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Jeff G. commented: I happened upon this article, and I'm really glad I did. I am a libertarian who recognizes that there are distinctions between Objectivism and Libertarianism, and cannot be unceremoniously lumped together.
Would you consider the modern libertarian movement in any way an offshoot of the Objectivist movement, or are they distinct movements? Would appreciate some Randian thoughts on the issue.
Greg S. replied: I think of the modern libertarian movement as having coalesced sometime between 1968 and 1971. I wouldn’t say that it was an offshoot of the Objectivist movement, but Rand was certainly a major influence on some of its leaders and most of its followers. Also, the social relationships formed through the Nathaniel Branden Institute (which gave lecture courses on Rand’s Objectivism) probably played a role in the formation of the libertarian movement, and it may be that (as Jennifer Burns suggests) the closing of NBI in 1968 created a sort of vacuum that helped the movement to form.
Anarchism (specifically the form endorsed by Rothbard) was the dominant force in that movement initially, and the confusion between freedom and anarchy (which I regard as its opposite) played (and continues to play) a really distorting role in libertarian thought—including in the thought of non-anarchist libertarian philosophers, such as Nozick. My sense is that, though anarchism remains a significant factor, its influence among self-professed libertarians and libertarian organizations has waned significantly, and I don’t know that anything has really taken its place. What I see now is more of a loose knit community of people and groups who vaguely favor free markets, and who share some of the same influences (including both Rand and the anarchists).
Today, those who subscribe to the principles of the American Revolution — individual liberty, limited government, the free market, and the rule of law — call themselves by a variety of terms, including conservative, libertarian, classical liberal, and liberal. We see problems with all of those terms. "Conservative" smacks of an unwillingness to change, of a desire to preserve the status quo. Only in America do people seem to refer to free-market capitalism — the most progressive, dynamic, and ever-changing system the world has ever known — as conservative. Additionally, many contemporary American conservatives favor state intervention in some areas, most notably in trade and into our private lives.
"Classical liberal" is a bit closer to the mark, but the word "classical" fails to capture the contemporary vibrancy of the ideas of freedom.
"Liberal" may well be the perfect word in most of the world — the liberals in societies from China to Iran to South Africa to Argentina tend to be supporters of human rights and free markets — but its meaning has clearly been altered in the contemporary United States.
The Jeffersonian philosophy that animates Cato's work has increasingly come to be called "libertarianism" or "market liberalism." It combines an appreciation for entrepreneurship, the market process, and lower taxes with strict respect for civil liberties and skepticism about the benefits of both the welfare state and foreign military adventurism.
This vision brings the wisdom of the American Founders to bear on the problems of today. As did the Founders, it looks to the future with optimism and excitement, eager to discover what great things women and men will do in the coming century. Market liberals appreciate the complexity of a great society, recognizing that socialism and government planning are just too clumsy for the modern world. It is — or used to be — the conventional wisdom that a more complex society needs more government, but the truth is just the opposite. The simpler the society, the less damage government planning does. Planning is cumbersome in an agricultural society, costly in an industrial economy, and impossible in the information age. Today collectivism and planning are outmoded and backward, a drag on social progress.
Libertarians have a cosmopolitan, inclusive vision for society. We applaud the progressive extension of the promises of the Declaration of Independence to more people, especially to women, African-Americans, religious minorities, and gay and lesbian people. Our greatest challenge today is to continue to extend the promise of political freedom and economic opportunity to those who are still denied it, in our own country and around the world.
Greg S. replies: Karl, I more or less agree with the statement you quote from Cato, especially the point that all of the terms to name "those who subscribe to the principles of the American Revolution" have problems with them. Part of the reason that there are problems is that there isn't much consensus on what those principles are. There are a number of reasons for this, but one is that "anarchism" is seen as a close relative of these principles instead of as one form of the opposite principle--viz. rule by brute force. The fetish for anarchism seems to be fading in libertarian circles, so this isn't as big an issue as it once was. But until there is a consensus among self-professed libertarians that the disagreement between anarchists and proponents of a rights-respecting government is not a debate within a single ideological movement but a debate between fundamentally different ideologies, I don't think that "libertarian" is a term anyone should adopt as a name for his own ideology--at least not without being explicit about where he stands on this issue.
This doesn't mean that I'm opposed to working with organizations that call themselves libertarian, when I judge that they're predominantly good (as I think is the case with CATO), and I'm happy to appear on panels or in books with anarchists as well, just as I am with socialists and others, so long as it's done in a way that makes clear that there's a fundamental disagreement that people need to consider, rather than presenting us as fundamentally aligned. (In fact, I'm editing a book now that has several self-professed libertarian contributors, including two anarchists.)
Boaz's book, which you link to above, has much to recommend it, but it plays coy on this issue. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the libertarian movement knows that anarchism has played a significant part in it, and book on "The Libertarian Mind" needs to acknowledge that and take a position on it.
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Chris C. says: Political labels seem to have a noxious tendency to mutate over time as this or that group of people lay claim to the term. It happened to "liberal," for example. Without contextualization, the term "liberal" nowadays is basically empty of cognitive content. We now hear about "neoliberalism" (a term seemingly employed most often by critics of capitalism or free markets) and I'm sure new mutations will come along. Chomsky (an anarchist of sorts, anarcho-syndicalism I gather) refers to himself as a libertarian socialist; I take it he models his ideal society after the kubbitz in Israel. In any case, he isn't particularly friendly toward private property, or toward capitalism as it's usually understood, and definitely not toward corporate capitalism as it has become. There are a number of people on the left who question how the liberty or freedom of employee-workers is actualized well under capitalistic institutions, and so mock and deride the term "libertarian" as used by economic "right-wingers" like Nozick or Milton (and David) Friedman. And it goes on and on.
Nonetheless, for purposes of cognitive economy and utility, "libertarian" might, appropriately contextualized, be a valid label for any political ideology that takes individual liberty to be of primary importance. I think the same can be said for the label "liberal" as it was clearly defined and defended by Mises in his main political treatise, 'Liberalism.' Ca. 1964, AR appeared not to take issue with the "libertarian" label when applied to Mises or Hazlitt, but when the likes of Rothbard or (the young) Roy Childs argued for anarchism on libertarian grounds, and the "movement" became associated prominently with such arguments, AR repudiated the label via the square quotes (or, in a letter, referring to Rothbard's "so-called libertarian" ideas). She did this with other political labels as well, notably "liberal" and "conservative." (All the entries for these term in the Lexicon have these square-quotes around them, and quite understandably so.)
AR didn't appear to bother much with whether she regarded Rothbard and Childs as pseudo-libertarians or some such; I think one reason for this is that she *already* had a label for her political-economic philosophy: laissez-faire capitalism. (Laissez-faire indicating the broader political program corresponding to chapter 10 of OPAR; capitalism to the economic aspect corresponding to chapter 11 there.) This doesn't of course stop someone like David Friedman from calling his anarchistic (no-govt-monopoly-on-force) view a form of capitalism, or even a "radical capitalism." I don't see this as a basis for rejecting the label "capitalism," but the term "capitalism" for the most part isn't susceptible to the kind of appropriation-by-anybody problem that the terms "libertarian" and "liberal" have been: it picks out an incontestably essential feature: the codification of private property rights.
In any event, I don't personally mind much using a properly-contextualized term such as "libertarian" to describe laissez-faire or classical liberal ideology. (I'm thinking along the lines of John Hospers's article "What Libertarianism Is" - http://public.callutheran.e... - or the SEP entry (surprisingly enough not about free-will libertarianism) - http://plato.stanford.edu/e... - as outlining the essential features of this view now widely termed "libertarianism." As one can see, though, there is a division between "left-libertarians" and "right-libertarians" that centers on the nature of property rights.) My *main* issue is with one's approach to ideas generally, such that in the realm of ideas one either identifies *primarily* as libertarian or as primarily something else, e.g., individualist, egoist, advocate of reason, Aristotelian. Being primarily a philosophical Aristotelian (I have a book out under a pen name prominently featuring a general 'Aristotelianism' concept in the title and text), I tend to identify myself intellectually by that label or something like it ('Perfectivist' for instance), and *not* (or not all that much or often) with a political label, be it "libertarian" or "liberal" or "laissez-faire" or "capitalist," etc.
One can discern a person's approach to ideas by the amount of time or space he or she devotes to a particular area of study. Rand's main focus in her later philosophical career was epistemology, i.e., on refining the art of reasoning well. If, by contrast, you take a look at the body of Rothbard's work, it's all on matters of economics or politics. His libertarianism (as he saw it) was central to his intellectual identity in a way that it wasn't with Rand. (He has a counterpart on the center-left in Rawls, who spent his career on political philosophy.) Peripherally he devoted time and (article) publication space to epistemology or economic methodology but his major (book) publications did not. I think this is a key, fundamental difference between someone like AR and someone like Rothbard that goes beyond choice of labels, and it comes out in the things AR said about the "libertarian movement," namely its politics-centeredness (or - a term she used in later Q&A periods - the 'eclecticism' of prominent "movement" libertarians).
Finally, a more to-the-point question: as one can tell from the SEP entry the term "libertarianism" in the context of contemporary political philosophy has been associated with a certain conception of rights that derives in origin from Locke and sees its more recent expression in Nozick most famously; if we're not going to use the label "libertarian" as a convenient shorthand for this conception of rights, then what better label would you recommend? "Politically I am a ________." Or is this where contextualization and circumstance best dictate terminology and phrasing? I do, after all, have very strong libertarian political sensibilities, you know, Lockean-like. :-) I suppose AR's fill-in-the-blank answer would be "radical for capitalism" (which is 3 words)....
Greg S. replies: Chris, I don't think there is any good short answer to your "fill in the blank" question. I agree that there are ways that the word "libertarian" might be (or has been) defined in which I'd be happy to describe my views as (broadly speaking) "libertarian," but this is true with the terms "liberal" and "conservative" too. And none of these definitions of these terms capture well the way the words are used and understood today, so I don't use them to describe my views. It would be convenient to have a single term, but it's no great tragedy that we don't. There isn't such a term for most positions on most issues. One can give an essentialized description of one's view. For example: I think that the sole proper function of government is to protect individual rights. Or one can identify one's position by reference to prominent figures such as Rand or Locke with whom one agrees.
If someone wants to fight to reclaim "liberal," "conservative," or "libertarian," I don't object, and perhaps they'll create a future in which I'm happy to use the word to describe myself. But that's not an intellectual project I'm interested in myself. In any case, in my view, the first step to reclaiming "libertarianism" would be to insist that anarchists are not libertarians, and I think this would seem like a bizarre claim given that several of the people regarded as paradigms of libertarianism are anarchists. This was not the case before the late 60's when Rothbard effectively commandeered the term.
The following comments on this post are preserved:
Jeff G. commented: I happened upon this article, and I'm really glad I did. I am a libertarian who recognizes that there are distinctions between Objectivism and Libertarianism, and cannot be unceremoniously lumped together.
Would you consider the modern libertarian movement in any way an offshoot of the Objectivist movement, or are they distinct movements? Would appreciate some Randian thoughts on the issue.
Greg S. replied: I think of the modern libertarian movement as having coalesced sometime between 1968 and 1971. I wouldn’t say that it was an offshoot of the Objectivist movement, but Rand was certainly a major influence on some of its leaders and most of its followers. Also, the social relationships formed through the Nathaniel Branden Institute (which gave lecture courses on Rand’s Objectivism) probably played a role in the formation of the libertarian movement, and it may be that (as Jennifer Burns suggests) the closing of NBI in 1968 created a sort of vacuum that helped the movement to form.
Anarchism (specifically the form endorsed by Rothbard) was the dominant force in that movement initially, and the confusion between freedom and anarchy (which I regard as its opposite) played (and continues to play) a really distorting role in libertarian thought—including in the thought of non-anarchist libertarian philosophers, such as Nozick. My sense is that, though anarchism remains a significant factor, its influence among self-professed libertarians and libertarian organizations has waned significantly, and I don’t know that anything has really taken its place. What I see now is more of a loose knit community of people and groups who vaguely favor free markets, and who share some of the same influences (including both Rand and the anarchists).
The following comments on this post are preserved:
Karl M. writes: http://www.cato.org/mission
Today, those who subscribe to the principles of the American Revolution — individual liberty, limited government, the free market, and the rule of law — call themselves by a variety of terms, including conservative, libertarian, classical liberal, and liberal. We see problems with all of those terms. "Conservative" smacks of an unwillingness to change, of a desire to preserve the status quo. Only in America do people seem to refer to free-market capitalism — the most progressive, dynamic, and ever-changing system the world has ever known — as conservative. Additionally, many contemporary American conservatives favor state intervention in some areas, most notably in trade and into our private lives.
"Classical liberal" is a bit closer to the mark, but the word "classical" fails to capture the contemporary vibrancy of the ideas of freedom.
"Liberal" may well be the perfect word in most of the world — the liberals in societies from China to Iran to South Africa to Argentina tend to be supporters of human rights and free markets — but its meaning has clearly been altered in the contemporary United States.
The Jeffersonian philosophy that animates Cato's work has increasingly come to be called "libertarianism" or "market liberalism." It combines an appreciation for entrepreneurship, the market process, and lower taxes with strict respect for civil liberties and skepticism about the benefits of both the welfare state and foreign military adventurism.
This vision brings the wisdom of the American Founders to bear on the problems of today. As did the Founders, it looks to the future with optimism and excitement, eager to discover what great things women and men will do in the coming century. Market liberals appreciate the complexity of a great society, recognizing that socialism and government planning are just too clumsy for the modern world. It is — or used to be — the conventional wisdom that a more complex society needs more government, but the truth is just the opposite. The simpler the society, the less damage government planning does. Planning is cumbersome in an agricultural society, costly in an industrial economy, and impossible in the information age. Today collectivism and planning are outmoded and backward, a drag on social progress.
Libertarians have a cosmopolitan, inclusive vision for society. We applaud the progressive extension of the promises of the Declaration of Independence to more people, especially to women, African-Americans, religious minorities, and gay and lesbian people. Our greatest challenge today is to continue to extend the promise of political freedom and economic opportunity to those who are still denied it, in our own country and around the world.
Greg S. replies: Karl, I more or less agree with the statement you quote from Cato, especially the point that all of the terms to name "those who subscribe to the principles of the American Revolution" have problems with them. Part of the reason that there are problems is that there isn't much consensus on what those principles are. There are a number of reasons for this, but one is that "anarchism" is seen as a close relative of these principles instead of as one form of the opposite principle--viz. rule by brute force. The fetish for anarchism seems to be fading in libertarian circles, so this isn't as big an issue as it once was. But until there is a consensus among self-professed libertarians that the disagreement between anarchists and proponents of a rights-respecting government is not a debate within a single ideological movement but a debate between fundamentally different ideologies, I don't think that "libertarian" is a term anyone should adopt as a name for his own ideology--at least not without being explicit about where he stands on this issue.
This doesn't mean that I'm opposed to working with organizations that call themselves libertarian, when I judge that they're predominantly good (as I think is the case with CATO), and I'm happy to appear on panels or in books with anarchists as well, just as I am with socialists and others, so long as it's done in a way that makes clear that there's a fundamental disagreement that people need to consider, rather than presenting us as fundamentally aligned. (In fact, I'm editing a book now that has several self-professed libertarian contributors, including two anarchists.)
Boaz's book, which you link to above, has much to recommend it, but it plays coy on this issue. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the libertarian movement knows that anarchism has played a significant part in it, and book on "The Libertarian Mind" needs to acknowledge that and take a position on it.
The following comments on this post are preserved:
Chris C. says: Political labels seem to have a noxious tendency to mutate over time as this or that group of people lay claim to the term. It happened to "liberal," for example. Without contextualization, the term "liberal" nowadays is basically empty of cognitive content. We now hear about "neoliberalism" (a term seemingly employed most often by critics of capitalism or free markets) and I'm sure new mutations will come along. Chomsky (an anarchist of sorts, anarcho-syndicalism I gather) refers to himself as a libertarian socialist; I take it he models his ideal society after the kubbitz in Israel. In any case, he isn't particularly friendly toward private property, or toward capitalism as it's usually understood, and definitely not toward corporate capitalism as it has become. There are a number of people on the left who question how the liberty or freedom of employee-workers is actualized well under capitalistic institutions, and so mock and deride the term "libertarian" as used by economic "right-wingers" like Nozick or Milton (and David) Friedman. And it goes on and on.
Nonetheless, for purposes of cognitive economy and utility, "libertarian" might, appropriately contextualized, be a valid label for any political ideology that takes individual liberty to be of primary importance. I think the same can be said for the label "liberal" as it was clearly defined and defended by Mises in his main political treatise, 'Liberalism.' Ca. 1964, AR appeared not to take issue with the "libertarian" label when applied to Mises or Hazlitt, but when the likes of Rothbard or (the young) Roy Childs argued for anarchism on libertarian grounds, and the "movement" became associated prominently with such arguments, AR repudiated the label via the square quotes (or, in a letter, referring to Rothbard's "so-called libertarian" ideas). She did this with other political labels as well, notably "liberal" and "conservative." (All the entries for these term in the Lexicon have these square-quotes around them, and quite understandably so.)
AR didn't appear to bother much with whether she regarded Rothbard and Childs as pseudo-libertarians or some such; I think one reason for this is that she *already* had a label for her political-economic philosophy: laissez-faire capitalism. (Laissez-faire indicating the broader political program corresponding to chapter 10 of OPAR; capitalism to the economic aspect corresponding to chapter 11 there.) This doesn't of course stop someone like David Friedman from calling his anarchistic (no-govt-monopoly-on-force) view a form of capitalism, or even a "radical capitalism." I don't see this as a basis for rejecting the label "capitalism," but the term "capitalism" for the most part isn't susceptible to the kind of appropriation-by-anybody problem that the terms "libertarian" and "liberal" have been: it picks out an incontestably essential feature: the codification of private property rights.
In any event, I don't personally mind much using a properly-contextualized term such as "libertarian" to describe laissez-faire or classical liberal ideology. (I'm thinking along the lines of John Hospers's article "What Libertarianism Is" - http://public.callutheran.e... - or the SEP entry (surprisingly enough not about free-will libertarianism) - http://plato.stanford.edu/e... - as outlining the essential features of this view now widely termed "libertarianism." As one can see, though, there is a division between "left-libertarians" and "right-libertarians" that centers on the nature of property rights.) My *main* issue is with one's approach to ideas generally, such that in the realm of ideas one either identifies *primarily* as libertarian or as primarily something else, e.g., individualist, egoist, advocate of reason, Aristotelian. Being primarily a philosophical Aristotelian (I have a book out under a pen name prominently featuring a general 'Aristotelianism' concept in the title and text), I tend to identify myself intellectually by that label or something like it ('Perfectivist' for instance), and *not* (or not all that much or often) with a political label, be it "libertarian" or "liberal" or "laissez-faire" or "capitalist," etc.
One can discern a person's approach to ideas by the amount of time or space he or she devotes to a particular area of study. Rand's main focus in her later philosophical career was epistemology, i.e., on refining the art of reasoning well. If, by contrast, you take a look at the body of Rothbard's work, it's all on matters of economics or politics. His libertarianism (as he saw it) was central to his intellectual identity in a way that it wasn't with Rand. (He has a counterpart on the center-left in Rawls, who spent his career on political philosophy.) Peripherally he devoted time and (article) publication space to epistemology or economic methodology but his major (book) publications did not. I think this is a key, fundamental difference between someone like AR and someone like Rothbard that goes beyond choice of labels, and it comes out in the things AR said about the "libertarian movement," namely its politics-centeredness (or - a term she used in later Q&A periods - the 'eclecticism' of prominent "movement" libertarians).
Finally, a more to-the-point question: as one can tell from the SEP entry the term "libertarianism" in the context of contemporary political philosophy has been associated with a certain conception of rights that derives in origin from Locke and sees its more recent expression in Nozick most famously; if we're not going to use the label "libertarian" as a convenient shorthand for this conception of rights, then what better label would you recommend? "Politically I am a ________." Or is this where contextualization and circumstance best dictate terminology and phrasing? I do, after all, have very strong libertarian political sensibilities, you know, Lockean-like. :-) I suppose AR's fill-in-the-blank answer would be "radical for capitalism" (which is 3 words)....
Greg S. replies: Chris, I don't think there is any good short answer to your "fill in the blank" question. I agree that there are ways that the word "libertarian" might be (or has been) defined in which I'd be happy to describe my views as (broadly speaking) "libertarian," but this is true with the terms "liberal" and "conservative" too. And none of these definitions of these terms capture well the way the words are used and understood today, so I don't use them to describe my views. It would be convenient to have a single term, but it's no great tragedy that we don't. There isn't such a term for most positions on most issues. One can give an essentialized description of one's view. For example: I think that the sole proper function of government is to protect individual rights. Or one can identify one's position by reference to prominent figures such as Rand or Locke with whom one agrees.
If someone wants to fight to reclaim "liberal," "conservative," or "libertarian," I don't object, and perhaps they'll create a future in which I'm happy to use the word to describe myself. But that's not an intellectual project I'm interested in myself. In any case, in my view, the first step to reclaiming "libertarianism" would be to insist that anarchists are not libertarians, and I think this would seem like a bizarre claim given that several of the people regarded as paradigms of libertarianism are anarchists. This was not the case before the late 60's when Rothbard effectively commandeered the term.