Barnett, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law., chapter 14, David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism., John Hasnas, "The Obviousness of Anarchy," in Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?, ed. Roderick Long and Tibor R. Machan(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); "The Depoliticization of Law," Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2007); "Reflections on the Minimal State," Politics, Philosophy and Economics 2, no. 1 (2003)., Roderick Long, "Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism," in Anarchism/Minarchism: Is Government Part of a Free Country?, ed. Roderick Long and Tibor R. Machan(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); "Rule-Following, Praxeology, and Anarchy," New Perspectives on Political Economy 2, no. 1 (2006)., and Aeon Skoble, Deleting the State: An Argument About Government(Chicago: Open Court, 2008). 113 Rothbard, Long, and Skoble, for instance, are all fairly traditional natural rights theorists. David Friedman is something of an anomaly as the lone critic of this view, his own position being based in a kind of broad consequentialism or pluralism.

 

 

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theory than their minimal state brethren. A famous open letter from Roy

Childs (an anarcho-capitalist) to Ayn Rand (a minimal state libertarian)

illustrates the argument nicely.114 It is our natural right, Childs held, to be free

from the initiation of physical force. And yet, a minimal state must necessarily

“either initiate force or stop being a government.” This is so in two ways. First,

if a minimal state provides police and military services, it must fund these

services in just the same way that it would have to fund projects like roads or

public schools – typically through taxation.115 But how can a libertarian hold that

the state is justified in taking people’s money without their consent, even if it

uses the revenues in order to protect individual rights? I cannot take your

money, even if I promise to use it to protect you. So why are states any

different? And second, if the government is to really be a state in the technical

sense of that word, it must not only provide police and other protective services,

it must claim a monopoly on the provision of such services. If it does not, it is

merely one firm among others competing in an open marketplace. But this

claim to monopoly, like all claims to enforceable monopoly, is inconsistent with

libertarian rights. I do not violate anyone’s libertarian rights if I sell protective

services to you for a fee. Therefore, if you forcibly prevent me from doing so,

then you are violating my rights.

                                                                                                                         114 Roy A. Childs, "An Open Letter to Ayn Rand," in Liberty against Power: Essays by Roy A. Childs, Jr., ed. Joan Kennedy Taylor(San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1994). 115 Ayn Rand famously proposed that her minimal state government could be funded voluntarily by selling lottery tickets. See her "Government Financing in a Free Society," in The Virtue of Selfishness(New York: Signet, 1961). This plan, however, was widely lambasted by other libertarians, including Robert Nozick, who wonders why, since a minimal state would have no power to prevent private parties from running their own lotteries, we should think that the state would have “any more success in attracting customers in this than in any other competitive business?” Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 25.

 

 

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But while minimal state libertarians are fighting the anarchists on one

front, they are simultaneously waging war on another front as well. Their rivals

on the other side are the classical liberals. This faction, led by the likes of

Friedrich Hayek, Richard Epstein, Gerald Gaus, and Loren Lomasky, pushes

for a state that is much, much smaller than any state that currently exists on the

face of the planet.116 But they also hold that a legitimate state can, and in some

cases should, be larger than the night watchman state advocated by the minimal

statists. How large, precisely, a legitimate state may be is a matter about which

classical liberals disagree amongst themselves. But there is general consensus

that states may justly use tax revenues for the provision of certain public goods

(in the technical, economic sense). And classical liberals, unlike minimal state

libertarians, tend to be open to the possibility that justice may allow or even

require a limited amount of redistribution in order to provide a kind of social

safety net for the very poor.

In the sense in which we use it here, “classical liberal” is a label that

describes a particular sort of political-philosophical view, and thus one that can

be applied to contemporary and historical figures alike. But the term also has a

distinctly historical meaning, as well, referring primarily to figures of the 17th

and 18th centuries such as John Locke, Algernon Sydney, Adam Smith, David

Hume, and Immanuel Kant. This dual usage can lead to some confusion,

unless we are careful. But by and large, there is significant overlap. Most of the

classical liberals, in the historical sense, were classical liberals, in the political-

philosophical sense. Thus, Adam Smith believed that government ought to be

                                                                                                                         116 See Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty; Richard A. Epstein, Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good(New York: Basic Books, 1998); Gerald F. Gaus, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community.

 

 

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generally limited by “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty.” Under

that system, government has three duties to fulfill:

first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of

other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as

possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression

of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact

administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and

maintaining certain publick works and certain publick institutions, which

it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of

individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay

the expence to any individual or small number of individuals, though it

may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.117

By any contemporary standards, Smith’s ideal government is quite small indeed.

But compared to the standards of a Murray Rothbard, or even a Robert

Nozick, it is nevertheless objectionably large. Smith, after all, was no strict

ideologue of laissez-faire, endorsing not only the erection of “public works” but

also the Navigation Acts, the regulation of paper money in banking, the public

provision of fire protection, a government post office, the establishment of

temporary monopolies, including patents and copyrights, education of the

youth, the production and regulation of coinage, and much else.118

Classical liberals are often consequentialists, and this has sometimes even

been taken as a defining characteristic of the view.119 There is, after all, a certain

                                                                                                                         117 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter IX, paragraph 51. 118 See, for the classic and exhaustive study, Jacob Viner, "Adam Smith and Laissez Faire," The Journal of Political Economy 35, no. 2 (1927). 119 Norman P. Barry, On Classical Liberalism and Libertarianiam(London: Macmillan, 1986)., chapter 1

 

 

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kind of moral flexibility to classical liberalism, or at least a tendency to resist

drawing bright lines in order to distinguish the proper from the improper

spheres of government, and such flexibility is a (sometimes notorious) hallmark

of consequentialist moral approaches. But there are classical liberals who are

not consequentialists (Lomasky and Gaus, for example), and there are

consequentialists who are not classical liberals (e.g. David Friedman). So, once

again, neat classifications elude us.

Will The First “Real” Libertarian Please Stand Up?

This chapter opened with an account of the first recorded uses of the

term “libertarian,” and the different meanings that term developed over time.

But, labels aside, what about the history of the idea itself? Given the way in

which we have characterized libertarianism in this chapter, are we able to say

who the first libertarian intellectual was?

Questions such as this are perhaps more important, and more tractable,

for those who define libertarianism by way of a rigid set of necessary and

sufficient conditions than it is for those like us who think of libertarianism as a

kind of cluster concept. As we have seen in the previous two sections, the

variety of ways in which our six characteristics can be interpreted, combined,

and integrated into an overarching moral theory means that libertarianism can

take a wide variety of different forms. Debates can be had – and, every day on

the internet, debates are had – about which form of libertarianism is the purest

and who should or should not count as a “real” libertarian.120 Such debates can

                                                                                                                         120 Want to find out how pure you are? Take Bryan Caplan’s “Libertarian Purity Test” and find out! http://www.bcaplan.com/cgi-bin/purity.cgi.

 

 

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be entertaining, but we see little scholarly value in trying to impose overly rigid

boundaries upon what is, in reality, a messy ideological terrain.

Our approach to libertarianism in this book is evolutionary rather than

formal. Thus, we focus on the distinctive characteristics of the libertarian

intellectual tradition, rather than on some one (putatively) authentic “libertarian”

template primordially espoused by any individual thinker. Like the historical

origins of a real family, the historical edges of the libertarian tradition are rough

and blurred rather than neat and clean. Later family members such as Rothbard

may display our five markers of the libertarian family in a particularly explicit

and familiar and way, at least when compared to more distant figures such as

Adam Smith or John Locke. But if we wish to understand the libertarian

tradition in a deep and nuanced way, we must peer through the shadows and

attend to those early figures too. Early thinkers in the libertarian tradition

sometimes expressed social concerns, and combined moral ideas, in ways that

were rejected, or simply forgotten, by the postwar archetypes. By focusing

broadly on the libertarian tradition rather than any self-styled group of

libertarian archetypes, we hope to recover and hold up for reconsideration

some of these less familiar libertarian combinations and concerns

Nevertheless, there is some value in asking when libertarianism came

into being. Did libertarianism spring into existence in the middle of the 20th

century, in the person of Murray Rothbard? Or is it an older doctrine, first

 

 

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developed, perhaps by the English Leveller John Lilburne?121 Could it be even

older still? Was Jesus the first libertarian?122 Was Lao-tsu? 123

Many individuals over the course of a number of centuries played a role

in developing each of the six characteristic ideas we have explored in this

chapter, and our book will discuss some of those individuals in detail. Still, not

everyone who played a role in the development of libertarian ideas should

properly be classified as a libertarian. A libertarian is someone who bears not

just one or two of our markers of membership, but all of them. She is,

moreover, someone for whom those ideas form a kind of deeply integrated system

of belief, such that her libertarian political conclusions flow from her

fundamental beliefs about human nature and the nature of the world.124

Arriving at the same conclusions as libertarians do about politics isn’t enough

to make one a libertarian; one has to arrive at them for the right sorts of

reasons as well.

Understood in this way, we think, there is a good case to be made for

the claim that libertarianism emerged in its contemporary form in the middle of

the 19th century in Britain and France. Before that time, there were classical

liberals, but not libertarians as such. The difference between the two is partly a

matter of substance. At least in its ideal type, libertarianism, as we understand

                                                                                                                         121 Peter Richards, "John Lilburne (1615-1657): English Libertarian," Libertarian Heritage, no. 25 (2008). 122 Tom Mullen, "Jesus Christ, Libertarian," LewRockwell.com, http://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/12/tom-mullen/jesus-christ-libertarian/. 123 See Murray N. Rothbard, "Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals in Social Change toward Laissez Faire," Journal of Libertarian Studies IX, no. 2 (1990): 44. “The first libertarian intellectual was Lao-tzu, the founder of Taosim.” 124 See George Smith’s useful distinction between liberal sentiments, liberal principles, liberal theories, and liberal ideologies. What we have in mind here is a question about the origin of libertarian ideology, not merely of libertarian sentiments, principles, or theories. Smith, The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism, 51-52.

 

 

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it, is a more radical doctrine, a more absolutist one, and a more systematic one.125

And, prior to the Industrial Revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries,

many of the issues involving property and, especially, market exchange simply

could not play the central, defining role they would come to play for libertarianism

in its modern form. It is difficult to ascertain what John Locke would have

thought about international trade, markets in kidneys or the regulation of

modern commodity markets. And without knowing more about what he would

think about these issues, it is difficult to say for sure whether the label of

“libertarian” is an appropriate one.

But the substantive difference between classical liberalism and

libertarianism is also, we think, the product of an underlying and in some ways

more fundamental historical difference. Classical liberalism developed in the 17th

century largely in reaction to the emerging phenomenon of political absolutism.126

Prior to that time, and without that clearly defined system against which to

identify itself, liberalism as we know it today simply could not be conceived.

Similarly, we would argue, libertarianism largely defined itself in opposition to

the rising tide of socialism in the 19th century, especially, perhaps, as manifested

in the revolutions of 1848. Right around that time, but not much before, there

an occurred an explosion of unmistakably libertarian writing, including the

French economist Frédéric Bastiat’s libertarian tract, The Law (1850), his

Belgian-born colleague Gustave de Molinari’s anarcho-capitalist essay, “The

Production of Security” (1849), and Herbert Spencer’s libertarian synthesis,

Social Statics (1851). One could, perhaps, trace the development of

                                                                                                                         125 Classical liberals like Locke and Sydney could, of course, be quite radical in at least some important senses of the term. But even these icons of classical liberalism, we believe, were not libertarians in the fullest sense. 126 See Smith, The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism, 1, 55.

 

 

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libertarianism back a little earlier in the century. Thomas Hodgskin’s essay,

“The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted” (1832) is an

important work in the libertarian tradition that develops a number of important

insights regarding ideas of property, spontaneous order, and skepticism of

authority. And Spencer himself produced a remarkable series of twelve letters

on “The Proper Sphere of Government,” published in 1842-43 in The

Nonconformist and later republished in his book, The Man vs. The State.

Each of these texts played an important role in the development and

articulation of libertarian thought. But if we had to pick only one as the first

real work of libertarian synthesis, it would have to be Spencer’s Social Statics. In

terms of its breadth of coverage, its ability to draw connections between

question of practical policy and questions of fundamental moral principle, its

radicalism, and its connections (both explicit and implicit) to earlier and later

works of libertarian thought, it is simply without equal. This is not to say, of

course, that it is the best work of libertarian thought, or the one best articulates

the particular variety of libertarianism to which we the authors are attracted.

But it is certainly an important work, in many ways an excellent work, and

probably the work that has a better claim than any others to being the first real

libertarian text.

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