Category Archives: Libertarianism

Greg Johnson, the previous editor of TOQ, had the wonderful idea for an issue on how Libertarianism intersects with issues of White racial nationalism. The topic is an important one. Unlike explicit assertions of White identity and interests, libertarianism is considered part of the conservative mainstream. It doesnt ruffle the feathers of the multicultural powers that be. Indeed, as discussed in several of the articles hereparticularly the article by Simon Krejsa, libertarianism is an ideology of national dissolution that would greatly exacerbate problems resulting from immigration.

IGNORING THE REAL WORLD: LIBERTARIANISM AS UTOPIAN METAPHYSICS Several prominent libertarians have advocated open borders except for immigrants clearly intent on violating personal or property rights. As Krejsa notes, libertarians ignore the reality that the peoples crowding our shores often have powerful ethnic ties and that they are typically organized in well-funded, aggressive ethnic organizations. These ethnic organizations have a vital interest in a strong central government able to further their interests in a wide range of areas, from welfare benefits to foreign policy. In other words, they act far more as a corporate entity than as a set of isolated individuals. Further, the immigration policy advocated by Libertarians ignores the reality of racial and ethnic differences in a broad spectrum of traits critical to success in contemporary societies, particularly IQ, criminality, and impulsivity. Social utility forms no part of the thinking of Libertarianism.

In reading these articles, one is struck by the fact that libertarianism is in the end a metaphysics. That is, it simply posits a minimal set of rights (to ownership of ones own body, ownership of private property, and the freedom to engage in contracts) and unflinchingly follows this proposition to its logical conclusion. The only purpose of government is to prohibit the physical invasion of anothers person or property. It is a utopian philosophy based on what ought to be rather than on a sober understanding of the way humans actually behave. Not surprisingly, as Simon Lote and Farnham OReilly point out, there have never been any pure libertarian societies. There are powerful reasons for that.

Indeed, libertarianism philosophy reminds me of Kants categorical imperative which states that one must Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. The imperative defines a conception of moral obligation, but it certainly does not follow that others will behave in a moral way. One would be naive indeed to suppose that a philosophy of moral obligations would make people nicer. Kant would never have said that we should arrange society on the supposition that people will behave in the ways that they are morally obligated.

Similarly, the libertarian idea that we should alter government as if the governed are an atomistic universe of individuals is oblivious to the fact that a great many people will continue to behave on the basis of their group identity, whether based on ethnicity or on a voluntary association like a corporation. They will continue to engage in networking (often with co-ethnics) and they will pursue policies aimed at advancing their self-interest as conditioned by group membership. If they have access to the media, they will craft media messages aimed at converting others to agree with their point of viewmessages that need not accurately portray the likely outcomes of policy choices. Media-powerful groups may also craft messages that take advantage of peoples natural proclivities for their own profit without regard to the weaknesses of othersa form of the unleashing of Darwinian competition discussed in the following.

This minimal list of human interests is grounded in neither theology nor natural science. A focus of Trudie Perts essay is the conflict between libertarian philosophy and traditional Catholic collectivism with its group-protecting function based on the concept of natural law. From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, a society engineered according to libertarian ideology would unleash a Darwinian struggle of competition between individuals and groups. Since, as Vitman Tanka notes, there is nothing in libertarian ideology to prevent voluntary associations, people in a libertarian society would naturally band together to advance their interests. Such groups would see their own interests as best satisfied by a strong government that is on their side.

The libertarian utopia would thus be chronically unstable. Indeed, Krejsa quotes Peter Brimelow who notes that a libertarian society with completely open borders would result in enormous pressures for powerful state control immigration as the Viagra of the state: Immigrants, above all immigrants who are racially and culturally distinct from the host population, are walking advertisements for social workers and government programs and the regulation of political speech that is to say, the repression of the entirely natural objections of the host population.

A libertarian utopia would also unleash exploitation of the weak and disorganized by the strong and well-organized. Both Pert and Krejsa point out that a libertarian society would result in violations of normative moral intuitions. For example, parents could sell their children into slavery. Such behavior would indeed be evolutionarily maladaptive, because as slaves their reproductive opportunities would be at the whim of their master. But such an option might appeal to some parents who value other things more than their children as the result of genetically or environmentally induced psychiatric impairment, manipulative media influence, or drug-induced stupor in a society lacking social controls on drugs.

Moreover, in the libertarian Eden, regulations on marriage and sexual behavior would disappear so that wealthy men would be able to have dozens of wives and concubines while many men would not have access to marriage. Sexual competition among males would therefore skyrocket.

In fact, the social imposition of monogamy in the West has had hugely beneficial consequences on the society as a whole, including greater investment in children and facilitating a low pressure demographic profile that resulted in cumulative investment and rising real wages over historical time. In other words, progress.

Admittedly, benefits to the society as a whole are of no concern to libertarians. But, from an evolutionary perspective, they ought to be. An evolutionary approach has the virtue of being solidly grounded in a science of human interests, both explicit and implicit, whereas Libertarianism relies on metaphysical assertions. The fact is that dysfunctional societies are ultimately non-viable and likely to be pushed aside by more functional groups. Without the economic expansion brought about by the social controls on sexual behavior, the West may well have not embarked on the expansion and colonization beginning in the 15th century. Ultimately, social controls on sexual behavior benefited the vast majority of Whites.

The same can be said of social controls on sexual behavior. Social support for high-investment parenting has always been a critical feature of Western social structure until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Since then, all of the markers of family stability have headed south including divorce rates and births out of wedlock for all races and ethnic groups. (Nevertheless, there are very large differences between races and ethnic groups in conformity with J. Philippe Rushtons life history t
heory of race differences.) But this relative lack of social support for marriage has had very different effects depending on traits like IQ. For example, a well-known study in behavior genetics shows that the heritability of age of first sexual intercourse increased dramatically after the sexual revolution of the 1960's. In other words, after the social supports for traditional sexuality disappeared, genetic influences became more important. Before the sexual revolution, traditional sexual mores applied to everyone. After the revolution, genes mattered more. People with higher IQ were able to produce stable families and marriages, but lower-IQ people were less prone to doing so. These trends have been exacerbated by the current economic climate.

The triumph of the culture of critique therefore resulted in a more libertarian climate for sexual behavior that tended to produce family pathology among people at the lower end of the bell curve for IQ, particularly an increase in low-investment parenting. This in turn is likely to have decreased the viability of the society as a whole.

COULD WHITE ADVOCACY BE THE OUTCOME OF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS? It is interesting to consider whether a vibrant White advocacy movement could be the outcome of voluntary association in a society constructed along libertarian lines, as proposed by Tanka, who uses the Amish as an example. That is, Whites could come to realize that they have a natural interest in forming a voluntary association to advance their interests as Whites, much as Jews have done since the Enlightenment. (In traditional societies, Jewish groups were tightly controlled to prevent defection and cheating, i.e., engaging in acts such as undermining Jewish monopolies or informing on other Jews that were deemed harmful by the Jewish community as a whole. Traditional Jewish society was the antithesis of libertarianism.)

Such an outcome is theoretically possible but (like the rest of the libertarian wish list) would be unlikely to occur in the real world. In the real world, media-powerful groups and groups able to dominate prestigious academic institutions would indoctrinate people against identifying as Whites bent on pursuing White interests, as they do now. In the real world, there would be financial inducements to avoid White advocacy, including well-paid careers opposing White advocacy and economic consequences meted out by powerful voluntary associations, especially associations dominated by non-Whites hostile to White identity and interests also the case now. A White advocacy movement would therefore have a great deal of inertia to overcome.

And yet, voluntary association is the only way that a powerful White advocacy movement could develop. We are seeing the beginnings of such movements, especially in Europe with the rise of explicitly anti-Muslim and anti-immigration parties.

However, if a White-advocacy movement gains power, it would be foolish indeed to retain a libertarian political structure of minimal government. As noted by Farnham OReilly, the rights of the individual must remain subservient to the welfare of the group. If indeed White interests are worth defending, then furthering those interests must be the first priority. That would mean acting against media-powerful interests that produce messages countering White identity and acting against voluntary associations (such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League) that mete out economic penalties against Whites who identify as White and wish to pursue their interests as Whites. (It is noteworthy at of the nine authors of this issue of TOQ, seven use pseudonyms. The exceptions, Robert Griffin and I, both have tenure and thus have protected positions.)

Indeed, one might note that the greatest obstacle to the triumph of a White advocacy movement now is that current Western societies are organized along (imperfectly) libertarian lines. That is, the Western commitment to economic individualism (which allows vast concentrations of wealth by individuals) combined with the legitimacy of using that wealth to influence government policy, control media messages, and penalize White advocates, has allowed the creation of a semi-Darwinian world where very powerful interests have aligned themselves against White advocacy. This in turn is leading to natural selection against White people as they become overwhelmed demographically by non-Whites. In such a world, Whites, especially non-elite Whites, will eventually be at the mercy of hostile non-White groups with historical grudges against them a category that at the very least includes Jews, Blacks, and Mexicans. Again, there is no reason whatever to suppose that a society engineered along libertarianism lines would prevent associations based on ethnic/racial ties. The racialization of American politics in the semi-libertarian present is well advanced, with over 90% of Republican votes coming from Whites, and increasing percentages of Whites voting Republican.

LIBERTARIANISM FITS WITH THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF WHITES Nevertheless, having pointed to the pitfalls of libertarianism, it must be said that the individual freedom and liberty that are the hallmarks of libertarianism feel good to us Europeans, as emphasized by Simon Lote and Robert Griffin. All things equal, we would rather live in a society with minimal restraint on individual behavior.

(However, all things may not be equal, as Simon Krejsa points out, since the vast majority of Whites would prefer to live in a non-libertarian society that was predominantly White rather than a libertarian society that was predominantly Black. Race matters.)

In my view, individualism is an ethnic trait of Europeans the only group to have invented individualistic societies. (Ironically, for the reasons set out above, the semi-libertarian structure of contemporary Western societies may ultimately be the demise of the West.) This judgment is based on a variety of data. For example, European family patterns indicate that Europeans, far more than other groups, have been able to free themselves from clan-based social structure (a form of collectivism) and develop societies with a high level of public trust needed to create modern economies.

Thats perhaps why reading Ayn Rand has been so exciting for so many of us, as emphasized by Gregory Hood in his prize-winning essay. We thrill to the idea of talented, productive, competent people who are able to create their own worlds and are not bound by the petty conventions of society who seem larger than life. It is, as Hood points out, a White World, peopled by heroic Nordics, with an Aryan code of achievement, appreciation of hierarchy, and a robustly defended philosophy of greatness; it is a world where uniquely Western values such as individualism, the rule of law, and limited government are taken for granted.

I confess that when I first read Atlas Shrugged in high school, I was very much taken with it. Readers of her work naturally cast themselves in the role of John Galt or similar Randian super-person. Her characters appeal to our vanity and our natural desire to live free of burdensome constraints and to be completely in charge of our own destiny. I recall when driving across the country shortly after reading it that I took special notice of all the signs of eponymous businesses Johnsons Lumber Co., Hansens Furniture, Marios Pizza, Ford auto- mobiles. All were the creations of individuals with drive and ambition people creating their own worlds.

Its an attractive image, but as an evolutionist I understand that humans must think in terms of the larger picture what Frank S
alter terms ethnic genetic interests. And to effectively further our ethnic genetic interests, we must take account of the real world and accept the need for restraints on peoples behavior, as argued above. The good news is that, as Hood notes (see also Tankas essay), the road to a sense of White advocacy and a sense that Whites have interests often begins with Ayn Rand and libertarianism.

The European tendency toward individualism is also associated with moral universalism (as opposed to moral particularlism, famously, Is it good for the Jews?) and science (i.e, inquiry free from in- group/outgroup biases, with each scientist an independent agent unattached to any ingroup). The tendency toward moral particularism is especially important when thinking about Libertarianism. The European tendency toward moral universalism implies a relatively strong commitment to principled morality that is, moral principles that are adhered to independent of cost to self or family. This contrasts with non-European societies where there is a much greater tendency for family and kinship ties to color moral judgments.

This devotion to principled morality is most apparent in the Puritan tradition of American culture likely the result of prolonged evolution in small, exogamous, egalitarian groups in northern Europe. An egregious example is Justice John Paul Stevens who recently vacated the court, allowing President Obama to replace him with Elena Kagan, an undistinguished law school graduate who benefited greatly from Jewish ethnic networking and who is likely to reflect to values of the mainstream left-liberal Jewish community.

Stevens therefore is the ultimate non-ethnic actor, allowing himself to be replaced during a Democratic administration that would be very unlikely to appoint someone like himself. This lack of an ethnic sense is reflected in his writing:

The ideas of liberty and equality have been an irresistible force in motivating leaders like Patrick Henry, Susan B. Anthony, and Abraham Lincoln, schoolteachers like Nathan Hale and Booker T. Washington, the Philippine Scouts who fought at Bataan, and the soldiers who scaled the bluff at Omaha Beach, he wrote in an unusually lyrical dissent [in a 1989 flag burning case]. If those ideas are worth fighting forand our history demonstrates that they areit cannot be true that the flag that uniquely symbolizes their power is not itself worthy of protection.

Ideas are worth fighting for, but Stevens has no interest in advancing the cause of WASPs as an ethnic group. Here he idealizes non-White Filipinos fighting alongside Whites to secure a set of principles. He has no concern that there will be no more WASPs on the court for the foreseeable future, presumably because he thinks that whats important is that certain ideas will continue to guide the country.

The multicultural left should build statues to Stevens and David Souter also appointed by a Republican president and replaced by a non-White [Sonia Sotomayor] in a Democrat administration) as heroes of the hopeful non-White future. Their principled sense that ideas matter and that race and ethnicity are not at all important is exactly how the multicultural left wants all Whites to behave WASPs as the proposition ethnic group heralding America as the proposition nation.

This devotion to universalist ideas is a strong tendency in the liberal WASP subculture that has been such an important strand of American intellectual history. (The exception was during the 1920s when the Protestant elite sided with the rest of America when they led the battle to enact the immigration restriction law of 1924 which drastically restricted immigration and explicitly attempted to achieve an ethnic status quo as of 1890. Even then, there were substantial numbers of WASPs who opposed immigration restriction.)

In the 19th century, this liberal WASP tradition could be seen in their attraction to utopian communities and their strong moral revulsion to slavery that animated the cause of abolition. Ideas matter and are worth fighting for, even if more than 600,000 White people died in the battle Let us die to make men free as the Battle Hymn of the Republic urged. They had the idea that people are able to fashion moral ideals and then bring them into being as a result of political activism, a view that is certainly borne out by contemporary psychology. They were individualists who saw the world not in terms of in-groups and outgroups, but as composed of unique individuals. Their relatively tepid ethnocentrism and their ethnic proneness to moral universalism made them willing allies of the rising class of Jewish intellectuals who came to dominate intellectual discourse beginning at least by the 1930s. Even by the 1920s, the triumph of Boasian anthropology meant that appeals to WASP ethnicity would fall on deaf ears in the academic world.

Libertarianism thus fits well with this tradition. Indeed, Eric Kaufmann labels one of the 19th-century liberal American traditions libertarian anarchism, typified by Benjamin Tucker, publisher Liberty, a journal devoted to unfettered individualism and opposed to prohibitions on non-invasive behavior (free love, etc.). Moreover, as noted above, libertarianism is nothing if not strongly principled. Indeed, libertarianism is addicted to its fundamental principles of individual freedom no matter what practical costs may result to self, to others or to the society as a whole. The sign of principled behavior is that other interests, prototypically self-interest (paradoxically enough in the case of libertarianism), are irrelevant, and that is certainly the case with libertarianism.

IS LIBERTARIANISM A JEWISH INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT? Finally, we must ask, Is it good for the Jews? Simon Lote notes that libertarians tend to be cosmopolitan White males [who] are led by a smaller but more eminent group of Jews who are attracted to the political philosophy for entirely different reasons. Jews are attracted to libertarianism because

[the] cosmopolitan universalism at [the core of libertarianism] is a mighty ideological weapon to weaken White identity and loyalty and so ensures that Jewish interests are better preserved and advanced. After all, if one regards property rights as sacred, the idea of breaking the Jewish stranglehold over the media by government anti-trust legislation would be considered abhorrent. Libertarians also tend to be in favor of massive non-White immigration which is also favored by Jews as an ethnic strategy aimed at lessening the political and cultural influence of Whites.

Indeed, Trudie Pert begins her essay with the following quote from The Culture of Critique:

Jews benefit from open, individualistic societies in which barriers to upward mobility are removed, in which people are viewed as individuals rather than as members of groups, and in which intellectual discourse is not prescribed by institutions like the Catholic Church that are not dominated by Jews.

Libertarianism was not reviewed as a Jewish intellectual movement of The Culture of Critique, although the discussion of the Frankfurt School as a Jewish movement in Chapter 5 emphasizes that it pathologized the group commitments of non-Jews while nevertheless failing to provide a similar critique of Jewish group commitment. It noted that

a common component of anti-Semitism among academics during the Weimar period [in Germany] was a perception that Jews attempted to undermine patriotic commitment and social cohesion of society. Indeed, the perception that Jewish critical analysi
s of non-Jewish society was aimed at dissolving the bonds of cohesiveness within the society was common among educated non-Jewish Germans, including university professors . One academic referred to the Jews as the classic party of national decomposition.

In the event, National Socialism developed as a cohesive non-Jewish group strategy in opposition to Judaism, a strategy that completely rejected the Enlightenment ideal of an atomized society based on individual rights in opposition to the state. As I have argued in [Separation and Its Discontents] (Ch. 5), in this regard National Socialism was very much like Judaism, which has been throughout its history fundamentally a group phenomenon in which the rights of the individual have been submerged in the interests of the group.

Further:

The prescription that society adopt a social organization based on radical individualism would indeed be an excellent strategy for the continuation of Judaism as a cohesive, collectivist group strategy. Research on cross-cultural differences in individualism and collectivism indicates that anti-Semitism would be lowest in individualist societies rather than societies that are collectivist and homogeneous apart from Jews. A theme of [A People That Shall Dwell Alone] (Ch. 8) is that European societies (with the notable exceptions of the National Socialist era in Germany and the medieval period of Christian religious hegemonyboth periods of intense anti-Semitism) have been unique among the economically advanced traditional and modern cultures of the world in their commitment to individualism. The presence of Judaism as a highly successful and salient group strategy provokes anti-individualist responses from [non-Jews]. Collectivist cultures [like Judaism] place a much greater emphasis on the goals and needs of the ingroup rather than on individual rights and interests. Collectivist cultures develop an unquestioned attachment to the ingroup, including the perception that ingroup norms are universally valid (a form of ethnocentrism), automatic obedience to ingroup authorities, and willingness to fight and die for the ingroup. These characteristics are usually associated with distrust of and unwillingness to cooperate with outgroups. In collectivist cultures morality is conceptualized as that which benefits the group, and aggression and exploitation of outgroups are acceptable.

People in individualist cultures, in contrast, show little emotional attachment to ingroups. Personal goals are paramount, and socialization emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, independence, individual responsibility, and finding yourself. Individualists have more positive attitudes toward strangers and outgroup members and are more likely to behave in a prosocial, altruistic manner to strangers. Because they are less aware of in-group-outgroup boundaries, people in individualist cultures are less likely to have negative attitudes toward outgroup members. They often disagree with ingroup policy, show little emotional commitment or loyalty to ingroups, and do not have a sense of common fate with other ingroup members. Opposition to outgroups occurs in individualist societies, but the opposition is more rational in the sense that there is less of a tendency to suppose that all of the outgroup members are culpable for the misdeeds of a few. Individualists form mild attachments to many groups, whereas collectivists have an intense attachment and identification to a few ingroups.

The expectation is that individualists will tend to be less predisposed to anti-Semitism and more likely to blame any offensive Jewish behavior as resulting from transgressions by individual Jews rather than stereotypically true of all Jews. However Jews, as members of a collectivist subculture living in an individualistic society, are themselves more likely to view the Jewishnon- Jewish distinction as extremely salient and to develop stereotypically negative views about non-Jews.

Perts article suggests that libertarianism functioned as a Jewish intellectual movement for at least some of its main Jewish proponents. (No one is saying that libertarianism is a Jewish movement to the extent that, say, psychoanalysis was in its early years, when virtually all its practitioners were Jews. For the reasons indicated above, libertarianism is very attractive to Europeans.) In order for a movement to qualify as a Jewish movement, participants must have a Jewish identity and see their work as furthering Jewish interests. Particularly interesting is the animosity shown by Ludwig von Mises toward Christianity and particularly toward the Catholic Church as enemies of freedom. (One might also note Ayn Rands one-sided and impassioned defense of Israel and her denunciations of Arabs as racist murderers of innocent Jews indicate a strong Jewish identity and an unwillingness to condemn Jewish collectivism, either in Israel or in traditional and to a considerable extent in contemporary Diaspora societies. She also remonstrates against the racism of U.S. foreign policy prior to FDR, again suggesting views that are highly characteristic of the Jewish mainstream.)

For the reasons indicated above, there is little doubt that Judaism would benefit from a libertarian social order. In addition to lowering anti- Jewish attitudes, Pert notes that Jews as an well-organized, highly networked elite would be likely to be able to exploit non-Jews economically because non-Jews would not be protected by the state and because non-Jews would not likely be able to form cohesive protective groups in the absence of state involvement. (I have proposed that in the 4th century, voluntary associations centered around the Catholic Church served a protective function against Jewish economic domination, particularly the enslavement of non-Jews by Jews. As expected, this protective society then attempted (and succeeded) in obtaining political power by seizing control of the state.

In other words, these Catholics actively fought against a social order in which there were no safeguards against the exploitation of non-Jews by Jews. (To the extent that it permitted slavery of non-Jews by Jews, the previous social order was libertarian.) The libertarian rationalization of voluntary servitude is particularly noteworthy given the reality of Jewish economic domination in several historical eras.

Kevin MacDonald, The Establishment and Maintenance of Socially Imposed Monogamy in Western Europe. Politics and the Life Sciences 14, 3-23, 1995. http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/Monogamy1995.pdf

2 J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior (New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction, 1994).

3 M. P. Dunne, N. G. Martin, D. J. Statham, W. S. Slutske, S. H. Dinwiddie, K. K. Bucholz, P. A. F. Madden, and A. C. Heath, Genetic and environmental contributions to variance in age at first sexual intercourse. Psychological Science 8 (211216, 1997).

4 Kevin MacDonald, The Dissolution of the Family among Non-Elite Whites. The Occidental Observer (April 9, 2010). http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2010/04/kevin-macdonald-the- dissolution-of-the-family-among-non-elite-whites/

5 MacDonald, What Makes Western Culture Unique?; Kevin Mac Donald, Eric P. Kaufmanns The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. The Occidental Observer (July 29, 2009). http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-Kaufmann.html

6 Frank K. Salter, On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration (New Brunswick, NJ: T
ransaction, 2006; originally published by Peter Lang [Frankfurt Am Main, 2003]).

7 Kevin MacDonald, Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture: Applications to Moral Idealism and Political Philosophy. Politics and Culture (2010[Issue 1], April). http://www.politicsandculture.org/2010/04/29/evolution-and-a-dual-processing-theory-of-culture-applications-to-moral-idealism-and-political-philosophy/

8 Kevin MacDonald, Psychology and White Ethnocentrism. The Occidental Quarterly 6(4) (Winter, 200607, 746). http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/WhiteEthnocentrism.pdf J. G. Miller and D. M. Bersoff, Culture and Moral Judgment: How Are Conflicts Between Justice and Interpersonal Responsibilities Resolved? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62 (541554, 1992).

9 MacDonald, What Makes Western Culture Unique?

10 Jeffrey Toobin, After Stevens: What Will the Supreme Court Be Like without Its Liberal Leader? The New Yorker (March 23, 2010). http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/22/100322fa_fact_toobin?curr entPage=all#ixzz0tJXKtDE6

11 Mac Donald, Eric P. Kaufmanns The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America.

12 Kevin MacDonald, American Transcendentalism: An Indigenous Culture of Critique. The Occidental Quarterly 8(2) (Summer 2008, 91106). http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Gura-Transcendentalism.pdf

13 Kevin MacDonald, Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture.

14 Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique (Blooomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2002; originally published by Praeger [Westport, CT, 1998]), Chapter 7.

15Ibid., xxix.

16 Harry C. Triandis, Cross-cultural studies of individualism and collectivism. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 1989: Cross Cultural Perspectives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 55.

17Ibid.

18 Harry C. Triandis. Cross-cultural differences in assertiveness/competition vs. group loyalty/cohesiveness. In Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior (ed. R. A. Hinde & J. Groebel; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 82.

19Ibid. 80.

20 Triandis, Cross-cultural studies of individualism and collectivism, 61.

21 Ayn Rand on Israel and the Middle East. You Tube video of a public inter- view from 1979. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHSv1asFvU

22 Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism. (Bloomington, IN: 1stbooks Library, 2004; first published by Praeger [Westport, CT, 1998]), Chapter 3.

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Libertarianism and White Racial Nationalism | The ...

Transcript

Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. Im Trevor Burrus.

Aaron Powell: And Im Aaron Powell.

Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Thomas C. Leonard, research scholar at the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University and lecturer at Princeton Universitys Department of Economics. He is the author of the new book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Welcome to Free Thoughts.

Thomas Leonard: Thanks. Nice to be with you.

Trevor Burrus: So Id like to start with the title which says a lot by itself. Why Illiberal Reformers?

Thomas Leonard: Well, everyone knows that the scholars and activists who dismantled laissez faire and built welfare state were reformers. They dont call it the progressive era for nothing. But its my claim that a central feature of that reform, central feature of erecting the regulatory state, a new kind of state, was the producing of liberties in the name of various conceptions of the greater good. Not just economic liberties, property rights, contract and so forth, thats sort of a well-known part of the transition from 19th century liberalism to 20th century liberalism, but also I maintain civil and personal liberties as well.

Trevor Burrus: And what time period, are we talking about just after the turn of the century or the turn of the 20th century or going back further than that?

Thomas Leonard: Well, the idea is the architecture, if you will, the blueprints were drawn up sort of in the last decade and a half of the 19th century and they gradually made their way into actual sort of legislation and institutions, government institutions in the first 2 decades of the 20th century. Sort ofto use the usual scholarly terms kind of late gilded age and then the progressive era.

Trevor Burrus: So, who are these people, these reformers? Are they politicians mostly or are they in some other walk of life?

Thomas Leonard: Eventually they are politicians, but the politicians have to be convinced first. So the convincers in the beginning are a group of intellectuals or if you like scholars. They are economists, sociologists, population scientists, social workers.

Trevor Burrus: Population scientists, are those basically Malthusians or?

Thomas Leonard: No. Today we call them demographers.

Trevor Burrus: We dont use that term anymore. We call them what today?

Thomas Leonard: No. No. Today, we would call them demographers.

Trevor Burrus: Oh, okay.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah. Its not quiteit doesnt have to sound that sinister. But one of the interesting things, Trevor, about social science in this kind ofin its very beginnings in the late 19th century is itsits only beginning to become an academic discipline which is part of the book story. And a lot of social science kind of social investigations, fact-finding, research reports, a lot of that is being done outside the academy in the immigrant settlement houses, to a lesser extent in government administrative agencies, in investigations funded by the brand-new foundations and eventually in this brand-new invention called the Think Tank.

Aaron Powell: Was this increasing influence by what these people are ultimately working is largely academic, so is this new for academics or academics this influential before this?

Thomas Leonard: No. It is new. Its a revolution in academia. If we could transport ourselves backwards in time to Princeton, say, in 1880, we wouldnt recognize the place. American colleges, you know, just after the Civil War were tiny institutions. They werent particularly scholarly. They were denominational. They were led by ministers. In Princetons case, they would have been finishing southern gentlemen and you wouldnt recognize it at all.

If, however, we could transport ourselves back to, say, 1920, just at the end of the progressive era, you would recognize everything about the place. The social sciences had been invented and installed. Theres the beginning of the physical sciences in academia and its no longer just the classics, theology and a little bit of philosophy and mathematics. Part of the story of the rise of reform is the story of this revolution in American higher ed which takes place between 1880 and 1900.

Trevor Burrus: In the book, you discussed how Germany figures into this to some degree, which I thought was kind of interesting because Germany also figured into reforming our public education below higher ed but Germany status in the intellectual world was very influential on Americans in particular.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah, thats quite right. The German connection is crucial for understanding the first generation of economists and other reformers. In the 1870s and into the 1880s, if you wanted to study cutting-edge political economy, Germany was where you went and all of the founders of American economics and indeed most of the other sort of newly hatching social sciences did their graduate work in Bismarck in Germany. And its only sort of beginning in the 1890s that American higher end catches up but, boy, does it catch up quickly. Thats why we use the term revolution.

But the turn of the century, you know, the number of graduate students in the United States getting Ph.D.s is in the thousands. You know, sort of after the Civil War even as late as 1880, it would have just been a handdful.

Trevor Burrus: So what did these people start thinking aboutI mean these illiberal reformers, what did they get in their head partially from Germany, partially from other sources which we can talk about later? But in the sort of general overview when they looked at society, what did they sort of maybe not suddenly but at that moment, what did they decide they wanted to do with it?

Thomas Leonard: Well, another thing to understand is that most of them, in addition to sort of having this German model of how an economy works and also a German model of how an economy should be regulated, there were also evangelical protestants, most of them grew up in evangelical homes, most of them were sons and daughters of ministers or missionaries and they had, you know, this extraordinary zeal, this desire to set the world to rights. And they looked around them during the industrial revolution and they saw what really was extraordinary, unprecedented, economic and social change which we cannot gather under the banner of the industrial or at least the American industrial revolution.

And when they looked around them, they saw injustice. They saw low wages. There was a newly visible class of the poor in the cities. They saw inefficiency. They saw labor conflict. They saw uneducated men getting rich and this upending of the old social order in their view was not only inefficient, it was also un-Christian and immoral and it needed to be reformed, and they were sort ofits important to say unabashed about using evangelical terminology. They referred to this is the first generation of progressives. They referred to their project as bringing a kingdom of heaven to Earth.

Aaron Powell: Then how did theyso theyve got this project. Theyve identified these issues that they want to change. How did they go about turning that concern and the expertise that they thought they had into control of the reins of power or influence within government?

Thomas Leonard: Great question. It wasnt easy. They understood that they had a tall task in front of them. They had to persuade those in power that reform was needed and reform was justified. And it helped that 2 other students, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson went on too famous as politicians and so did other progressives at lower levels too. Part of the idea of academic economics in this sort of beginning stage was that you didnt just spend time in the library or do blackboard exercises. Your job was to go out and make the world a better place.

So, I think the best way to think about it was they, along with many other reformers, wrote for the newspapers, went on the lecture circuits, bent the air of politicians first at the state level and then later at the federal level and said its a new economic world. The old economic ideas, laissez faire as they called it, are not only is it immoral, its economically obsolete and we need to build a new relationship not unlike the model that Germany provided between the state and economic life. And very gradually it happened.

Trevor Burrus: They were talking about also the emergence of the administrative state comes into this too because then they can take over posts in government that are not necessarily elected where their expertise is supposed to be utilized.

Thomas Leonard: Thats exactly right. The crucial point is that we think about the progressive era as a huge expansion in the size and scope of government and indeed it is that. But the progressives didnt just want bigger government. They also wanted a new kind of government, which they saw as a better form, as a superior form of government. Famously the progressives werent just unhappy with economic life which was one thing, they were also unhappy with American political life and with American government which they saw and rightly so as corrupt and inefficient and not doing what it should be doing to improve society and economy. So they wanted to not only to expand state power but also to relocate it, to move government authority away from the courts which traditionally had held quite a bit of regulatory power and away from legislatures and into what they sometimes called a new fourth branch of government, the administrative state.

Trevor Burrus: And youre right, youre right in your book which I think this is a very succinct way of pointing it. Progressivism was first and foremost an attitude about the proper relationship of science and its bearer, the scientific expert, to the state and of the state to the economy and polity. And so these expertsI also want to think we should make clear, this was not a fringe group of intellectuals and academic professors. This waswould you say it was the mainstream or at least a kind of whos who of American intellectuals and all the great Ivy League institutions?

Thomas Leonard: Absolutely. Its the best and brightest if I can use an anachronistic phrase. Now, we have to be a little careful with Ivy League because the centers of academic reform are at places like Wisconsin and to some extent at Columbia and at Johns Hopkins and to some extent at Penn. But the old colonial colleges like Harvard and Yale were a little late to catch up. It took them a while to catch on to this new German model of graduate seminars and professors as experts and not merely instructors.

Trevor Burrus: So how did they conceptualize the average worker that needed their help? You have this great line in your book which I think says something about modern politics too. Progressives did not work in factories. They inspected them. Progressives did not drink in salons. They tried to shudder them. The bold women who chose to live among the immigrant poor and city slums called themselves settlers, not neighbors. Even when progressives idealized workers, they tended to patronize them. Romanticizing a brotherhood that they would never consider joining.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah. I think its fair to say and its not exactly a revelation that the progressives were not working class, but neither were they, you know, part of the gentry class. They were middle class and from middle class backgrounds, as I say sons and daughters of ministers and missionaries. So, they were unhappy when they looked upward at the new plutocrats who were uneducated and in their view un-Christian and potentially corrupting of the republic, but they also didnt like what they saw when they looked downward at ordinary people particularly at immigrants. If you dont mind, I feel like I should circle back to this fourth branch idea

Trevor Burrus: Please.

Thomas Leonard: as a conception of the administrative state. I didnt finish my thought very well. I think that the way that the progressives thought about the fourth branch is very important because the administrative state is as everyone knows has done nothing but grow since its blueprinting and its sort of first construction in Woodrow Wilsons first term. I think the key thingsort of these two key components that make this a new kind of government in the progressive mind. The first is that the independent agencies like the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission and the Permanent Tariff Commission were designed to be independent of Congress and the president. That was by design.

They were supposed to be in some sense above politics. They served for 7 years. They had overlapping terms. Oftentimes, they would be balanced politically and the president could not remove one of these commissioners except for cause and neither could Congress impeach them. So they occupied a kind of a unique place, a new place did these bureaucrats.

The second thing that matters I think for understanding the administrative state is that administrative regulations have the full force of federal law, right? Regulations are laws no different than you know, Congress had passed one. Moreover, the fourth branch, the administrators are also responsible for executing regulations and third, of course, theyre responsible for adjudicating regulatory disputes. So theres this combination of statutory and adjudicatory and executive power all rolled up into one, which is why I think the progressives called it the fourth branch. And the growth of administrative government I think is a much better metric for thinking about the success, if you will, or the durability of the progressive vision than simply looking at something like government spending as a share of GDP.

Aaron Powell: Can we decouple at least for purposes of critique the ideology of the progressives from the methods? Because obviously they ended up once they had the power, ended up doing a lot of really lamentable or awful things with it. But the basic idea of having experts in charge of thingsI mean you can see a certain appeal to that especially as, you know, science advances, technology advances, our body of knowledge grows. We understand more about the economy and more about how societies function just like you would want, you know, experts in the medical sciences overseeing your health as opposed to just laymen. Is there anything just inherently wrong or dangerous about the idea of turning over more of government to experts distinct from just the particular ideas of this set of experts?

Thomas Leonard: I dont think so. I think the question is more a practical one of what we think experts should do whether theyre working in government or in the private sector. And the progressives had what you might call a heroic conception of expertise. They believed that they not only could be experts serve the public good but they could also identify the public good and thats what I mean by a heroic conception. Not only do we know how to get to a particular outcome, we know also what those outcomes should be.

Now theres nothing about expertise per se that requires that heroic vision which in retrospect looks both arrogant and nave. It makes good sense for the state to call upon expertise where expertise can be helpful. So I dont think its an indictment of the very idea of using science for the purposes of state. Its more about what sort of authority and we want experts to have. Going as we sort of move into the new deal era, which is another great growth spurt in the size of the state, we get a slightly less heroic vision of what experts do. Thereswell, after World War I, that sort of nave heroic view of expertise is simply outmoded.

Trevor Burrus: So they definitelytheyre pretty arrogant as you mentioned. They haveso Im going to ask you sort of a few things about the way that theyre looking at society and what they think that they can do with it and what theyre allowed to do with it. So, how did they view individual rights and as a core layer, I guess, how do they think of society as opposed to the individual in terms of the sort of methodology of their science or state craft or whatever you want tohowever you want to describe it?

Thomas Leonard: Thats a great question. I think one of the most dramatic changes that we see in sort of American liberal thinking and its transition from 19th century small government liberalism to 20th century liberalism of a more activist expert-guided state is a re-conception of what Dan Rogers calls the moral hole, the idea of a nation or a state or a social organism as an entity that is something greater than the individual people that make it up. And I think this fundamental change is one of the sort of key elements in this progressive inflection point in American history. Up until that point if youre willing to call an era a point, forgive me. Up until that moment, I think thats what we should say.

Trevor Burrus: I think thats good, yes.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah, right. We would have said the United States are and after the progressive reconceptualization, its the United States is. Instead of a collection of states of federation, now the idea is that theres a nation. Woodrow Wilsons famous phrase at least famous in these precincts was Princeton in the nations service and this desire to identify a kind of moral hole, a nation, a state or a social organism. They gave it different names. I think the great impetus to the idea that it was okay to trespass on individual liberties as long as it promoted the interests of the nation or the state or the people or society or the social organism.

Trevor Burrus: So how doesand this is another big factor because its kind of interesting. We have awe talk about them as evangelicals and then progressives, which a lot of people might be surprised, the people who call themselves progressives now. But we also have them as evangelical but with Darwin and evolution having a huge influence on their thinking which also seems to not go with the way we align these things today. How did Darwin and evolution come in to their thinking and what did it make them start to conclude?

Thomas Leonard: Right. Well, remember the quote you had before about progressivism as being essentially a concept that refers to the relationship of science to government and of government to the economy. The science of the day or at least the science that most influencedthe economic reformers was Darwinism. And theres just no understanding progressive era reform without understanding the influence of Darwinism. It was in the progressive view what made these brand-new social sciences just barely established scientific. Thats one of the reasons we do history. Economics today doesnt have a whole lot to do with evolution or with Darwinism and has a lot to do with mathematics and statistical approaches. But at the turn of the century and until the end of the First World War, evolutionary thinking was at the heart of the science that underwrote economics and the other new social sciences, which were at least in the progressive view to guide the administrative state in its relationship to economy and polity.

Aaron Powell: What does Darwinian thinking look like in practice for the policy preferences of the progressives? I mean I see were not just talking about we need to breed out undesirable traits or something of that sort. How does the specifics of Darwin apply to their broader agenda?

Thomas Leonard: Well, Darwin does many things for the progressives. Darwin by himself is sort of a figure that they admire, sort of hes a disinterested man of science concerned only with the truth and uninterested in profit like, say, a greedy capitalist, uninterested in power like, say, a greedy politician. I mean Darwin is kind of a synecdoche if you like for the progressive conception of what a scientific expert does.

More than that, I think that, you know, the progressives andand by the way, many other intellectuals too, socialists and conservatives alike, were able to find whatever they needed in Darwin. Darwin was so influential in the gilded age and in the progressive era that everybody found something useful for their political and intellectual purposes during the gilded age and the progressive era.

Take competition, for example. If you were a so-called social Darwinist, you could say that competition was survival of the fittest, Herbert Spencers phrase that Darwin eventually borrowed himself and that, therefore, that those who succeeded in economic life were in some sense fitter. The progressives could use other evolutionary thinkers and say Wait a second, not so. Fitter doesnt necessarily mean better. Fitter just means better adapted to a particular environment. So competition would be an example of Darwinian thinking that was influential in the way that progressives thought about the way an economy works.

Trevor Burrus: But they werent particular. I mean they werent laissez faire and I know at one point you mentioned that theI think you said that it was either the American Economic Association or maybe sociology was started partially against William Graham Sumner. Was it sociology? William Graham Sumner was very influential on creating counter-movements to him and he is sort of a proto-libertarian or a libertarian figure who was laissez faire but they were absolutely not.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah. Thats quite right. Sumner is the bte noire of economic reformers. He was of a slightly earlier generation, the generation of 1840, and he was the avatar as you say of free markets and of small government and Sumner was the man ElyRichard T. Ely, sort of the standard bearer of progressive economics said that he organized the American Economic Association to oppose. Yeah, Sumner was in the end the only economist who is not asked to join the American Economic Association. So much was he sort of personally associated with laissez faire.

Trevor Burrus: Now, of course, they were accused and this is an important historical point because you mentioned the social Darwinism and I think I can almost hear your scare quotes through the line because that idea of Sumner and Herbert Spencer being Darwinists of a sort of wanted to let people die is a little bit overextended. Spencer definitely had some evolutionary ideas about society, but the social Darwinism doesnt only come in until the 50s if I understand correctly.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah. Social Darwinism is really an anachronism applied to the progressive era. I think we can safely, you know, ascribe the influence of that term to Richard Hofstadter who coined it in his dissertation which was published during the Second World War. It is true, of course, that you could find apologists for laissez faire or you could find people who said that, you know, economic success was not a matter of luck or a fraud or of coercion but was deserved, was justified.

There were lots of defenders of laissez faire on various grounds and Spencer and Sumner find they fit that description. But neither of them were particularly Darwinian. Spencer was a rival of Darwins. He thought his theory waswell, it was prior. He thought it was better and he coined the term evolution. And Sumner really wasnt much of a Darwinist at all if you look through his work, its only dauded with a few Darwinian references. I think what Hofstadter did, and he was such a graceful writer, is he coined a new term that sounded kind of unpleasant.

And if you look through the entire literature which Ive done, you will be hard-pressed to find a single person who identifies him or herself as a social Darwinist. You wont find a journal of social Darwinism. You wont find laboratories of social Darwinism. You wont find international societies for the promotion of social Darwinism.

Trevor Burrus: But ironically, eugenics, you will find all of those things.

Thomas Leonard: You will find all of those things.

Trevor Burrus: Actually, could you explain what eugenics is before we jump into the truly distasteful part of this episode?

Thomas Leonard: Well, eugenics is just in the progressive era what it meant, the period of my book, is the social control of human heredity. Its the idea that human heredity just like anything else guided by good science and overseen by socially-minded experts can improve human heredity just like it can improve government. It can make government good. It can make the economy more efficient and more just and so too can we do the same for human heredity.

Trevor Burrus: And eugenics wasI mean I think big is even an understatement of at least the first two decades of the 20th century and into the third and fourth decade but especially the first two decades.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah, there was an extraordinary intellectual vogue for eugenics all over the world, not just in the United States. Eugenics, its very difficult viewed in retrospect that is viewed through the sort of crimes that were committed by Nazi Germany in the middle of the 20th century. Its very difficult to see how what is a term that is a dirty word could actually be regarded as sort of the height of high-mindedness and social concern. But it was, in fact, at the time.

And across American society, eugenics was popular. It was popular among the new experimental biologists that we now called geneticist. It was certainly popular among the new social scientists, the economists and others who were staffing the bureaus at the administrative state and sitting in chairs in the university. And it was popular among politicians too. There were many journals of eugenics. There were many eugenics societies. They had international and national conferences. Hundreds probably thousands of scholars were happy to call themselves eugenicists and to advocate for eugenic policies of various kinds. Theres a book published in I think around 1924 by Sam Holmes who was a Berkeley zoologist and theres like 6000 or 7000 titles on eugenics in the bibliography.

Aaron Powell: How did the eugenicists of the time think about what they were doing or think about the people that they were doing it to?

Trevor Burrus: Well, first we should ask what they were doing. We havent actually got to that.

Aaron Powell: But I mean in generallike the attitude towards the very notion of this because we can even setting aside the horrors of what Nazi Germany did from our modern perspective looking back at this with the debates that we have and the struggle we have to allow people to say define the family, the way that they choose and just the overwhelming significance in, you know, the scope of ones life and the way one lives in that decision to have children and become a parent. And eugenics, no matterI mean no matter the details of it is ultimately taking that choice away from someone or making that choice for them and it seems just profoundly dehumanizing and did they consciously or unconsciously was there a dehumanizing element to it? Did they think of the people that they were going to practice this on as somehow less and so, therefore, deserving of less autonomy? Or was there a distancing from that element of it?

Thomas Leonard: Well, its important to rememberthe answer to the question is yes. The professionals, if you will, in the eugenics movement sort of the professionals and the propagandists certainly saw immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, immigrants from Asia, African Americans, the mentally and physically disabled as inferiors as unfit. Theres just no question about it. But what we needone important caution here again is that there were very few people at the time proposing anything like hurting inferiors into death chambers.

Eugenic policies were much less extreme. So when we encounter it in the context of, say, economic reform, it comes up In immigration, for example. If you regard immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and from Asia as unfit, as threats to American racial integrity or as economic threats to American working mens wages, thats a eugenic argument. Youre saying that when you argue that they will sort of reduce American hereditary vigor, thats a eugenic argument. It doesnt have to involve something as ugly as, say, coercive sterilization or worse.

Theres many ways of which I think are, you know, strange to us in retrospect of thinking about the law, be it immigration reform or minimum wages or maximum hours as a device for keeping the inferior out of the labor force or out of the country altogether.

Trevor Burrus: Yeah, lets goyeah, the last third of your book kind of goes with this. We have a chapter called Excluding the Unemployable. So can you talk a little bit about what that entailed?

Thomas Leonard: Sure. The unemployable is a kind of buzz phrase that I think was probably coined by Sidney and Beatrice Webb who were Fabian socialists, founders of the London School of Economics and whose work was widely read by American progressives and with whom American progressives had a very kind of fruitful trans-Atlantic interaction with. Its a misnomer, of course, because the unemployable refers to people who many of whom were actually employed. And the idea here is that a certain category of worker is willing to work for wages below what progressives regarded as a living wage or a fair wage and that these sorts of people who were often called feeble-minded when they were mentally disabled or defectives when they were physically disabled were doing the sort of transgressing in multiple ways.

The first thing was by accepting lower wages, they were undermining the deserving American working men or American really means Anglo-Saxon. The second thing is because they were willing to accept low wages, the American worker was unwilling to do so to accept these low wages and so instead opted to have smaller families. That argument went by the name of race suicide. The undercutting inferior worker because he was racially predisposed to accept or innately predisposed to accept lower wages meant that the Anglo-Saxon native, if you willscare quotes around nativehad fewer children and as a result the inferior strains were outbreeding the superior strains and the result was what Edward A. Ross called race suicide.

Trevor Burrus: Now that sounds like the movie Idiocracy. Have you ever seen this movie?

Thomas Leonard: Im not familiar with it.

Trevor Burrus: Oh, well. So, but I want to clarify something that might shock our listeners thatand you mentioned this briefly a little bit like for the economists, for members of the American Economic Association, at the time some of them thought of the minimum wage as valuable precisely because it unemployed these people. So whereas now were actually having this fight about whether or not the minimum wage unemploys anyone. It seems like there were a few doubts that it did unemploy people and the people it unemployed were the unemployable, unproductive workers who shouldnt be employed in the first place.

Thomas Leonard: Thats right. Theres a very long list of people who at one time or another just almost comically if it werent sad, long list of groups that were vilified as being inferior. As I say, physically disabled, mentally disabled coming from Asia or Southern Europe or Eastern Europe, African American, although the progressive werent terribly worried about the African Americans, at least outside the south until they started the great migration and became economic competitors in the factories as well. So, this very long list of inferiors creates a kind of regulatory problem which is how are we going to identify them and so you can, if you think for example that a Jew from Russia or an Italian from the mezzogiorno is inferior, how are you going to know that theyre Jewish or that theyre from Southern Italy. Their passport doesnt specify necessarily.

So one way, of course, is to take out your handbook, the dictionary of the races of America or another more clever way ultimately is to simply set a minimum wage so high that all unskilled labor will be unable to legally come to America because theyll be priced out.

Trevor Burrus: And that was also true ofit goes a little bit past your book but the migration of African Americans north had some influence on the federal minimum wage of the New Deal if I remember correctly.

Thomas Leonard: Yes, it did, and also Mexican immigrants as well. The idea of inferiors threatening Americans or Native Americans is a trope that recurs again and again and again, not just in the progressive era but also in the New Deal. And it is I suppose shocking and bizarre to see the minimum wage as hailed for its eugenic virtues. But one very convenient way of solving this problem of how do we identify the inferiors is to simply assume that theyre low-skilled and, therefore, unproductive and a binding minimum wage will ensure that the unproductive are kept out or if theyre already in the labor force, theyll be idled. And the deserving, that is to say the productive workers who were always assumed, of course, to be Anglo-Saxon will keep their jobs and get a raise. Its a very appealing notion.

And youre quite right that today, you know, most of the debate or a good part of the minimum wage debate concerns a question of how much unemployment you get for a given increase in the minimum. But theres no question that any disemployment from a higher minimum is a social cause thats undesirable. The progressive era was not seen as a social cause. It was not seen as a bug. It was seen as a desirable feature and this is why progressivism has made a virtue of it precisely because it did exclude so many folks who were regarded as deficientdeficient in their heredity, deficient in their politics, deficient in many other ways as well.

Aaron Powell: What struck me when you were running through the policies that they wanted so the minimum wage in order to exclude these people or the concerns about immigration is how many of them maybeI mean not in the motives behind them necessarily, not in the stated motives but in the specifics of the policies and some of the concerns look very much like what you hear today, you know. There seem to be conventional wisdom about the need to keep out unskilled immigrants. You hear stuff about, you know, theres too many of them in the population and that that will ultimately cause problems if they, you know, tip over into a majority or the existing minimum wage, but they dont seemthey dont have the what we think of as terrifically ugly motives behind them.

And so is therelike that historic change because it seems odd that if the motives and the desires and the attitudes have shifted, we would have seen the resulting policy shift. So how did thathow do we get that transition from, you know, keeping the desire for the policies of the progressive era but shifting our attitudes, our sense of virtue to something that would see the motives behind the policy of the progressive era as so repugnant?

Thomas Leonard: Well, I think that, you know, we teach freshmen in economics to make this fairly bright distinction between the so-called positive and the normative, right? So the positive question is what are the effects of the minimum wage on employment and what are the effects of the minimum wage on output prices and what are the effects of the minimum wage on the income distribution. And you can sort of think about these questions without sort of tipping over onto the normative side which isis it a good thing or a bad thing that a particular class of worker namely the very unskilled are likely to be harmed at all? So you canI think in a way its partly a parable about, you know, the capacity of sorting so-called scientific claims from so-called normative or ethical matters.

You know, my own view is one can be a supporter of the minimum wage, of course, without, you know, having repugnant views about the folks who are going to lose their job if we raise the minimum wage too high.

Trevor Burrus: Yeah, of course. That

Thomas Leonard: Goes with I think that goes without saying.

Trevor Burrus: Well, thats an interesting question about what are the lessons

Thomas Leonard: Yeah.

Trevor Burrus: from this. But I wanted to ask you about one more thing before we kind of get to that question which is aboutbecause theres another one that we didnt touch on which might surprise people, which is excluding women. So we gotwe went therethere were some sterilization, which weve been talking about much but you mentioned excluding unemployable. We had about immigration and now we also have excluding women and people might be surprised to hear that progressives were actually interested in doing this.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah. This is awell, all of these accounts are complex. The story of womens labor legislation is probably the most complex of all and thats partly because in the progressive era, most labor legislation was directed at women and at women only, not all but sort of the pillars of the welfare state which is to say minimum wages, maximum hours, mothers pensions which eventually evolved into AFTC and welfare. Those pillars werethose pillars that legislation was women and women only.

Now, there are different ways of thinking about it. I think that the thing to remember is that a lot of these legislation to set a wage floor to set a maximum number of hours to give women payments women with dependent children payments at home were enacted not so much to protect women from employment, the hazards of employment but rather to protect employment from women.

And when you look at the discourse, you do find a kind of protective paternalistic line where, for example, the famous Brandeis Brief which was used in so many Supreme Court cases in defensive labor legislation just sort of boldly asserts that women are the weaker sex and thats why women as women need to be protected from the hazards of market work. They didnt worry so much about the hazards of domestic work.

Trevor Burrus: And Brandeis was a champion ofI mean hes considered a champion of progressive era, but he did write this unbelievably sexist brief in Muller versus Oregon.

Thomas Leonard: Indeed he did and he collaborated with his sister-in-law, Josephine Goldmark, and its regarded as sort of not only the case but the brief itself is regarded as sort of a landmark in legal circles. So theres also a second class of argument which still lives on today, I might add, which is called the family wage and this is the idea that theres a kind of natural family structure wherein the father is the breadwinner and the mother stays at home and tends the hearth and raises the kids and that male workers are entitled to a wage sufficient to support a wife and other dependents, and that when women work for wages, they wrongly usurp the wages that rightly belong to the breadwinner. Thats another argument for regulating womens employment. Thats not really protecting women. Thats protecting men, of course.

And there were a whole host of arguments. Another argument was worried about womens sexual virtue that if women accepted, you know, low wages at the factory, theyll be tempted into prostitution. The euphemism of the day was the social vice and John Bates Clark pointed out that if 5 dollars a week tempts a factory girl into vice, then 0 dollars a week will do so more surely.

Trevor Burrus: Its really hard to decide when youre going through all this stuff and you include immigration and all these issues whether or not these people arewhen were talking about progressives, so thats the name we all call them now. But if were going to use modern term, are they liberals or are they conservative? I mean if the immigration thing looks conservative now and the protecting womens virtue and supporting the family looks conservative and the racism, you know, but the minimum wage wanting that. So there seemed to be a hodgepodge of something that doesnt really map to anything now.

Thomas Leonard: Yeah, I think thats right. I think its a mistake. I mean one of the problems that we face looking backwards from today is that progressivism todaya progressive today is someone on the left, someone on the left wing of the democratic party and thats not what progressive meant in the progressive era. There certainly were plenty of folks on the left who were progressives but they were also right progressives too. Men like Theodore Roosevelt would be a canonical sort of right progressive. Roosevelt ran as you know on that progressive ticket in 1912 handing the White House to Woodrow Wilson in so doing.

Yeah, I thinkyeah, one of the, you know, the historiographic lessons of the book is be careful projecting contemporary categories backwards in time. You know, the original progressives, they defended human hierarchy. They were Darwinists. They either ignored or justified Jim Crow. They were moralists. They were evangelicals. They promoted the claims of the nation over individuals and they had this, of course, heroic conception of their own roles as experts. Thats very different from what 21st century progressives are about. The 21st century progressives couldnt be more different in some respects. Theyre not evangelicals. Theyre very secular. They emphasize racial equality and minority rights. Theyre nervous about nationalism but they donttheyre not imperialists like the progressives were. Theyre unhappy with too much Darwinism in their social science. So, in these respects contemporary progressives are very different from their namesakes.

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Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics ... - Libertarianism.org

This is not without reason. Libertarians talk a lot about auditing the Federal Reserve and returning U.S. currency to the gold standard. They rail against the war on drugs and many of them, including the party's front-runner, enjoy pot. But as the Libertarian Party gathers in Florida to select its nominee during an unprecedented year in politics, it has a chance to break out of the fringe.

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Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, the party's 2012 presidential nominee and the frontrunner this cycle, said, "The more government does, the less freedom we enjoy. The Libertarian view is in favor of smaller government and greater individual liberty."

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Petersen has split with many socially liberal members of his party on abortion, which allows him to pitch himself social conservatives in a way other candidates cannot.

"I believe a fetus is a human child," Petersen said. "You cannot have liberty without sanctity of life."

Meanwhile, John McAfee, a cybersecurity expert who earned international notoriety years before his recent run for the Libertarian nomination, described libertarianism as an economic and social lifestyle of its own. He rolled off a list of principles he said defined his understanding of the party.

"Number one, our bodies and our minds belong to ourselves and not to the government or anyone else for that matter. Number two, we should not harm one another," McAfee recited.

"Number three, we should not take each other's stuff. We should not steal each other's property. Number four, we should keep our agreements."

Carla Howell, political director of the Libertarian National Committee, offered the party's own answer.

"We advocate for minimum government and maximum freedom," Howell said.

When it comes to policy, Howell cited party commitments to cutting taxes, ending the war on drugs and privatizing poorly performing government agencies. She took the TSA to task in particular, calling for its elimination. Howell also said the Libertarian Party advocates ending military interventions and foreign aid, which she said would promote peace and reduce spending.

"Bottom line," Howell said, "We need to make government much smaller than it is today."

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These days , in the occasional university philosophy classroom, the differences between Robert Nozicks Anarchy, State, and Utopia (libertarianism) and John Rawls A Theory of Justice (social liberalism) are still discussed vigorously. In order to demonstrate a broad spectrum of possible political philosophies it is necessary to define the outer boundaries, these two treatises stand like sentries at opposite gatesof the polis

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Rawls presents an account of justice in the form of two principles: (1) liberty principle= peoples equal basic liberties such as freedom of speech, freedom of conscience (religion), and the right to vote should be maximized, and (2) difference principle= inequalities in social and economic goods are acceptable only if they promote the welfare of the least advantaged members of society. Rawls writes in the social contract tradition. He seeks to define equilibrium points that, when accumulated, form a civil system characterized by what he calls justice as fairness. To get there he deploys an argument whereby people in an original position (state of nature), make decisions (legislate laws) behind a veil of ignorance (of their place in the society rich or poor) using a reasoning technique he calls reflective equilibrium. It goes something like: behind the veil of ignorance, with no knowledge of their own places in civil society, Rawls posits that reasonable people will default to social and economic positions that maximize the prospects for the worst off feed and house the poor in case you happen to become one. Its much like the prisoners dilemma in game theory. By his own words Rawls = left-liberalism.

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, libertarian response to Rawls which argues that only a minimal state devoted to the enforcement of contracts and protecting people against crimes like assault, robbery, fraud can be morally justified. Nozick suggests that the fundamental question of political philosophy is not how government should be organized but whether there should be any state at all, he is close to John Locke in that government is legitimate only to the degree that it promotes greater security for life, liberty, and property than would exist in a chaotic, pre-political state of nature. Nozick concludes, however, that the need for security justifies only a minimal, or night-watchman, state, since it cannot be demonstrated that citizens will attain any more security through extensive governmental intervention. (Nozick p.25-27)

the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection. (Nozick Preface p.ix)

Differences:

Similarities:

Some Practical Questions for Rawls:

Some Practical Questions for Nozick:

Read The Liberal Imagination of Frederick Douglass for an excellent discussion on the state of liberalism in America today.

Citations:

Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Robert Nozick. Basic Books. 1974

A Theory of Justice. John Rawls. Harvard University Press. 1971

Disclaimer: This is a forum for me to capture in digital type my understanding of various philosophies and philosophers. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the interpretations.

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Rawls and Nozick: Liberalism Vs Libertarianism

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Il libertarianismo[1] (chiamato anche, impropriamente, libertarismo, termine che identifica una differente e pi ampia ideologia) un insieme di filosofie politiche tra loro correlate che considerano la libert come il pi alto fine politico.[2] Ci include la libert individuale[3], la libert politica e l'associazione volontaria. Le parole libertarianism e libertarism furono usate dalla seconda met del XX secolo da filosofi e politici anglosassoni che provenivano da differenti formazioni culturali (talvolta anche contrapposte): ossia quelle del liberalismo, socialismo, comunismo[4][5][6][7] e dell'anarchismo.

L'idea politica del libertarismo si rif al sistema economico capitalista e al diritto alla propriet privata, ma le sue numerose correnti divergono sul peso e sulla stessa figura dello Stato: gli anarco-capitalisti premono per una sua totale eliminazione, mentre i miniarchisti mirano a preservare un'autorit pubblica che svolga compiti basilari di difesa e ordine pubblico, o anche una ridotta assistenza sociale.[8]

In lingua inglese, i termini libertarism e libertarianism sono utilizzati come sinonimi nell'uso politico, per la precisione libertarism indica quasi invariabilmente il movimento collettivista, o left libertarianism, mentre libertarianism pu indicare sia il movimento anarchico che i partiti di stampo liberale.[senzafonte] Nella maggior parte delle altre lingue ad esempio neolatine si distingue tra libertarismo, un concetto ampio sinonimo di anarchia[9], che in quanto tale si identifica con l'anarchismo e il socialismo libertario, e libertarianismo, che trae le sue origini dal liberalismo classico[1], le cui correnti principali sono l'anarco-capitalismo e il miniarchismo.

I libertariani si definiscono di solito come liberali coerenti, rigorosi e nemici della coercizione, propugnando in modo radicale le tesi tipiche del liberalismo.[10]

Due sono i filoni pi diffusi del libertarianismo:

I miniarchisti prospettano uno Stato ridotto alla minima funzione di garante delle libert individuali, ovvero lo stato di diritto; questa corrente costituzionalista si rifa evidentemente ai pensatori originali del liberalismo, per esempio John Locke, e in tempi pi recenti a intellettuali del calibro di Friedrich Von Hayek e Robert Nozick. Per i sostenitori del miniarchismo lo Stato tenuto a intervenire in economia, in linea di massima, solo per garantire un corretto svolgimento del libero mercato, abbattendo i monopoli e gli oligopoli (qualora questi siano venuti in essere violando i diritti individuali) e costruendo le necessarie e ovvie infrastrutture.

Gli anarco-capitalisti giudicano le proposte del miniarchismo incoerenti dal punto di vista teorico e irrealizzabili sul piano concreto, proponendo invece l'abolizione dello Stato e la realizzazione di un sistema di privatopie, entit territoriali auto-organizzate nei limiti delle libert individuali in grado di fornire servizi di libero mercato, sviluppantesi secondo un sistema di adesione volontaria alle regole che ogni enclave stabilisce autonomamente. Il sistema delle privatopie esclude a priori l'esistenza di nazioni e soprattutto entit sovranazionali, ammettendo unicamente la diffusione di una capillare e interattiva rete di piccole comunit private. Il principale punto di riferimento intellettuale della corrente anarco-capitalista Murray Newton Rothbard.

All'interno di questa visione radicale, i libertariani anarcocapitalisti intendono privatizzare, o meglio porre su un mercato libero, quei settori come l'amministrazione della giustizia, la sicurezza e l'ordine pubblico che perfino i liberali classici considerano alla stregua di prerogative esclusive dello Stato; in questo senso va letta la loro idea di anarco-individualismo.

La filosofia politica ed economica contemporanea stenta a riconoscere la validit delle teorie libertariane, non tanto per l'opposizione alla gestione privatizzata e concorrenziale di settori fondamentali dello stato sociale come la giurisdizione, quanto per il fondato timore che in un assetto socio-economico cos definito, privo di qualsivoglia governo centrale, una congrega ristretta di individui molto potenti sia tentata di imporre coercitivamente la propria autorit al resto della comunit; in pratica, il sistema anarco-capitalista sarebbe non auspicabile perch tenderebbe a favorire, nel momento stesso in cui venisse implementato, quei pochissimi soggetti che gi dispongono di un notevole potere finanziario (multinazionali, banche d'investimento, lobby industriali etc.). Lo stato di diritto invece, essendo, quanto meno nelle sue forme pi avanzate, basato sul sistema democratico della decisione politica, tenderebbe invece a contrastare la concentrazione del potere nelle mani di esigui gruppi privilegiati, dal momento che, qualunque sia la politica economica di una comunit, la maggior parte degli individui di quella stessa comunit ha interesse a difendere le gi ristrette risorse e propriet di cui dispone a fronte della soverchiante ricchezza di pochi soggetti. Uno degli oppositori pi spietati dell'anarco-capitalismo Noam Chomsky, il quale, da socialista libertario come egli stesso si definito, ha affermato che le idee libertariane, qualora applicate al mondo reale della politica, produrrebbero "tali forme di tirannia e oppressione come se ne sono viste poche nella storia dell'umanit".

I libertariani, d'altro canto, rigettano totalmente le accuse che vengono loro rivolte indistintamente dagli altri schieramenti politici, sia conservatori che progressisti, argomentando che in tutta la storia della civilt umana, se proprio vi un colpevole di violazione dei diritti umani, questi soprattutto lo Stato. E infatti proprio il potere astratto e non vincolante dell'autorit statale stato il principale mezzo con cui piccoli gruppi di potere o addirittura singoli individui hanno potuto, in tutti i tempi e in tutti i luoghi, realizzare forme di governo tiranniche, soverchianti e contrarie alle pi elementari regole di pacifica convivenza civile, o reiterare arbitrariamente la violazione del diritto di autodeterminazione di ogni essere umano, tra cui, al netto dell'evidenza, vi sono gli interventi armati contro altre popolazioni, minoranze o addirittura nazioni, sistematicamente portate avanti in nome di uno specifico ordine sociale da raggiungere e da imporre a tutti, o in nome di una generica sicurezza e stabilit nazionale.

Laddove quindi i tradizionali sostenitori dello Stato, inclusi i liberali classici, vedono in questo un'alta e possibilmente equa autorit garante dei diritti individuali, senza il quale sarebbe impossibile contenere lo spirito egoistico umano, che in un contesto anarchico non avrebbe freni n argini per manifestarsi, invece i libertariani pongono maggior fiducia nello spirito filiale dell'umanit, rammentando che le stesse idee di libert e uguaglianza sono nate dal basso, ovvero sono sorte spontaneamente dalla creativit mentale dei singoli, e non certo imposte dall'alto per "decreto intellettuale" da una presunta autorit garante della ragione. Il libero mercato, dunque, essendo per l'appunto una manifestazione spontanea e originale dello spirito di cooperazione umano, da intendere come la volont organica e orizzontale di una comunit di individui di determinare, ognuno per s stesso, il corso della propria vita, vivrebbe per necessit di autoregolazione, che nella visione libertariana viene chiamata anche "propriet di se stessi" o principio di non aggressione.

Gli anarchici di tradizione socialista usano il termine libertario per descrivere se stessi e le loro idee sin dal 1857. "Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement sociale", fu ad esempio pubblicato a New York dal 1858 al 1861 dal rivoluzionario anarcocomunista Joseph Dejacque[11]. Nella seconda met del 1900, negli Stati Uniti d'America, fece ingresso l'accezione liberal-libertaria, in genere indicata come libertarianism, ma, a volte libertarism. Il termine libertarianism, specificamente, nel 1970 rientrer in Europa per le traduzioni dell'economista francese Henri Lepage, con l'intenzione d'evitare evidenti fraintendimenti.

Le parole libertarismo e libertario furono quindi usate dalla seconda met del XX secolo da filosofi e politici anglosassoni che provenivano da differenti contrapposte formazioni culturali, e quindi, principalmente in lingua inglese, tali termini attualmente indicano movimenti culturali e politici che pur definendosi in traduzione italiana libertari sono assolutamente in antitesi tra loro. Filosofi e politici definiti libertari sono quindi in diverse tradizioni culturali ossia quelle del liberalismo, socialismo, comunismo e anarchismo: quest'ultimo movimento politico-sociale ha poi adottato il termine libertarismo appunto per autodefinirsi[12].

Negli anni settanta del XX secolo nasce negli Usa un partito politico che raccoglie una lunga storia di antistatalismo di taglio liberale e che si autodefinisce libertarian, il Libertarian Party, quindi utilizzando il termine in senso proprio, senza rispettare n i crismi anarchici della tradizione socialista, n, dunque, quelli libertari intesi nel senso europeo del termine.

Il Partito Libertariano degli Stati Uniti d'America, (LP) dall'11 dicembre 1971, data della sua fondazione, costantemente cresciuto, venendo a ricadere, utilizzando un termine innumerario, tra i terzi partiti ovvero tra i partiti minori che distaccati di diversi ordini di grandezza dai primi due, sono comunque presenti seppure a livello di decimali di milione. (Constitution Party, Green Party, Libertarian Party). Per le presidenziali del 2004 si posizionato sui 0.2 milioni di cittadini affiliati (Democratic 72.00, Republican 55.00, Indipendent 42.00, Constitution 0.37, Green 0.31, Libertarian 0.20). Nelle elezioni del 2008 il candidato libertarian con 532995 voti, lo 0,40% di preferenze, si aggiudicato la quarta posizione.

Si caratterizza per il forte antistatalismo, la volont di escludere qualunque intervento statale in campo di Welfare State in particolare nel campo della salute pubblica (abolizione di ogni forma di assistenza sanitaria universale garantita), e l'abolizione di ogni forma di tassazione generalista (corrispondente all'IVA italiana).

Da alcuni decenni, questo termine usato soprattutto per definire, in senso pi ampio, quelle teorie che danno preminenza alla scelta individuale davanti alle pretese di qualunque potere politico.

Il movimento mostra sensibilit verso la protezione della propriet e della libert di mercato ed uso comune definire "libertarianism" (e spesso anche "propertarianism", per distinguerlo maggiormente dal libertarismo di matrice anarchica tradizionale e socialista) la corrente anarco-capitalista, cio la versione pi estrema del pensiero liberale, la quale ha trovato la propria espressione pi significativa in Murray N. Rothbard.

Tale "libertarianism" affonda le sue radici nella tradizione dell'individualismo americano professando l'idea di un mercato completamente sottratto ad ogni tutela statale, che lasci l'individuo padrone di s in ogni aspetto della vita dell'individuo, inclusi i servizi di protezione, la giustizia e il diritto. La maggioranza dei suoi teorici sono fautori del giusnaturalismo lockiano, ma esiste anche una variante utilitarista (David Friedman). In Europa i massimi esponenti di tale teoria politica sono Hans-Hermann Hoppe e Anthony de Jasay.

Esistono in seno al movimento libertariano americano ed europeo una variet[13][14][15][16][17] di tendenze:

I libertariani, sia europei che americani, giudicano contraddittoria con le premesse antistataliste la tradizionale avversione degli anarchici di tradizione socialista (es. Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Chomsky, ecc.) ad ogni idea di un libero mercato basato sulla legittimit della propriet privata, sullo scambio volontario e su interazioni umane liberamente scelte.

A causa dei problemi semantici sopra evidenziati, l'uso dei termini "libertario/libertarismo" per indicare l'anarchismo classico, e dei termini "libertariano/libertarianismo" per indicare l'anarco-capitalismo, praticamente ovunque diffuso, tranne che nei paesi di lingua inglese. L'affinit dei due termini in ogni caso, rende frequente la necessit di disambiguazione.

Tra i movimenti che si rifanno alle ideologie libertariane ma che non viene da molti ritenuto propriamente libertarian si ritrova anche il movimento politico statunitense Libertarian National Socialist Green Party (LNSGP) della corrente nazional-libertariana verde, una organizzazione dalla dubbia reale esistenza[18] (non legata al Libertarian Party) che coltiva elementi di libertarianismo in un retroterra culturale e ideologico nazional-conservatore e ambientalista, improntando il suo programma alla difesa dell'identit nazionale e delle "esigenze ambientali", considerando comunque una degenerazione le tendenze di supremazia razziale tipiche del white power.

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Libertarianismo - Wikipedia

I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God designed us to occupy

Sarah Moore Grimk, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes

There is not a feminist alive who could possibly look to the male legal system for real protection from the systemized sadism of men. Women fight to reform male law, in the areas of rape and battery for instance, because something is better than nothing. In general, we fight to force the law to recognize us as the victims of the crimes committed against us, but the results so far have been paltry and pathetic.

Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone

Lets start with what this essay will do, and what it will not. We are both convinced of, and this essay will take more or less for granted, that the political traditions of libertarianism and feminism are both in the main correct, insightful, and of the first importance in any struggle to build a just, free, and compassionate society. We do not intend to try to justify the import of either tradition on the others terms, nor prove the correctness or insightfulness of the non-aggression principle, the libertarian critique of state coercion, the reality and pervasiveness of male violence and discrimination against women, or the feminist critique of patriarchy. Those are important conversations to have, but we wont have them here; they are better found in the foundational works that have already been written within the feminist and libertarian traditions. The aim here is not to set down doctrine or refute heresy; its to get clear on how to reconcile commitments to both libertarianism and feminismalthough in reconciling them we may remove some of the reasons that people have had for resisting libertarian or feminist conclusions. Libertarianism and feminism, when they have encountered each other, have most often taken each other for polar opposites. Many 20th century libertarians have dismissed or attacked feminismwhen they have addressed it at allas just another wing of Left-wing statism; many feminists have dismissed or attacked libertarianismwhen they have addressed it at allas either Angry White Male reaction or an extreme faction of the ideology of the liberal capitalist state. But we hold that both judgments are unjust; many of the problems in combining libertarianism with feminism turn out to be little more than terminological conflicts that arose from shifting political alliances in the course of the 20th century; and most if not all of the substantive disagreements can be negotiated within positions already clearly established within the feminist and libertarian traditions. What we hope to do, then, is not to present the case for libertarianism and for feminism, but rather to clear the ground a bit so that libertarianism and feminism can recognize the important insights that each has to offer the other, and can work together on terms that allow each to do their work without slighting either.

We are not the first to cover this ground. Contemporary libertarian feminists such as Joan Kennedy Taylor and Wendy McElroy have written extensively on the relationship between libertarianism and feminism, and they have worked within the libertarian movement to encourage appeals to feminist concerns and engagement with feminist efforts. But as valuable as the 20th century libertarian feminists scholarship has been, we find many elements of the libertarian feminism they propose to be both limited and limiting; the conceptual framework behind their synthesis all too often marginalizes or ignores large and essential parts of the feminist critique of patriarchy, and as a result they all too often keep really existing feminist efforts at arms length, and counsel indifference or sharply criticize activism on key feminist issues. In the marriage that they propose, libertarianism and feminism are one, and that one is libertarianism; we, on the other hand, aver that if counseling cannot help libertarianism form a more respectful union, then we could hardly blame feminists for dumping it.

But we think that there is a better path forward. McElroy and others have rightly called attention to a tradition of libertarian feminism that mostly been forgotten by both libertarians and feminists in the 20th century: the 19th century radical individualists, including Voltairine de Cleyre, Angela Heywood, Herbert Spencer, and Benjamin Tucker, among others. The individualists endorsed both radical anti-statism and also radical feminism (as well as, inter alia, allying with abolitionism and the labor movement), because they understood both statism and patriarchy as components of an interlocking system of oppression. An examination of the methods and thought of these individualistsand of Second Wave feminism in light of the individualist traditiondoes show what McElroy and Taylor have argued it doesbut in a way very different from what they might have expected, andwe arguewith very different implications for the terms on which libertarianism and feminism can work together.

The parallels between libertarian and feminist insights are striking. The state is male in the feminist sense, MacKinnon argues, in that the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women (MacKinnon 1989, Chapter 8 11). The libertarian completion of this thought is that the state sees and treats everybodythough not in equal degreethe way men see and treat women. The ideal of a womans willing surrender to a benevolent male protector both feeds and is fed by the ideal of the citizenrys willing surrender to a benevolent governmental protector. We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors, Ezra Heywood remarked (McElroy 1991, p. 227); in the same way, libertarians have often described the state as an entity that protects people primarily from harms caused or exacerbated by the state in the first place. Just as, under patriarchy, forced sex is not recognized as real or fully serious rape unless the perpetrator is a stranger rather than ones husband or boyfriend, so, under statism, governmental coercion is not recognized as real or fully serious tyranny unless it happens under a non-democratic government, a dictatorship. The marriage vow, as a rape license, has its parallel in the electoral ballot, as a tyranny license. Those who seek to withhold consent from their countrys governmental apparatus altogether get asked the same question that battered women get asked: If you dont like it, why dont you leave? the mans rightful jurisdiction over the home, and the states over the country, being taken for granted. Its always the woman, not the abusive man, who needs to vacate the home (to go where?); its likewise the citizen, not the abusive state, that needs to vacate the territory (to go where?).

Despite these parallels, however, many libertarians libertarian feminists definitely included seems surprisingly unsympathetic to most of what feminists have to say. (And vice versa, of course, but the vice versa is not our present topic.) When feminists say that gender and sexuality are socially constructed, libertarians often dismiss this as metaphysical subjectivism or nihilism. But libertarians do not call their own Friedrich Hayek a subjectivist or nihilist when he says that the objects of economic activity, such as a commodity or an economic good, nor food or money, cannot be defined in objective terms [CRS I. 3], and more broadly that tools, medicine, weapons, words, sentences, communications, and acts of production, and generally all the objects of human activity which constantly occur in the social sciences, are not such in virtue of some objective properties possessed by the things, or which the observer can find out about them [IEO III. 2], but instead are defined in terms of human attitudes toward them. [IEO II. 9]

Libertarians are often unimpressed by feminist worries about social norms that disable anything a woman says from counting as declining consent to sexual access, but they are indignant at theories of tacit or hypothetical consent that disable anything a citizen says from counting as declining consent to governmental authority. Libertarians often conclude that gender roles must not be oppressive since many women accept them; but they do not analogously treat the fact that most citizens accept the legitimacy of governmental compulsion as a reason to question its oppressive character; on the contrary, they see their task as one of consciousness-raising and demystification, or, in the Marxian phrase, plucking the flowers from the chains to expose their character as chains.

When radical feminists say that male supremacy rests in large part on the fact of rapeas when Susan Brownmiller characterizes rape as a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear (Against Our Will, p. 15)libertarians often dismiss this on the grounds that not all men are literal rapists and not all women are literally raped. But when their own Ludwig von Mises says that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action, that it rests in the last resort on the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen, and that its essential feature is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning [HA VI.27.2], libertarians applaud this as a welcome demystification of the state. Libertarians rightly recognize that legally enacted violence is the means by which all rulers keep all citizens in a state of fear, even though not all government functionaries personally beat, kill, or imprison anybody, and even though not all citizens are beaten, killed, or imprisoned; the same interpretive charity towards the radical feminist analysis of rape is not too much to ask.

Brownmillers and other feminists insights into the pervasiveness of battery, incest, and other forms of male violence against women, present both a crisis and an opportunity for libertarians. Libertarianism professes to be a comprehensive theory of human freedom; what is supposed to be distinctive about the libertarian theory of justice is that we concern ourselves with violent coercion no matter who is practicing iteven if he has a government uniform on. But what feminists have forced into the public eye in the last 30 years is that, in a society where one out of every four women faces rape or battery by an intimate partner, and where women are threatened or attacked by men who profess to love them, because the men who attack them believe that being a man means you have the authority to control women, male violence against women is nominally illegal but nevertheless systematic, motivated by the desire for control, culturally excused, and hideously ordinary. For libertarians, this should sound eerily familiar; confronting the full reality of male violence means nothing less than recognizing the existence of a violent political order working alongside, and independently of, the violent political order of statism. As radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon writes, Unlike the ways in which men systematically enslave, violate, dehumanize, and exterminate other men, expressing political inequalities among men, mens forms of dominance over women have been accomplished socially as well as economically, prior to the operation of the law, without express state acts, often in intimate contexts, as everyday life (1989, p. 161). Male supremacy has its own ideological rationalizations, its own propaganda, its own expropriation, and its own violent enforcement; although it is often in league with the male-dominated state, male violence is older, more invasive, closer to home, and harder to escape than most forms of statism. This means that libertarians who are serious about ending all forms of political violence need to fight, at least, a two-front war, against both statism and male supremacy; an adequate discussion of what this insight means for libertarian politics requires much more time than we have here. But it is important to note how the writings of some libertarians on the familyespecially those who identify with the paleolibertarian political and cultural projecthave amounted to little more than outright denial of male violence. Hans Hermann Hoppe, for example, goes so far as to indulge in the conservative fantasy that the traditional internal layers and ranks of authority in the family are actually bulwarks of resistance vis-a-vis the state (Secession, the State, and the Immigration Problem IV). The ranks of authority in the family, of course, means the pater familias, and whether father-right is, at a given moment in history, mostly in league with or somewhat at odds with state prerogatives, the fact that it is so widely enforced by the threat or practice of male violence means that trying to enlist it in the struggle against statism is much like enlisting Stalin in order to fight Hitlerno matter who wins, we all lose.

Some of libertarians sharpest jabs at feminism have been directed against feminist criticisms of sexual harassment, misogynist pornography, or sadomasochism. Feminists in particular are targeted as the leading crusaders for political correctness, and characterized as killjoys, censors, or man-haters for criticising speech or consensual sex acts in which women are denigrated or dominated; it is apparently claimed that since the harassment or the portrayal doesnt (directly) involve violence, there arent any grounds for taking political exception to it. But the popularity in libertarian circles of Ayn Rands novel The Fountainhead (a deeply problematic novel from a feminist standpoint, but instructive on the present point) indicates that libertarians know better when it comes to, say, conformity and collectivism. Although its political implications are fairly clear, The Fountainhead pays relatively little attention to governmental oppression per se; its main focus is on social pressures that encourage conformity and penalize independence. Rand traces how such pressures operate through predominantly non-governmental and (in the libertarian sense) non-coercive means, in the business world, the media, and society generally. Some of the novels characters give in, swiftly or slowly, and sell their souls for social advancement; others resist but end up marginalized, impoverished, and psychologically debilitated as a result. Only the novels hero succeeds, eventually, in achieving worldly success without sacrificing his integrity but only after a painful and superhuman struggle. It would be hard to imagine libertarians describing fans of The Fountainhead as puritans or censors because of their objections to the Ellsworth Tooheys of the worldeven though Tooheys malign influence is mainly exercised through rhetorical and social means rather than by legal force. An uncharitable reading that the situation unfortunately suggests is that libertarians can recognize non-governmental oppression in principle, but in practice seem unable to grasp any form of oppression other than the ones that well-educated white men may have experienced for themselves.

A more charitable reading of libertarian attitudes might be this: while the collectivist boycott of independent minds and stifling of creative excellence in The Fountainhead is not itself enacted through government means, collectivism clearly is associated with the mass psychology that supports statism. So is patriarchy, actually, but it is most closely associated with a non-governmental form of oppressionthat is, male supremacy and violence against women. All this makes it seem, at times, that libertariansincluding libertarian feministsare suffering from a sort of willful conceptual blindness; perhaps because they are afraid to grant the existence of serious and systematic forms of political oppression that are not connected solely or mainly with the state. Its as though, if they granted any political critique of the outcomes of voluntary association, they would thereby be granting that voluntary association as such is oppressive, and that government regulation is the solution. But such a phobic reaction only makes sense if you first accept (either tacitly or explicitly) the premise that all politics is exclusively the domain of the government, and as such (given Misess insights into the nature of government) all political action is essentially violent action. This is, as it were, a problem that has no name; but we might call it the authoritarian theory of politics, since it amounts to the premise that any political question is a question resolved by violence; many 20th century libertarians simply grant the premise and then, because they hold that no question is worth resolving by (initiatory) violence, they call for the death of politics in human affairs.

At least one libertarian theorist, the late Don Lavoie, makes our point when he observes that there is

much more to politics than government. Wherever human beings engage in direct discourse with one another about their mutual rights and responsibilities, there is a politics. I mean politics in the sense of the public sphere in which discourse over rights and responsibilities is carried on, much in the way Hannah Arendt discusses it. . The force of public opinion, like that of markets, is not best conceived as a concentrated will representing the public, but as the distributed influence of political discourses throughout society. Inside the firm, in business lunches, at street corners, interpersonal discourses are constantly going on in markets. In all those places there is a politics going on, a politics that can be more or less democratic. Leaving a service to the forces of supply and demand does not remove it from human decision making, since everything will depend on exactly what it is that the suppliers and demanders are trying to achieve. What makes a legal culture, any legal system, work is a shared system of belief in the rules of justice a political culture. The culture is, in turn, an evolving process, a tradition which is continually being reappropriated in creative ways in the interpersonal and public discourses through which social individuals communicate. Everything depends here on what is considered an acceptable social behavior, that is, on the constraints imposed by a particular political culture. To say we should leave everything to be decided by markets does not, as [libertarians] suppose, relieve liberalism of the need to deal with the whole realms of politics. And to severely limit or even abolish government does not necessarily remove the need for democratic processes in nongovernmental institutions.

Its true that a libertarian could (as Karl Hess, for example, does) simply insist on a definition of politics in terms of the authoritarian theory, and stick consistently to the stipulation, while also doing work on a systemic critique of forms of oppression that arent (by their definition) enacted through the political means; they would simply have to hold that a full appreciation of oppressive conditions requires a thorough understanding of what the economic means or action in the market or civil society can include. But given the curious misunderstandings that many libertarians seem to have of feminist critiques, it seems likely that the issue here isnt merely terminologicalit may be that the real nature of typical feminist concerns and activism is rendered incomprehensible by sticking to stipulations about the use of politics and the market when the ordinary use of those terms wont bear them. You could, if you insisted, look at street harassment as a matter of psychic costs that women face in their daily affairs, and the feminist tactic of womens Ogle-Ins on Wall Street as a means of reducing the supply of male leering by driving up the psychic costs to the producers (using shame and awareness of what its like to face harassment). In this sense, the Ogle-In resembles, in some salient respects, a picket or a boycott. But no-one actually thinks of an Ogle-In as a market activity, even if you can make up some attenuated way of analyzing it under economic categories; it clearly fails to meet a number of conditions (such as the voluntary exchange of goods or services between actors) that are part of our routine, pre-analytic use of terms such as market, producer, and economic. Just as clearly, an Ogle-In has something importantly in common with legislation, court proceedings, and even market activities such as boycotts or pickets that appeals to our pre-analytic use of politicaleven though neither the Ogle-In nor the market protests are violent, or in any way connected with the State: they are all trying to address a question of social coordination through conscious action, and they work by calling on people to make choices with the intent of addressing the social issueas opposed to actions in which the intent is some more narrowly economic form of satisfaction, and any effects on social coordination (for good or for ill) are unintended consequences.

Libertarian temptations to the contrary notwithstanding, it makes no sense to regard the state as the root of all social evil, for there is at least one social evil that cannot be blamed on the state and that is the state itself. If no social evil can arise or be sustained except by the state, how does the state arise, and how is it sustained? As libertarians from La Botie to Rothbard have rightly insisted, since rulers are generally outnumbered by those they rule, the state itself cannot survive except through popular acceptance which the state lacks the power to compel; hence state power is always part of an interlocking system of mutually reinforcing social practices and structures, not all of which are violations of the nonaggression axiom. There is nothing un-libertarian, then, in recognizing the existence of economic and/or cultural forms of oppression which, while they may draw sustenance from the state (and vice versa), are not reducible to state power. One can see statism and patriarchy as mutually reinforcing systems (thus ruling out both the option of fighting statism while leaving patriarchy intact, and the option of fighting patriarchy by means of statism) without being thereby committed to seeing either as a mere epiphenomenon of the other (thus ruling out the option of fighting patriarchy solely indirectly by fighting statism).

The relationship between libertarianism and feminism has not always been so chilly. 19th-century libertarians a group which includes classical liberals in the tradition of Jean-Baptiste Say and Herbert Spencer, as well as individualist anarchists in the tradition of Josiah Warren generally belonged to what Chris Sciabarra has characterized as the radical or dialectical tradition in libertarianism, in which the political institutions and practices that libertarians condemn as oppressive are seen as part of a larger interlocking system of mutually reinforcing political, economic, and cultural structures. Libertarian sociologist Charles Dunoyer, for example, observed:

The first mistake, and to my mind the most serious, is not sufficiently seeing difficulties where they are not recognizing them except in governments. Since it is indeed there that the greatest obstacles ordinarily make themselves felt, it is assumed that that is where they exist, and that alone is where one endeavors to attack them. One is unwilling to see that nations are the material from which governments are made; that it is from their bosom that governments emerge . One wants to see only the government; it is against the government that all the complaints, all the censures are directed .

From this point of view, narrowly directing ones efforts toward purely political reform without addressing the broader social context is unlikely to be effective.

Contrary to their reputation, then, 19th-century libertarians rejected atomistic conceptions of human life. Herbert Spencer, for example, insisted that society is an organism, and that the actions of individuals accordingly cannot be understood except in relation to the social relations in which they participate. Just as, he explained, the process of loading a gun is meaningless unless the subsequent actions performed with the gun are known, and a fragment of a sentence, if not unintelligible, is wrongly interpreted in the absence of its remainder, so any part, if conceived without any reference to the whole, can be comprehended only in a distorted manner. But Spencer saw no conflict between his organismic view of society and his political individualism; in fact Spencer saw the undirected, uncoerced, spontaneous order of organic processes such as growth and nutrition as strengthening the case against, rather than for, the subordination of its individual members to the commands of a central authority. In the same way, American libertarian Stephen Pearl Andrews characterized the libertarian method as trinismal, meaning that it transcended the false opposition between unismal collective aggregation and duismal fragmented diversity. Even the egoist-anarchist Benjamin Tucker insisted that society is a concrete organism irreducible to its aggregated individual members.

While the 19th-century libertarians social holism and attention to broader context have been shared by many 20th-century libertarians as well, 19th-century libertarians were far more likely than their 20th-century counterparts to recognize the subordination of women as a component in the constellation of interlocking structures maintaining and maintained by statism. Dunoyer and Spencer, for example, saw patriarchy as the original form of class oppression, the model for and origin of all subsequent forms of class rule. For Dunoyer, primitive patriarchy constituted a system in which a parasitic governmental lite, the men, made their living primarily by taxing, regulating, and conscripting a productive and industrious laboring class, the women. Herbert Spencer concurred:

The slave-class in a primitive society consists of the women; and the earliest division of labour is that which arises between them and their masters. For a long time no other division of labour exists.

Moreover, Spencer saw an intimate connection between the rise of patriarchy and the rise of militarism:

The primary political differentiation originates from the primary family differentiation. Men and women being by the unlikeness of their functions in life, exposed to unlike influences, begin from the first to assume unlike positions in the community as they do in the family: very early they respectively form the two political classes of rulers and ruled. [In] ordinary cases the men, solely occupied in war and the chase, have unlimited authority, while the women, occupied in gathering miscellaneous small food and carrying burdens, are abject slaves . [whereas in] those few uncivilized societies which are habitually peaceful in which the occupations are not, or were not, broadly divided into fighting and working, and severally assigned to the two sexes along with a comparatively small difference between the activities of the sexes, there goes, or went, small difference of social status. Where the life is permanently peaceful, definite class-divisions do not exist. [T]he domestic relation between the sexes passes into a political relation, such that men and women become, in militant groups, the ruling class and the subject class .

Accordingly, Spencer likewise saw the replacement of militarized hierarchical societies by more market-oriented societies based on commerce and mutual exchange as closely allied with the decline of patriarchy in favor of increasing sexual equality; changing power relations within the family and changing power relations within the broader society stood in relations of interdependence:

The domestic despotism which polygyny involves, is congruous with the political despotism proper to predominant militancy; and the diminishing political coercion which naturally follows development of the industrial type, is congruous with the diminishing domestic coercion which naturally follows the accompanying development of monogamy.

The truth that among peoples otherwise inferior, the position of women is relatively good where their occupations are nearly the same as those of men, seems allied to the wider truth that their position becomes good in proportion as warlike activities are replaced by industrial activities . Where all men are warriors and the work is done entirely by women, militancy is the greatest. [T]he despotism distinguishing a community organized for war, is essentially connected with despotism in the household; while, conversely, the freedom which characterizes public life in an industrial community, naturally characterizes also the accompanying private life. Habitual antagonism with, and destruction of, foes, sears the sympathies; while daily exchange of products and services among citizens, puts no obstacle to increase of fellow-feeling.

In Spencers view, the mutual reinforcement between statism, militarism, and patriarchy continued to characterize 19th-century capitalist society:

To the same extent that the triumph of might over right is seen in a nations political institutions, it is seen in its domestic ones. Despotism in the state is necessarily associated with despotism in the family. [I]n as far as our laws and customs violate the rights of humanity by giving the richer classes power over the poorer, in so far do they similarly violate those rights by giving the stronger sex power over the weaker. To the same extent that the old leaven of tyranny shows itself in the transactions of the senate, it will creep out in the doings of the household. If injustice sways mens public acts, it will inevitably sway their private ones also. The mere fact, therefore, that oppression marks the relationships of out-door life, is ample proof that it exists in the relationships of the fireside.

This analysis of the relation between militarism and patriarchy from the fantastically-maligned but seldom-actually-read radical libertarian Herbert Spencer is strikingly similar to that offered by the fantastically-maligned but seldom-actually-read radical feminist Andrea Dworkin:

I mean that there is a relationship between the way that women are raped and your socialization to rape and the war machine that grinds you up and spits you out: the war machine that you go through just like that woman went through Larry Flynts meat grinder on the cover of Hustler. You damn well better believe that youre involved in this tragedy and that its your tragedy too. Because youre turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live. It is also part of the economy that you frequently claim to protest.

And the problem is that you think its out there: and its not out there. Its in you. The pimps and the warmongers speak for you. Rape and war are not so different. And what the pimps and the warmongers do is that they make you so proud of being men who can get it up and give it hard. And they take that acculturated sexuality and they put you in little uniforms and they send you out to kill and to die. (I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape)

Spencer, for his part, did not confine attention to those forms of patriarchal oppression that were literally violent or coercive in the sense of violating libertarian rights; he denounced not only the legal provision that a husband may justly take possession of his wifes earnings against her will or the statute, which permits a man to beat his wife in moderation and to imprison her in any room in his house, but the entire system of economic and cultural expectations and institutions within which violent forms of oppression were embedded. He complained, for example, of a variety of factorsmore often cultural than legalthat systematically stunted womens education and intellectual development, including such facts as that women are not admissible to the academies and universities in which men get their training, that the kind of life they have to look forward to, does not present so great a range of ambitions, that they are rarely exposed to that most powerful of all stimuli necessity, that the education custom dictates for them is one that leaves uncultivated many of the higher faculties, and that the prejudice against blue-stockings, hitherto so prevalent amongst men, has greatly tended to deter women from the pursuit of literary honours. In the same way he protested against the obstacles to womens physical health and well-being deriving from patriarchal norms of feminine attractiveness and propriety that promoted in the training of girls a certain delicacy, a strength not competent to more than a mile or twos walk, an appetite fastidious and easily satisfied, joined with that timidity which commonly accompanies feebleness.

The 19th-century libertarians attitude toward (what was called) the woman question has much in common with their attitude toward the (analogously labeled) labor question. 19th-century libertarians generally saw the existing capitalist order as a denial, rather than as an expression, of the free market. For most of these thinkers, capitalism meant, not economic laissez-faire (which as libertarians they favored), but rather government intervention in the marketplace on behalf of capitalists at the expense of laborers and consumers, and they condemned it accordingly as the chief prop of plutocratic class oppression. But rather than simply calling for an end to pro-business legislation, they also favored private cooperative action by workers to improve their bargaining power vis--vis employers or indeed to transcend the wage system altogether; hence their support for the labor movement, workers cooperatives, and the like. Similarly, while calling for an end to legislation that discriminated against women, 19th-century libertarians like Spencer did not confine themselves to that task, but also, as weve seen, addressed the economic and cultural barriers to gender equality, private barriers which they saw as operating in coordination with the governmental barriers.

Such problems as domestic violence and crimes of jealousy, for example, derive, Stephen Pearl Andrews taught, primarily from the inculcation of patriarchal values, which encourage a man to suppose that the woman belongs, not to herself, but to him. Although the best immediate solution to this problem may be to knock the man on the head, or to commit him to Sing-Sing, the superior longterm solution is a public sentiment, based on the recognition of the Sovereignty of the Individual. The ultimate cure for domestic violence thus lies in cultural rather than in legal reform: Let the idea be completely repudiated from the mans mind that that woman, or any woman, could, by possibility, belong to him, or was to be true to him, or owed him anything, farther than as she might choose to bestow herself. (Andrews 1889, p. 70) But Andrews solution was not solely cultural but also economic, stressing the need for women to achieve financial independence. Andrews criticized the system by which the husband and father earns all the money, and doles it out in charitable pittances to wife and daughters, who are kept as helpless dependents, in ignorance of business and the responsibilities of life, and liable at any time to be thrown upon their own resources, with no resources to be thrown upon. (p. 42) One key to womens economic independence would be to have children reared in Unitary Nurseries (p. 41), i.e., day care (funded of course by voluntarily pooled resources rather than by the State, which Andrews sought to abolish). Andrews looked forward to a future in which with such provision for the care of children, Women find it as easy to earn an independent living as Men, and thus freed by these changes from the care of the nursery and the household, Woman is enabled, even while a mother, to select whatever calling or profession suits her tastes.

So the individualists libertarianism was not cashed out in ignoring non-governmental forms of oppression, but in their refusal to endorse government intervention as a long-term means of combating them. At first glance, contemporary liberals might find all this puzzling: So the 19th century libertarians recognized these problems, but they didnt want to do anything effective about them? But effective political action only means government force if you buy into the authoritarian theory of politics; and there are good reasonsboth historical and theoreticalfor contemporary feminists to reject it. Feminists such as Kate Millett and Catharine MacKinnon have directly criticized conceptions of politics that are exclusively tied to the the exercise of State power, and throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, radical feminists continually fought against the patronizing response to their program by male Leftists who could not recognize womens personal circumstances as a political issue, or the actions and institutions suggested by Womens Liberation as a political program, precisely because they were outside of the realm of male public debate and government action. And as historians of second-wave feminism such as Susan Brownmiller have shown, many of radical feminisms most striking achievements were brought about through efforts that were both clearly political in nature but also independent of State political processessuch as consciousness-raising groups, ogle-ins and WITCH hexes against street harassment and sexist businesses, and the creation of autonomous women-run institutions such as cooperative day-care centers, womens health collectives, and the first battered womens shelters and rape crisis centers.

Nineteenth century libertarians would hardly have been surprised that these efforts have been as effective as they have without the support of government coercion; in fact, they might very well argue that it is precisely because they have avoided the quagmire of the bureaucratic State that they have been so effective. If libertarian social and economic theory is correct, then non-libertarians typically overestimate the efficacy of governmental solutions, and underestimate the efficacy of non-governmental solutions. The 19th-century libertarian feminists opposed state action not only because of their moral objections to state coercion but also because they understood the state what Ezra Heywood called the booted, spurred and whiskered thing called government (in McElroy 1991, p. 226) as itself a patriarchal institution, whose very existence helped to reinforce patriarchy (or what Angela Heywood called he-ism) in the private sector; using the state to fight male supremacy would thus be like attempting to douse a fire with kerosene. As Voltairine de Cleyre put it:

Today you go to a representative of that power which has robbed you of the earth, of the right of free contract of the means of exchange, taxes you for everything you eat or wear (the meanest form of robbery), you go to him for redress from a thief! It is about as logical as the Christian lady whose husband had been removed by Divine Providence, and who thereupon prayed to said Providence to comfort the widow and the fatherless. In freedom we would not institute a wholesale robber to protect us from petty larceny. (Economic Tendency of Freethought 35)

The 19th-century libertarians would thus not have been surprised to learn that, in our day, anti-pornography law written with feminist intentions has been applied by male police and male judges to censor feminist publications, or that sex discrimination law has, in the hands of male legislators and judges, been used to reverse 19th century feminist gains in custody and divorce law. Hand the he-ist state a club, and you can be sure the club will be used in a he-ist manner.

While adverse power relations in the private sector whether between labor and capital or between men and women were seen as drawing much of their strength from the support given to them by corresponding power relations in the political sector, these thinkers did not conclude that it would be sufficient to direct all their energies against the sins of government in the hope that the private forms of oppression would fall as soon as political forms did. On the contrary, if private oppression drew strength from political oppression, the converse was true as well; 19th-century libertarians saw themselves as facing an interlocking system of private and public oppression, and thus recognized that political liberation could not be achieved except via a thoroughgoing transformation of society as a whole. While such libertarians would have been gratified by the extent to which overt governmental discrimination against women has been diminished in present-day Western societies, they would not have been willing to treat that sort of discrimination as the sole index of gender-based oppression in society.

Moses Harman, for example, maintained not only that the family was patriarchal because it was regulated by the patriarchal state, but also that the state was patriarchal because it was founded on the patriarchal family: I recognize that the government of the United States is exclusive, jealous, partialistic, narrowly selfish, despotic, invasive, paternalistic, monopolistic, and cruel logically and legitimately so because the unit and basis of that government is the family whose chief corner stone is institutional marriage. (In McElroy 199, p. 104) Harman saw the non-governmental sources of patriarchy as analogous to the non-governmental sources of chattel slavery (another social evil against which libertarians were especially active in fighting):

The crystals that hardened and solidified chattel slavery were partly religious; partly economic or industrial, and partly societary . And so likewise it is with the enslavement of woman. The control of sex, of reproduction, is claimed by the priest and clergy man as pre-eminently their own province. Marriage is also an economic institution. Women have an industrial value, a financial value. Orthodox marriage makes man ruler of the house, while the wife is an upper servant without wages. The husband holds the common purse and spends the common earnings, as he sees fit. Marriage is a societary institution pre-eminently so. [A woman] must not only be strictly virtuous, but clearly above suspicion, else social damnation is her life sentence. (In McElroy 1991, pp. 113-4)

Hence the fight against patriarchy would likewise require challenging not only governmental but also religious, economico-industrial, and societary obstacles (such as the social sanctions against divorce, birth control, and careers for women, coordinate with the legal sanctions).

While the non-governmental obstacles drew strength from the governmental ones, Victor Yarros stressed that they also had an independent force of their own. In addition to their burden of economic servitude, which Yarros optimistically opined would not outlive the State and legality for a single day, for it has no other root to depend upon for continued existence, women are also subjected to the misery of being the property, tool, and plaything of man, and have neither power to protest against the use, nor remedies against abuse, of their persons by their male masters and this form of subjugation, he thought, could not be abolished overnight simply by abolishing the state, since it was sanctioned by custom, prejudice, tradition, and prevailing notions of morality and purity; its abolition must thus await further economic and intellectual progress.

Among the private power relations sanctioned by custom, prejudice, and tradition, Yarros included those so-called privileges and special homage accorded by the bourgeois world to women, which the Marxist writer E. Belfort Bax had denounced as tyranny exercised by women over men. Anticipating contemporary feminist critiques of chivalry, Yarros responded:

Not denying that such tyranny exists, I assert that Mr. Bax entirely misunderstands its real nature. Mans condescension he mistakes for submission; marks of womans degradation and slavery his obliquity of vision transforms into properties of sovereignty. Tchernychewsky takes the correct view upon this matter when he makes Vera Pavlovna say; Men should not kiss womens hands, since that ought to be offensive to women, for it means that men do not consider them as human beings like themselves, but believe that they can in no way lower their dignity before a woman, so inferior to them is she, and that no marks of affected respect for her can lessen their superiority. What to Mr. Bax appears to be servility on the part of men is really but insult added to injury.

And Voltairine de Cleyres list of libertarian feminist grievances includes legal and cultural factors equally:

Let Woman ask herself, Why am I the slave of Man? Why is my brain said not to be the equal of his brain? Why is my work not paid equally with his? Why must my body be controlled by my husband? Why may he take my labor in the household, giving me in exchange what he deems fit? Why may he take my children from me? Will them away while yet unborn? (Sex Slavery 11)

19th-century libertarians, especially in the English-speaking world (French libertarians tended to be more socially conservative), were deeply skeptical of the institution of marriage. Marriage is unjust to woman, Moses Harman declared, depriving her of her right of ownership and control of her person, of her children, her name, her time and her labor. I oppose marriage because marriage legalized rape. (In McElroy **, pp100-102) A woman takes the last name first of her father, then of her husband, just as, traditionally, a slave has taken the last name of his master, changing names every time he changed owners. (** p. 112) Some, like Harman and Spencer, thought the solution lay in reconstituting marriage as a purely private relation, neither sanctioned nor regulated by the State, and thus involving no legal privileges for the husband. Others went farther and rejected marriage in any form, public or private, as a legacy of patriarchy; de Cleyre, for example, maintained that the permanent relation of a man and a woman, sexual and economical, whereby the present home and family life is maintained, is a dependent relationship and detrimental to the growth of individual character, regardless of whether it is blessed by a priest, permitted by a magistrate, contracted publicly or privately, or not contracted at all. (They Who Marry Do Ill **) Victor Yarros and Anselme Bellegarrigue nevertheless advised women to exploit existing gender conventions in order to get themselves supported by a man; Benjamin Tucker and Sarah Holmes, by contrast, insisted that every individual, whether man or woman, shall be self-supporting, and have an independent home of his or her own.

19th-century libertarian feminists are not easily classifiable in terms of the contemporary division between (or the stereotypes of) liberal feminists and radical feminists. Weve already seen that they recognized no conflict between the liberal value of individualism and the radical claim that the self is socially constituted. They were also liberal in taking individuals rather than groups as their primary unit of analysis but radical in their contextualizing methodology; they would have agreed with MacKinnons remark that thoughts and ideas are constituent participants in conditions more than mere reflections [ la Marxism] but less than unilineral causes [ la liberalism] of life settings. (MacKinnon 1989, p. 46) They were liberal in their stress on negative freedom and their respect for the actual choices people make, but they were also radical in their recognition that outward acquiescence may not express genuine consent since, in Andrews words, wives have the same motives that slaves have for professing contentment, and smile deceitfully while the heart swells indignantly. (Andrews ***) Unlike some radical feminists (such as Mary Daly), they did not treat patriarchy as the root cause of all other forms of oppression; for them patriarchy was simply one component (though the chronologically first component) of a larger oppressive system, and to the extent that they recognized one of this systems components as causally primary, they were more likely to assign that role to the state. But like radical and unlike liberal feminists, they did not treat sexism as a separable aberration in a basically equitable socio-economic order; they argued that male supremacy was a fundamental principle of a social order that required radical changes in society and culture, as well as law and personal attitudes. Thus they would gladly endorse MacKinnons statement that powerlessness is a problem but redistribution of power as currently defined is not its ultimate solution (MacKinnon 1989, p. 46). 19th century libertarian feminists vigorously debated the degree to which participation in electoral politics was a legitimate means and end for womens liberation; they also offered radical critiques of the traditional family, and were willing to issue the kinds of shocking and extreme condemnations for which todays radical feminists are often criticized as when Andrews and de Cleyre described the whole existing marital system as the house of bondage and the slaughter-house of the female sex (Andrews 1889, **), a prison whose corridors radiate over all the earth, and with so many cells, that none may count them (de Cleyre, Sex Slavery **), or when Bellegarrigue demystified romantic love by noting that [t]he person whom one loves passes into the state of property and has no right; the more one loves her, the more one annihilates her; being itself is denied her, for she does not act from her own action, nor, moreover, does she think from her own thought; she does and thinks what is done and thought for her and despite her, and finally concluded that Love is Hate. As abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (also a libertarian and a feminist) remarked, in another context, in defense of what some considered his extremist rhetoric: I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt. (**) 19th-century libertarian feminism was simultaneously liberal and radical, perhaps because libertarianism precisely is liberalism radicalized.

Since the 19th century, libertarianism and feminism have largely parted ways perhaps, in part, because libertarians allowed the advance of state socialism in the early 20th century to drive them into an alliance with conservatives, an alliance from which libertarians could not hope to emerge unmarked. (Few libertarians today even remember that their 19th-century predecessors often called their position voluntary socialism socialism to contrast it, not with the free market, but with actually existing capitalism, and voluntary to contrast it both with state socialism and with anti-market versions of anarchist socialism.)

Since this parting of ways, feminists have developed increasingly sophisticated analyses and demystifications of patriarchy, but their understanding of statism has grown correspondingly blurred; libertarians have developed increasingly sophisticated analyses and demystifications of statism, but their understanding of patriarchy has grown correspondingly blurred. A 19th-century libertarian feminist, if resurrected today, might thus have much to learn from todays libertarians about how statism works, and from todays feminists about how patriarchy works; but she or he would doubtless also see present-day feminists as, all too often, extraordinarily insensitive to the pervasive and inherently destructive effects of state hegemony per se, and present-day libertarians as, all too often, extraordinarily insensitive to the pervasive and inherently destructive effects of male hegemony per se. A contemporary marriage, or remarriage, of feminism with libertarianism thus seems a consummation devoutly to be wished but not if it is now to be a patriarchal marriage, one in which the feminism is subordinated to or absorbed into or muffled by the libertarianism, a marriage in which one party retains, while the other renounces, its radical edge. Our concern about the nature of libertarian feminism in its contemporary form is precisely that it tends to represent this sort of unequal union.

Libertarian feminist Joan Kennedy Taylor has written extensively on the need for a more libertarian feminism and a more feminist libertarianism. While her work has been admirable in highlighting the importance of synthesizing libertarian insights with feminist insights, and in her willingness to call fellow libertarians to task when it is needed, we worry that her attempt at a synthesis often recapitulates antifeminist themes, and hobbles her feminist program in the process.

Many of the most frustrating elements of Taylors attempt at libertarian feminism are connected with what you might call her dialectical strategy: throughout Taylors work she attempts to position herself, and her libertarian feminism, mainly by means of oppositionby her insistent efforts to ally it with mainstream, liberal feminism and thus to distance it from extreme, radical feminism. The positioning strategywhich we might call Radical Menace politicscomes uncomfortably close to classical anti-feminist divide-and-conquer politics, in which the feminist world is divided into the reasonable (that is, unthreatening) feminists and the feminists who are hysterical or man-hating (so, presumably, not worthy of rational response). In antifeminist hands the strategy comes uncomfortably close to a barely-intellectualized repetition of old antifeminist standbys such as the hairy-legged man-hater or the hysterical lesbian. Unfortunately, feminists aiming in good faith at the success of the movement have also responded to radical-baiting by falling into the trap of defining themselves primarily by opposition to the extreme positions of other feminists. In both cases, the specter of That Kind of Feminist is invoked to give feminists the Hobsons Choice between being marginalized and ignored, or being bullied into dulling the feminist edge of their politics wherever it is threatening enough to offend the mainstream.

While Taylors work shows a great deal more understanding of, and sympathy with, classical feminist concerns than antifeminist radical-baiters, her treatment of issues pioneered by radical feministssuch as sexual harassment in the workplacedo seem to combine the authoritarian theory of politics with Radical Menace rhetoric in ways that leave it limited and frustrating. Her book on sexual harassment, oxymoronically subtitled A Non-Adversarial Approach to Sexual Harassment, much of what women experience as harassment in the workplace is simply a misunderstanding between the male and female subcultures, a misperception by women of such practices among men in traditionally all-male environments as hazing newcomers or telling sexist jokes. For Taylor, male behavior that may seem directed at women in a hostile way may just be treating them as women often say they wish to be treated like men. (p. 7) Because women are the ones who are seeking to enter male workplaces that are permeated by male culture, Taylor concludes that it should be the woman, and not the man, whose behavior is modified. (p. 200)

But why, then, doesnt it equally follow that libertarians living in a predominantly statist culture should stop complaining about governmental coercion and instead adapt themselves to the status quo? After all, statists dont just tax and regulate libertarians; they tax and regulate each other. This is how statists have, for centuries, behaved toward one another in traditionally all-statist environments, and, one might argue, theyre just innocently treating libertarians the same way. If Taylor and other libertarians are nevertheless unwilling take such statist behavior for granted, why should women follow her advice to take the analogous male behavior for granted? As Elizabeth Brake writes:

But why is part of mens culture to tell dirty and anti-female jokes, as Taylor claims? She writes that women should shrug off such joking . Would the workplace situation that Taylor describes seem as harmless if she wrote, Whites tell dirty and anti-black jokes among themselves? Would she still counsel that the targets of such jokes should toughen up, rather than advocating a behavioral change on the part of the jokers? It is staggering that Taylor forgets to ask why these jokes target women. And why does the hazing or teasing of women take a sexual form? I take it that men do not grope each other as part of their hazing rituals.

To this we may add: and why are these still traditionally all-male or mostly-male environments, long after most purely legislative barriers to workplace equality have fallen? Is the behavior Taylor describes merely an effect, and not also in part a sustaining cause, of such workplace inequality?

Taylor has much to say about the harmful effects of power relations in the political sphere, but she seems oddly blind to harmful power relations in the private sphere; and much of her advice strikes us as counseling women to adapt themselves docilely to existing patriarchal power structures so long as those structures are not literally coercive in the strict libertarian sense. This sort of advice draws its entire force from the authoritarian theory of politicsin assuming that state violence is the only politically effective means for combating patriarchy. Taylor effectively renounces combating patriarchy; in so doing she not only undermines feminism, but also reinforces the very idea that drives some contemporary feminists towards a statist program.

We have similar concerns about many of the writings of Wendy McElroy, another of todays foremost libertarian feminists. We greatly admire much that she has to say, including her radical analyses of state power; and her historical research uncovering the neglected radical individualist tradition of the 19th century is invaluable. But, as with Taylor, we find her treatment of present-day feminism problematic. Perhaps even more so than Taylor, McElroys efforts at forging a libertarian feminism are limited by her tendency towards Radical Menace politicsa tendency which seems to have intensified over the course of her career. In some of her earlier writings McElroy treats libertarian feminism and socialist feminism as two branches of radical feminism, and contrasts both with mainstream feminism. Thus in a 1982 article she writes:

Throughout most of its history, American mainstream feminism considered equality to mean equal treatment under existing laws and equal representation within existing institutions. The focus was not to change the status quo in a basic sense, but rather to be included within it. The more radical feminists protested that the existing laws and institutions were the source of injustice and, thus, could not be reformed. These feminists saw something fundamentally wrong with society beyond discrimination against women, and their concepts of equality reflected this. To the individualist, equality was a political term referring to the protection of individual rights; that is, protection of the moral jurisdiction every human being has over his or her own body. To socialist-feminists, it was a socioeconomic term. Women could be equal only after private property and the family relationships it encouraged were eliminated. (McElroy 1991, p. 3)

On this understanding, mainstream feminists seek equality in the weak sense of inclusion in whatever the existing power structure is. If there are male rulers, there should be female rulers; if there are male slaves, there should be female slaves. Radical feminists seek a more radical form of equality socioeconomic for the socialist form of radicalism, and political for the libertarian or individualist form of radicalism. By political equality McElroy does not mean equal access to the franchise; indeed, as a voluntaryist anarchist she regards voting as a fundamentally immoral and counterproductive form of political activity. Rather, she means the absence of any and all political subordination of one person to another, where political is understood explicitly in terms of the authoritarian theory of politics:

Society is divided into two classes: those who use the political means, which is force, to acquire wealth or power and those who use the economic means, which requires voluntary interaction. The former is the ruling class which lives off the labor and wealth of the latter. (McElroy 1991, p. 23)

For McElroy, then, the sort of gender inequality that feminism needs to address is simply a specific instance of the broader kind of inequality that libertarianism per se addresses the subordination of some people to others by means of political force:

The libertarian theory of justice applies to all human beings regardless of secondary characteristics such as sex and color. To the extent that laws infringe upon self-ownership, they are unjust. To the extent that such violation is based upon sex, there is room for a libertarian feminist movement. (p. 22)

Notice how restrictive this recommendation is. The basis for a libertarian feminist movement is the existence of laws that (a) infringe upon self-ownership, and (b) do so based upon sex. Libertarian feminism is thus conceived as narrowly political in scope, and politics is conceived of exclusively in terms of the authoritarian theory. But on what grounds? Why is there no room in McElroys classification for a version of feminism that seeks to combat both legal and socioeconomic inequality, say? And why wouldnt the concerns of this feminism have a perfectly good claim to the adjective political? McElroys answer is that [a]lthough most women have experienced the uncomfortable and often painful discrimination that is a part of our culture, this is not a political matter. Peaceful discrimination is not a violation of rights. (p. 23) Hence such discrimination is not a subject that libertarianism as a political philosophy addresses except to state that all remedies for it must be peaceful. (p. 23)

Now it is certainly true that no libertarian feminist can consistently advocate the use of political force to combat forms of discrimination that dont involve the use of violence. But how should we classify a feminist who seeks to alter not only political institutions but also pervasive private forms of discrimination but combats the latter through non-violent means only? What sort of feminist would she be? Suppose, moreover, that libertarian social theory tells us, as it arguably does, that governmental injustice is likely to reflect and draw sustenance from the prevailing economic and cultural conditions. Wont it follow that libertarianism does have something to say, qua libertarian political theory, about those conditions?

McElroy is certainly not blind to the existence of pervasive but non-governmental discrimination against women; she writes that our culture heavily influences sex-based behavior and even so intimate a matter as how we view ourselves as individuals.

Many of the societal cues aimed at women carry messages that, if taken to heart, naturally produce feelings of intellectual insecurity and inadequacy. The list is long. Women should not compete with men. Women become irrational when menstruating. Women do not argue fairly. Women not men must balance career and family. A wife should relocate to accommodate her husbands job transfer. A clean house is the womans responsibility: a good living is the mans. A wife who earns more than her husband is looking for trouble. Women are bad at math. Girls take home economics while boys take car repair. If a man sexually strays, its because his wife is no longer savvy enough to keep him satisfied. Women gossip; men discuss. Whenever they stand up for themselves, women risk being labeled everything from cute to a bitch. Almost every woman I know feels some degree of intellectual inadequacy.

So isnt this sort of thing a problem that feminists need to combat? McElroys answer is puzzling here. She writes: Although discrimination may always occur on an individual level, it is only through the political means that such discrimination can be institutionalized and maintained by force. (p. 23) This statement can be read as saying that sexual discrimination becomes a systematic problem, rather than an occasional nuisance, only as a result of state action. Yet she does not, strictly speaking, say that only through state action can discrimination be institutionalized (though the phrase on an individual level certainly invites that interpretation). What she says is that only through the political means can discrimination be institutionalized by force. Since, on the authoritarian theory that McElroy employs, the political means just is force, the statement is a tautology. But it leaves unanswered the questions: (a) can discrimination be institutionalized and maintained by means other than force? and (b) can discrimination be institutionalized and maintained by force but not by the state? Systematic non-governmental male violence would be an instance of institutionalizing patriarchy through means that are political, in McElroys sense, but not governmental; various non-violent forms of social pressure would be a means of institutionalizing patriarchy through non-political means. McElroy is right to say that, for libertarians, discrimination that does not violate rights cannot be a political issue (in her sense of political); but it does not follow that feminism must be no more than a response to the legal discrimination women have suffered from the state.

In her more recent writings, McElroy seems to have grown more committed and more wide-reaching in her use of Radical Menace politics. Rather than categorizing libertarian feminism as a tendency within radical feminism (albeit one in opposition to what is usually called radical feminism), she now typically treats radical feminists per se as the enemy, adopting Christina Hoff Sommers terminology of gender feminism for her analytical purposes. But while Sommers opposes equity feminism to gender feminism, and has been understood as aligning the latter with radical feminism, McElroy now clearly lumps liberal and radical feminists together as gender feminists, and opposes libertarian feminism (individualist feminism, ifeminism) to this aggregation. At least she seems to treat liberal feminism as a form of gender feminism when she writes:

While libertarians focus on legal restrictions, liberals (those fractious, left-of-center feminists) are apt to focus additionally on restrictive social and cultural norms), which an individual woman is deemed helpless to combat. If the left-of-center feminists (sometimes called gender feminists) are correct in their view that cultural biases against women are stronger than the formal rights extended equally to both sexes, then justice for women depends on collective, not individual action, and on a regulated marketplace. (McElroy 2002, pp. ix-x.)

Apart from the non sequitur in this last, notice that liberal feminism, left-of-center feminism, and gender feminism are all apparently being treated as equivalent. On the other hand, in her book Sexual Correctness: The Gender-Feminist Attack on Women (a frustrating mix of legitimate and illegitimate criticisms of non-libertarian feminism), McElroy distinguishes the two. Gender feminism views women as separate and antagonistic classes and holds that men oppress women through the twin evils of the patriarchal state and the free-market system. The goal is not equality but gender (class) justice for women. Liberal feminism is instead defined as an ideology in transition from a watered-down version of individualist feminism to a watered-down version of gender feminism. (McElroy 1996, p. ix) So presumably gender feminism here becomes roughly equivalent to radical feminism. But McElroys definitions seem to leave no room for any version of feminism that agrees that women are oppressed by men not only through the state but through non-political means, but is also pro-market. Yet why isnt McElroy herself precisely that sort of feminist?

The implicit suggestion is that to regard something as a legitimate object of feminist concern is ipso facto to regard it as an appropriate object of legislation. On this view, those feminists who see lots of issues as meriting feminist attention will naturally favour lots of legislation, while those feminists who prefer minimal legislation will be led to suppose that relatively few issues merit feminist attention. But without the conceptual confusions that all too often accompany the authoritarian theory of politics, its hard to see any reason for accepting the shared premise. Certainly McElroys 19th-century libertarian feminist predecessors did not accept it.

It may seem odd to hold up 19th-century libertarian feminism as a model against which to criticize McElroy. For no one has done more than McElroy to popularize and defend 19th-century libertarian feminism, particularly in its American version. McElroys career has been a steady stream of books and articles documenting, and urging a return to, the ideas of the 19th-century libertarian feminists. Yet we know and it is largely owing to McElroys own efforts that we know that if there are any gender feminists lurking out there, the 19th century individualists, while libertarian, would certainly be found among their ranks.

As weve seen, McElroy contrasts the libertarian version of class analysis, that assigns individuals to classes based on their access to political power, with both the Marxist version (based on access to the means of production) and the radical feminist (based, as she thinks, on biology).

Classes within ifeminist analysis are fluid. This is not true of radical feminist analysis that is based on biology. To radical feminism, biology is the factor that fixes an individual into a class. To ifeminism, the use of force is the salient factor and an individual can cross class lines at any point.

There is a double confusion here. First, radical feminist analysis is not based on biology. On the contrary, a central theme of radical feminism has been precisely that gender differences are socially constructed, and that women are constituted as a politically relevant class by social institutions, practices, and imputed meanings, not by pre-social biological facts beyond anyones control. MacKinnon, for example, notes that while those actions on the part of women that serve the function of maintaining and constantly reaffirming the structure of male supremacy at their expense are not freely willed, they are actions nonetheless, and once it is seen that these relations require daily acquiescence, acting on different principles seems not quite so impossible (MacKinnon 1989, pp. 101-2). Second, libertarian analysis traditionally understands the ruling class not just as those who make use of the political means (i.e., force) is a mugger thereby a member of the ruling class? but as those who control the state, the hegemonic and institutionalized organization of the political means. The membership of that ruling class may not be strictly fixed at birth, but one cannot exactly move into it at will either. Hence McElroys description simultaneously overstates the rigidity of class as radical feminists see it and understates the rigidity of class as libertarians see it.

In her hostility to the so-called gender feminist version of class analysis, McElroy is momentarily led into a rejection of class analysis per se, forgetting that she herself accepts a version of class analysis: Self-ownership is the foundation of individualism, she writes; it is the death knell of class analysis. This is because self-ownership reduces all social struggle to the level of individual rights, where every woman claims autonomy and choice, not as the member of an oppressed subclass, but as a full and free member of the human race. (p. 147) As McElroy remembers perfectly well in other contexts, there is nothing incongruous in upholding a doctrine of individual autonomy and at the same time pointing to the existing class structure of society to help explain why that autonomy is being systematically undermined. Perhaps McElroys attachment to the authoritarian theory of politics makes her suspect that a state solution must be in the offing as soon as a political concept like class is introduced.

This hypothesis gains support from McElroys discussion of the problem of domestic violence. McElroy distinguishes between liberal feminist and gender feminist responses to the problem. According to McElroy, liberal feminists favour a sociocultural approach that examines the reasons why aggression against women is tolerated by our society, as well as a psychological approach that examines the emotional reasons why men are abusive and why women accept it. Gender feminists, by contrast, are said to take an entirely political view in favouring a class analysis approach, by which men are said to beat women to retain their place in the patriarchal power structure [Sexual Correctness, p. 110]. But this false dichotomy is puzzling; surely those who favour the political approach are not offering it as an alternative to psychological and sociocultural approaches. Does McElroy assume that any political problem must have a governmental solution?

McElroys discussion of prostitution [Sexual Correctness, chs. 9-10] is likewise frustrating. On the one hand, she makes a good case for the claims that (a) many feminists have been condescendingly dismissive of the voices of prostitutes themselves, and (b) legal restrictions on prostitution do more harm than benefit for the women they are allegedly designed to help. But McElroy neglects the degree to which critiques of prostitution by radical feminists such as Diana Russell and Andrea Dworkin (who prostituted herself to survive early in her adulthood) have drawn on the (negative) testimony of women in prostitution; she often seems unwilling to acceptin spite of what is said by the very women in prostitution that she citesthat the choices women can make might be constrained by pervasive economic, sexual, and cultural realities in a way thats worth challenging, even if the outcomes are ultimately chosen. When McElroy urges that feminist discussions of prostitution need to take seriously what women in prostitution say about it, she is making a point that every feminist ought to keep firmly in mind; but her zeal to defend the choices of prostitutes, McElroy comes close to claiming that any critical attention to the authenticity of someone elses choices, or to the cultural or material circumstances that constrain, them is tantamount to treating that person as a child or a mentally incompetent person (p. 124)a claim that no-one in the world ought to believe, and one that no-one earnestly does.

Catharine MacKinnons discussion of consent in male supremacy offers a useful counterpoint to McElroys limited discussion of choicealbeit from a source that is sure to provoke McElroy and many other libertarians. MacKinnons work suggests that consent whether to intercourse specifically or traditional sex roles generally is in large part a structural fiction to legitimize the real coercion built into the normal social definitions of heterosexual intercourse, and concludes that to the extent that this is so, it makes no sense to define rape as different in kind. Liberal and libertarian feminists have often complained against radical feminists that such assimilation of social and institutional influence to literal compulsion slights women by underestimating their capacity for autonomous choice even under adverse circumstances; from this standpoint, the radical feminist tendency to view all intercourse through rape-colored spectacles is open to some of the same objections as the patriarchal tendency to view all intercourse through consent-colored spectacles.

But MacKinnon and other radical feminists are best interpreted, not as claiming a literal equivalence between rape and ordinary intercourse, but only as claiming that the two are a good deal less different than they seem objecting not so much to the distinction as to the exaggeration of the differences extent and significance. Even this more moderate claim, however, strikes many liberal and libertarian feminists as trivializing rape. This is a fair complaint; but the charge of trivialization is also a two-edged sword. If understating the difference between two evils trivializes the worse one, overstating the differences trivializes the less bad one. (And even calling the understating kind of trivialization trivialization may understandably strike some feminists as an instance of, or at least an invitation to, the overstating kind of trivialization.)

Now the distinction between literal compulsion and other forms of external pressure is absolutely central to libertarianism, and so a libertarian feminist, to be a libertarian, must arguably resist the literal effacing of these differences. But it does not follow that libertarian feminists need to deny the broader radical feminist points that (a) patriarchal power structures, even when not coercive in the strict libertarian sense, are relevantly and disturbingly like literal coercion in certain ways, or that (b) the influence of such patriarchal power structures partly rests on and partly bolsters literally violent expressions of male dominance. Libertarians have never had any problem saying these things about statist ideology; such ideology, libertarians often complain, is socially pervasive and difficult to resist, it both serves to legitimate state coercion and receives patronage from state coercion, and it functions to render the states exploitative nature invisible and its critics inaudible. In saying these things, libertarians do not efface the distinction between coercion and ideological advocacy; hence no libertarian favors the compulsory suppression of statist ideology.

Why not follow the 19th-century libertarians, who neither denied the existence and importance of private discrimination, nor assimilated it to legal compulsion? There is nothing inconsistent or un-libertarian in holding that womens choices under patriarchal social structures can be sufficiently voluntary, in the libertarian sense, to be entitled to immunity from coercive legislative interference, while at the same time being sufficiently involuntary, in a broader sense, to be recognized as morally problematic and as a legitimate target of social activism. Inferring broad voluntariness from strict voluntariness, as many libertarians seem tempted to do, is no obvious improvement over inferring strict involuntariness from broad involuntariness, as many feminists seem tempted to do; and libertarians are ill-placed to accuse feminists of blurring distinctions if they themselves are blurring the same distinctions, albeit in the opposite direction.

If we dispense with the limitations imposed by Radical Menace rhetoric and the authoritarian theory of politics, then what sort of a synthesis between feminism and libertarianism might be possible? We do not intend, here, to try to set out a completed picture; we only hope to help with providing the frame. But while it can certainly draw from the insights of 20th century libertarian feminists, it will likely be something very different from what a Joan Kennedy Taylor or a Wendy McElroy seems to expect. Taylor, for example, envisions libertarian feminism as a synthesis of libertarian insights with the spirit and concerns of mainstream liberal feminism; but if what we have argued is correct, then its not at all clear that mainstream liberal feminism is the most natural place for libertarians to look. Liberal feminists have made invaluable contributions to the struggle for womens equalitywe dont intend to engage in a reverse Radical Menace rhetoric here. But nevertheless, the 19th century libertarian feminists, and the 21st century libertarian feminists that learn from their example, may find themselves far closer to Second Wave radical feminism than to liberalism. As we have argued, radical feminist history and theory offer a welcome challenge to the authoritarian theory of politics; radical feminists are also far more suspicious of the state as an institution, and as a means to sex equality in particular, than liberal feminists. While liberal feminists have bought into to bureaucratic state action through mechanisms such as the EEOC and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, Catharine MacKinnon has criticized the way in which feminist campaigns for sex equality [have] been caught between giving more power to the state in each attempt to claim it for women and leaving unchecked power in the society to men (MacKinnon 1989, Chapter 8 10), and R. Amy Elman argues in Sexual Subordination and State Intervention that feminist activism against rape and battery has met with considerably more success in the United States than in progressive Sweden because of the (relative) decentralization of political authority in the U.S. These are remarks that would not be out of place in the works of radical libertarians such as Tom Bell or Murray Rothbard; there is good reason to think that an explicitly libertarian feminism will have much to say to, and much to learn from, the radical feminist tradition.

Its true that in spite of their suspicions of the state as a tool of class privilege, radical feminists are sometimes willing to grant the State powers that liberal feminists would withholdfor example, to penalize pornographers for the misogynist content of their works. To libertarians this may seem paradoxical: shouldnt distrusting an institution make one less willing to augment its powers, rather than more? But this apparent disconnect is less paradoxical than it seems; if state neutrality is a myth, if the state is by nature a tool in the struggle between sexes or classes or both, then it can seem as though the only sensible response is to employ it as just that, rather than trusting to its faade of juridical impartiality. To libertarians, of course, this strategy is as self-defeating as donning the ring of Sauron; but it is certainly understandable. Moreover, if radical feminists are suspicious of the state, they are equally suspicious of society, especially market society, and so are disinclined to view as entitled to immunity from state interference. The underlying assumption of judicial neutrality, MacKinnon writes, is that a status quo exists which is preferable to judicial intervention. (MacKinnon 1989, Chapter 8 23) Hence MacKinnons ambivalence about special legal protections for women; such protections treat women as marginal and second-class members of the workforce (Chapter 8 20), but since market society does that already, such laws may offer women some concrete benefits. Here of course libertarians have reason to be less suspicious of market society, since on their theoretical and historical understanding, most of the evils conventionally attributed to market society are actually the product of state intervention itself. Here, however, it would be a mistake for libertarians to assume that any persisting social evil, once shown not to be an inherent product of market society per se, must then be either a pure artefact of state intervention, or else not importantly bad after all.

Libertarian feminism, then, should seek to shift the radical feminist consensus away from state action as much as possible; but the shift should not be the shift away from radicalism that libertarian feminists such as McElroy and Taylor have envisioned. In an important sense, putting the libertarian in libertarian feminism will not be importing anything new into radical feminism at all; if anything, it is more a matter of urging feminists to radicalize the insights into male power and state power that they have already developed, and to expand the state-free politics that they have already put into practice. Similarly, a radical libertarianism aligned with a radical feminism may confront many concerns that are new to 20th century libertarians; but in confronting them they will only be returning to their 19th century roots, and radicalizing the individualist critique of systemic political violence and its cultural preconditions to encompass those forms faced by female individuals as well as male.

Libertarianism and feminism are, then, two traditionsand, at their best, two radical traditionswith much in common, and much to offer one another. We applaud the efforts of those who have sought to bring them back together; but too often, in our judgment, such efforts have proceeded on the assumption that the libertarian tradition has everything to teach the feminist tradition and nothing to learn from it. Feminists have no reason to embrace a union on such unequal terms. Happily, they need not. If libertarian feminists have resisted some of the central insights of the feminist tradition, it is in large part because they have feared that acknowledging those insights would mean abandoning some of the central insights of the libertarian tradition. But what the example of the 19th century libertarian feminists should show usand should help to illuminate (to both libertarians and feminists) in the history of Second Wave feminismis that the libertarian critique of state power and the feminist critique of patriarchy are complementary, not contradictory. The desire to bring together libertarianism and feminism need not, and should not, involve calling on either movement to surrender its identity for the sake of decorum. This marriage can be saved: as it should be, a marriage of self-confident, strong-willed, compassionate equals.

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Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved ...

Christian libertarianism describes the synthesis of Christian beliefs concerning free will, human nature, and God-given inalienable rights with libertarian political philosophy. It is also an ideology to the extent its supporters promote their cause to others and join together as a movement. In contrast to the Christian left and the Christian right respectively, they believe that charity and enforcement of personal-level morality should be the purview of the (voluntary) church and not the state. These responsibilities must not be abrogated, though any non-governmental organization (NGO) not publicly financed is free to pursue them as well.

As with secular libertarianism, socialism, fascism, and crony capitalism are strongly opposed, as is theocracy. The latter does not include merely being influenced by Christian concepts; whereas in a theocracy, government derives its powers from a divine or religious authority directly exercising governmental control. The use of force is never justified to achieve purely political, social, or religious goals, but is reserved solely to uphold natural rights.

Individual freedom of religion without state interference is absolutely supported regardless of one's beliefs. Nevertheless, a majority religion in a given locale could display its faith on government-owned property if it had the popular votes to do so. Public sector discrimination is strictly forbidden, while in the private sector, it is permitted, though discouraged (excepting bona fide associated costs, such as insurance rates).

Christian libertarians believe these principles are supported by the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, which are recorded in the Bible, and His criticism of the laws (Halakha) observed by the Pharisees. For example, in Jesus' day, it was prohibited to heal someone on the Sabbath, because this was considered doing actual work on the mandated day of rest and worship. He opposed the Pharisees due to their self-righteous, man-made regulations added to God's law, which they obeyed outwardly, but with the wrong inward motivation. Also, most Christians believe the ceremonial and civic laws found in the Old Testament have been superseded by the New Covenant. For these reasons, Christian libertarians may consider Jesus as the greatest libertarian in history.

According to Andrew Sandlin, an American theologian and author, Christian libertarianism is the view that mature individuals are permitted maximum freedom under God's law.[1] Alex Barron, an American blogger and podcast host, states that Christian libertarianism can be summed up like this: "I am as libertarian as my Christian faith allows."[2]

Christian (including Orthodox, Protestant, and Roman Catholic) libertarians are people who believe in maximum liberty for individuals, but recognize there are universal and objective moral truths, such as "murder is wrong." For Christian libertarians, an understanding and appreciation of these moral absolutes is formed in large part by their Christian faith. Christians in this school of political thought tend to describe such basic directives in terms of natural law or natural rights, or the law that "well formed" humans seem to come to on their own. The concept of maximum economic and political liberty under the limits of natural law as understood by theologically conservative Christianity is what forms the basis of Christian libertarian philosophy. The ideas of Christian faith and libertarian political and economic theory are somewhat in contention, but Christian libertarians are constantly trying to balance their desire for minimal involvement by the state in the affairs of individuals, and limits to behavior from Christian moral teaching.

In keeping with the fundamentals of libertarianism, laws of the state should be kept to the bare minimum. Acts that merely annoy others or slowly degrade their health might be dealt with at the local level, where the least amount of effort is needed to initiate or oppose change.

There is great concern that even in relatively free societies, laws and regulations are becoming increasingly numerous, irrelevant, and too complex for the average person to understand. While those on the Christian right may wish to outlaw what they see as immoral, this only makes the public more accustomed to having to deal with new laws. Thus, it "opens the floodgates" for social liberals, progressives, and non-libertarian secularists to pass their own laws when they are in control of the government, rather than having an aversion to all new laws.

As Jesus did not call upon the political and legal authorities to enforce piety or discourage sinful behavior, Christian libertarians do not believe in a political mandate to Christianize culture. Behavior considered sinful by the Churchbut which does not violate the lives, liberty, or property of othersmust be disciplined within the Church itself. (This includes family discipline in the case of minor children.) Even if such behavior warrants cultural opposition amongst the general public, it must not be prohibited by the state. Only actions which legitimately constitute various forms of physical assault, tangible theft (including destruction/desecration), or fraudulent schemes may be criminalized and prosecuted, as these alone infringe upon the natural rights of others. Due to the large taxpayer expense to house nonviolent offenders, and immoral "prison culture," Christian libertarians generally maintain that only violent criminals and those who have demonstrated a willingness to transgress the natural rights of their neighbors should be quarantined from society and incarcerated. On an international scale, non-interventionism is promoted based upon the principles of state sovereignty and self-determination. The right of people to immigrate (without public assistance) is fully supported, as is free trade.

While there may be a need for police, prosecutors, and prisons to uphold natural rights, these should not be so numerous and costly to enforce laws beyond natural rights. This becomes a burden for taxpayers, and affects churchgoers ability to give to their local church and support missions. The prohibition of drugs, for example, takes away funds from the church and gives them to the state, while greatly increasing violence due to the illicit drug trade. While drug abuse is considered immoral, it is within the realm of the church, and not the state. In addition, libertarians do not support civil asset forfeiture, as it can easily affect the innocent with very limited due process and costly legal fees.

Advocating legalization of what is sinful can put Christians in a difficult position. There is always the concern non-believers may misinterpret that whatever is being legalized is now permissible. While many on the Christian right believe that God still judges nations, Christian libertarians find no basis for this in the New Testament. Both agree nations were judged in Old Testament times, but is a matter of contention whether it applies to the present day. Inevitably, the Christian right becomes alarmed when moral laws are abandoned, as they feel their nation will suffer. Christian libertarians, on the other hand, believe that under the New Covenant, God judges only individuals. Nations become prosperous when they uphold and enforce the natural rights of the people. Maximum freedom from state interference must be preserved, and laws for the sole sake of morality need not exist.

Unlike the versions of socialism or welfare statism traditionally favored by the Christian left, libertarians generally see no need for government-provided social services. These activities are best entrusted to private nonprofit organizations, which include churches and faith-based charities. This does not mean libertarians want to see governmental services shut down overnight, but, rather, phased out as soon as possible when nonprofits become capable of doing this work. Voluntary giving is more just and efficient than forced redistribution of wealth through taxation as whatever is taxed, less of it will be produced. Christian libertarians believe public welfare is an ineffective means to lift the financially struggling out of poverty. This carries with it negative unintended consequences, such as people being less willing to obtain higher education or employment, or having more children than they would otherwise. Saving money beyond token amounts is often prohibited for those on public assistance, leading to unwise financial habits.

School choice including parochial schools for primary and secondary education is advocated over mandated government-run schools at taxpayer expense. The spontaneous order of the free marketplace is always preferable to central planning. Over-regulation of business reduces productivity and increases unemployment, while enabling new possible avenues of corruption. Similarly, minimum wage laws hurt younger, less qualified workers, and cause price hikes even on the poor. Free individuals are in a much better position to rationally pursue their own interests than those who are being dictated to by a strong-armed central government. The state should not prohibit unwise personal, financial, or medical decisions, nor prosecute those who encourage them (short of fraud), as this is within the realm of the church.

Other differences include the support of the individual right to keep and bear arms for defense. Being wealthy is not a problem for Christian libertarians. Only the love of money (not money in itself) is considered a sin.

With respect to environmental concerns, libertarians largely view regulatory policies and the politicization of Creation Care as only superficially "green" and essentially corporatist. Often, they cite the large-scale pollution and environmental degradation caused by governments as a reason to minimize the activities and role of the state in society (see also green libertarianism and free-market environmentalism).

Christian libertarians are generally opposed to relatively free countries relinquishing their sovereignty to international governing bodies such as the United Nations, as many in the movement believe this paves the way for authoritarian world government. Internationalism is perceived as a threat to free speech and expression, freedom of religion, self-defense rights, right to a fair trial, and the like. Among dispensationalist Protestants, this trend of political and economic centralization on a global scale tends to be cast in eschatological terms with connections being drawn to "the Beast" described in the Book of Revelation.

Arguably the greatest difference between Christian and secular libertarians concerns those who are not only libertarian, but also libertinethat is, they want to do the very things in which Christianity forbids. For example, Christian libertarians believe it is immoral to engage in recreational drug use, but also immoral to forcibly prevent others from doing so. On the other hand, a non-believer may espouse libertarian ideals so they need not fear such laws Christians have no intention of violating. Christians have to uphold Jesus' command of "love your neighbor as yourself," while non-believers might not be so inclined.

Essentially, Christian and secular libertarians share common goals, but disagree on the underlying objective of government. Christian libertarians believe that government is only valid if it helps to maintain and support Natural Law as understood through a traditional Christian moral code. Other significant differences lie with the nature and source of our rights. In the words of Thomas Jefferson:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. --United States Declaration of Independence as originally written by Thomas Jefferson, 1776

Without invoking the name of God, secularists can only promise "government-granted" rights. Christian libertarians view these precariously, as they could be revoked. A famous example of this is the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic in 1920s Germany. As the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler took power in the early 1930s during the Great Depression, the rights granted under Germany's constitution became irrelevant.

Christian libertarians agree with other libertarians on most issues. However, there are several issues that they often disagree to some extent:

Abortion. While many secular libertarians feel that the government must not have the power to compel a woman to maintain pregnancy and promote abortion as a human right, Christian libertarians often contend - on the basis of the belief that life begins at conception - that there are two lives involved in the decision. Thus, they argue that the government does have a role in protecting the life, liberty, and property of individuals, including unborn citizens. That said, there is still debate about who should be prosecuted, under what circumstances, and how to ensure safeguards against an unintentional miscarriage being confused with willful abortion.

Anarcho-capitalism. Another area, where Christian and secular libertarians disagree, is in restraining libertarian economic policies. Where many secular libertarians support few, if any, limits on economic activity or anarcho-capitalism, Christian libertarians often see the value in restraining anarcho-capitalism with agreed upon values that are Christian based. Values such as mandatory Christian holidays off from work including the Sabbath (Sunday), child labor laws, and utilizing Gods creation (the environment) in a responsible way are all valid community decisions.

Commercialized vices. Many secular libertarians would have a society where there would be no limit on vices such as pornography, prostitution, gambling and recreational drug use because these are open dealings between consenting adults. Often, Christian libertarians take the view that while secular governments tend to overreach, there could be reasonable limits if enacted at the local level, and aimed mainly at public (rather than private) settings. This includes restrictions on where it is available, attempting to separate its influence from young people, and allowing local communities to ban it from their jurisdiction. While viewed as being primarily in the realm of the Church to discourage these activities, nonetheless, government should not be promoting any such behavior that is self-destructing.

Same sex marriage. This can be a contentious issue among libertarians of all stripes, including Christian libertarians. Their decisions often come down to whether government is merely allowing this activity, or promoting something that is understood to be against moral norms from a traditional Christian viewpoint. Christian libertarians will often defend rights for same-sex couples to form contracts between each other (e.g. civil unions), have visitation rights in places such as hospitals, and the right to pass on property to each other. Nevertheless, many Christian libertarians stop short of support for same-sex marriage, and often contend that the state should have no authority to define the terms of marriage. In a Christian libertarian form of government, society as a whole may not have the ability to ban the vast majority of activities between consenting adults. However, it cannot advocate and promote anti-Christian morals either.

The Ten Commandments have varying enforceability under Christian libertarianism. Beliefs differ on whether to consolidate at the beginning or end to prevent forming more than ten commandments. This list (developed by John Calvin) consolidates coveting with the alternative numbering used by Catholics and most Lutherans (developed by Church Father St. Augustine) in brackets.

Not all specific crimes that the state can enforce are addressed directly. For example, kidnapping would be part of the eighth [seventh] commandment.

The origins of Christian libertarianism in the United States can be traced back to the roots of libertarianism. According to Murray Rothbard, of the three libertarian (anarchist) experiments begun during the European colonization of the Americas in the mid 17th century, all three of them were begun by Christian groups.[3]

Martin Luther, one of the authors of the Protestant Reformation, is referred to as libertarian In the introduction to "Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority." The term used here is something quite different than the political ideology of libertarianism. The book's editor, Harro Hopfl, says that libertarian, egalitarian, communal motifs were part of the texture of Luther's theology.[4]

Lord Acton was a theoretician who posited that political liberty is the essential condition and guardian of religious liberty. The Acton Institute, an American Christian libertarian think tank, is named after him.[5]

The quotes below come from the translation commonly referenced as the New King James Version.

From the last book of the Christian New Testament, called the Apocalypse or Revelation, chapter 22, verses 10-16; this passage references the principle of non-interference in the lives of others:

And he said to me, Do not seal the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand. He who is unjust, let him be unjust still; he who is filthy, let him be filthy still; he who is righteous, let him be righteous still; he who is holy, let him be holy still.

And behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to give to every one according to his work. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last. Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city. But outside are dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and whoever loves and practices a lie.

I, Jesus, have sent My angel to testify to you these things in the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the Bright and Morning Star.

The New Testament book, 1 Corinthians 5:9-13, addresses this same principle:

I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people.

Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.

But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner not even to eat with such a person.

For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? But those who are outside God judges. Therefore put away from yourselves the evil person.

From the first book of the Christian New Testament, called the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 15, verses 1-20; this passage references the simplicity of spiritual purity, and the non-necessity of a multitude of contradictory physical rules:

Then the scribes and Pharisees who were from Jerusalem came to Jesus, saying,

Why do Your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.

He answered and said to them, Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition? For God commanded, saying, Honor your father and your mother; and, He who curses father or mother, let him be put to death. But you say, Whoever says to his father or mother, Whatever profit you might have received from me is a gift to Godthen he need not honor his father or mother. Thus you have made the commandment of God of no effect by your tradition.

Hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy about you, saying:

When He had called the multitude to Himself, He said to them, Hear and understand: Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.

Then His disciples came and said to Him, Do You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?

But He answered and said, Every plant which My heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch.

Then Peter answered and said to Him, Explain this parable to us.

So Jesus said, Are you also still without understanding? Do you not yet understand that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is eliminated? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man.

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February 4, 2013 columns

Zwolinksi argues that libertarians are right to support private property, but also that private property is more complicated than we sometimes think.

Libertarians care about justice. And justice, I have argued inpreviousposts, is incompatible with the goal of maximizing freedom. But this means that freedom and justice can sometimes come into conflict. It means that, not always but sometimes, fulfilling the demands of justice will require limiting freedom. Sometimes we have to choose.

An especially vivid and significant example of this conflict can be seen in the relationship between freedom and property. In this post, I will explain the nature of that conflict. In the next, I will say how I think libertarians ought to respond to it. To anticipate, though, my thesis is that although property rights entail significant restrictions on freedom, those restrictions are nevertheless justifiable in light of the many moral benefits that property institutions bring including, notably, benefits in the form of countervailing enhancements of freedom.

Libertarians are virtually defined by their commitment to both liberty and rights of private property. Some libertarians, such as Jan Narveson, even go so far as to equate the twoarguing that liberty really just is property.

I think that there are plenty of good reasons to be enthusiastic about both liberty and property. And, indeed, there are plenty of good reasons to believe that liberty and property are very closely related.

But we shouldnt allow the freedom-enhancing power of private property to blind us to its costsor even to the fact that some of those costs are measured in the currency of freedom itself. That property has the power to limit freedom as well as to protect it shouldnt be surprising, really. After all, imposing limits on others freedom is part of the point of private property. The Hobbesian state of nature is a state of war precisely because and to the extent that each individual has the liberty to do anything which, in his own judgment and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means to the preservation of his own lifeeven if that thing is the crop you just harvested or your body itself. The freedom of each person to do anything he wishes is a recipe for a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Peace, prosperity, and stability are only achieved when each individual agrees to lay down some of this unlimited liberty and to respect the rights of others.

I suspect that most libertarians will have no serious problems with what I have said so far. My freedom to steal your bread and punch you in the face is, anyway, a pretty unattractive kind of freedom from a moral point of view. So if private property simply places limits on that kind of freedom, thats a feature, not a bug.

But not every liberty suppressed by property is so easily written off. Private property limits not just the freedom of thieves and aggressors, but of innocent individuals seeking nothing other than to make an honest way in the world. Consider, in this vein, what Herbert Spencer had to say in his Social Statics about private property in land. For Spencer, the equal freedom of all entails an equal right of each person to use the earth for the satisfaction of his wants. But what if land can be legitimately appropriated as private property?

[I]f one portion of the earths surface may justly become the possession of an individual, and may be held by him for his sole use and benefit, as a thing to which he has an exclusive right, then other portions of the earths surface may be so held; and eventually the whole of the earths surface may be so held; and our planet may thus lapse altogether into private hands. Observe now the dilemma to which this leads. Supposing the entire habitable globe to be so enclosed, it follows that if the landowners have a valid right to its surface, all who are not landowners, have no right at all to its surface. Hence, such can exist on the earth by sufferance only. They are all trespassers. Save by the permission of the lords of the soil, they can have no room for the soles of their feet. Nay, should the others think fit to deny them a resting-place, these landless men might equitably be expelled from the earth altogether.

A property right in land is a right to control access to that land. It is a right to say No. But if all land is privately owned, and all landowners have a right to say No to all non-landowners, then non-landowners are not equally free with landowners. They exist in a state of dependence. Like feudal serfs or the most abject slaves, they live only by the consent of those in command.

For Spencer, this was a reason to reject private property in land altogether. So, too, for the later Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen, who argued in strikingly similar terms that lack of property in general, and lack of money in particular, constituted a serious form of unfreedom. According to Cohen, to lack money is to be liable to continual interference by others. A woman who wants to take the train to visit her sister in Glasgow but cannot afford the ticket will be physically prevented from boarding the train, or physically ejected from it once her lack of a ticket is discovered. She thus lacks the freedom to take the train, just as much as she would if men with guns patrolled the station on orders from the government and prevented her from taking it.

In fact, men with guns do patrol the station on orders from the government to prevent the woman from boarding. They are called the police. And in enforcing the property rights of the owners of the train, they necessarily restrict the freedom of non-owners.

Now, the thing to note about Cohens argument, and Spencers for that matter, is that it is based on a perfectly ordinary understanding of what freedom is. Cohen is not arguing that the poor lack positive freedom or real freedom or any other adjectival form of freedom of novel origin and dubious merit. He is arguing that they lack precisely the kind of negative freedom that libertarians purport to be concerned withfreedom from liability to physical interference by other human beings.

Being poor isnt like being crippled or sick, in other words. These, Cohen concedes, might plausibly be construed as a mere physical inability to exercise ones freedom, not a lack of freedom itself. But poverty is different. A crippling disability would limit your ability to do what you want even if you were alone on a desert island. Disabilities are natural facts, and the restrictions they impose are physical, not social in nature. But lack of money would be no obstacle to a solitary man on a desert island. And this is because money is an essentially social device. It derives its value from a system of norms that are socially recognized and socially enforced. And without that enforcementwithout the fact that behind money and property institutions more generally there are men with guns standing ready to enforce the claims they representmoney would be nothing.

Libertarians, as George Smith recently noted, have generally responded to this argument by insisting that real freedom is not absence of interference per se but rather absence of interference with ones rights. Ive criticized that response before and will say more about it in my next post. I will also say what I think the proper libertarian response is, and what its limits are.

Matt Zwolinski is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, and co-director ofUSDs Institute for Law and Philosophy. He has publishednumerous articles at the intersection of politics, law, economics, with a special focus on issues of exploitation and political libertarianism. He is the editor of Arguing About Political Philosophy (Routledge, 2009), and is currently writing two books: Exploitation, Capitalism, and the State and, with John Tomasi, Libertarianism: A Bleeding Heart History. The latter is under contract with Princeton University Press. Matt Zwolinski is the founder of and a regular contributor to the blog Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

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November 3, 2011 essays

A guide to books on the history of liberty and libertarianism.

The history of libertarianism is more than a series of scholarly statements on philosophy, economics, and the social sciences. It is the history of courageous men and women struggling to bring freedom to the lives of those living without it. The works on this list give important context to the ideas found on the others.

A History of Libertarianism by David Boaz

This essay, reprinted from Libertarianism: A Primer, covers the sweep of libertarian and pre-libertarian history, from Lao Tzu in the sixth century B.C. to the latest developments of the 21st century. Because its available for free on Libertarianism.org, the essay also includes numerous links to more information about major thinkers and their works. For a general sense of the rich history of the movement for liberty, this is easily the best place to start.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn

Bernard Bailyns Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the ideas that influenced the American Revolution had a profound influence on our understanding of the republics origin by exposing its deeply libertarian foundations. Bailyn studied the many political pamphlets published between 1750 and 1776 and identified patterns of language, argument, and references to figures such as the radical Whigs and Cato the Younger. Because these were notions which men often saw little need to explain because they were so obvious, their understanding was assumed by the Founders and thus not immediately obvious to modern readers. When the Revolution is reexamined with Bailyns findings in mind, theres no way to escape the conclusion that America was always steeped in libertarian principles.

Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement by Brian Doherty

The libertarian movement in America in the 20th century is the focus of this delightful history from Brian Dorhety. Radicals for Capitalism is more the story of the men and women who fought for freedom and limited government than it is an intellectual history of libertarian ideas. But it is an important story because it helps to place the contemporary debate about the place of libertarianism in American politics within the context of a major and long-lived social movement.

The Decline of American Liberalism by Arthur A. Ekirch Jr.

Ekirch traces the history of the liberal idea in the United States from the founding through World War II. He places the high point of true liberalism in the years immediately following the American Revolution, before the federal government began its long march of ever more centralized control over the country. And he shows how this shift has negatively impacted everything from global peace to the economy to individual autonomy.

Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade by Douglas A. Irwin

Ever since Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, the case for free tradeboth its economic benefits and its moral footingseemed settled. Yet in the ensuing two centuries, many have attempted to restrict freedom of trade with claims about its deleterious effects. Irwins Against the Tide traces the intellectual history of free trade from the early mercantilists, through Smith and the neoclassical economists, and to the present. He shows how free trade has withstood theoretical assaults from protectionists of all stripesand how it remains the most effective means for bringing prosperity and peace to people throughout the world.

The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000 Year History Told Through the Lives of Freedoms Greatest Champions by Jim Powell

If Radicals for Capitalism is the tale of the men and women who fought for liberty in the 20th century, Jim Powells The Triumph of Liberty fills in the backstory. The book is an exhaustive collection of biographical articles on 65 major figures, from Marcus Tullius Cicero to Martin Luther King, Jr., summarizing their lives, thought, and impact. While not all of them were strictly libertarian, every one of the people Powell covers was instrumental in making the world a freer. For a grand sweep of libertys history through the lives of those who struggled in its name, theres no better source than The Triumph of Liberty.

How The West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation Of The Industrial World by Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell Jr.

The central question that How the West Grew Rich addresses is precisely what its title implies. For thousands of years, human beings lived in unrelieved misery: hunger, famine, illiteracy, superstition, ignorance, pestilence and worse have been their lot. How did things change? How did a relatively few peoplethose in what we call the Westescape from grinding poverty into sustained economic growth and material well-being when most other societies remained trapped in an endless cycle of birth, hardship, and death? This fascinating book tells that story. The explanations that many historians have offeredclaiming that it was all due to science, or luck, or natural resources, or exploitations or imperialismare refuted at the outset, in the books opening chapter. Rosenberg and Birdzell are then free to provide an explanation that makes much more sense.

The State by Franz Oppenheimer

Much political philosophy begins with a social concept theory of the state. Mankind originally existed in a state of nature, and the state only arose when people came together and agreed to give up some of their liberties in exchange for protection of others. Oppenheimer rejects this rosy picture and replaces it with his much more realistic conquest theory, which finds the genesis of states in roving bands of marauders who eventually settled down and turned to taxation when they realized it was easier than perpetual raiding. The State also features Oppenheimers influential distinction between the two means by which man can set about fulfilling his needs: I propose in the following discussion to call ones own labor and the equivalent exchange of ones own labor for the labor of others, the economic means for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the political means.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Cant Explain the Modern World by Deirdre McCloskey

In Bourgeois Dignity, McCloskey offers a different story of economic growth from the common one of capitalism and markets. The West grew rich, she argues, not simply because it embraced trade, but because its cultural ideas shifted, specifically in granting a sense of dignity to the bourgeoisie. It is that dignityand the rhetoric surrounding itthat sparked the Industrial Revolution and, in turn, lead to the modern world. Bourgeois Dignity traces the influence of these changing ideasand uses them to explain not just the rise of the West but also the recent, monumental growth of India and China. The book is the second in a four-volume series, The Bourgeois Era.

Aaron Ross Powell is a Cato Institute research fellow and founder and editor of Libertarianism.org, which presents introductory material as well as new scholarship related to libertarian philosophy, theory, and history. He is also co-host of Libertarianism.orgs popular podcast, Free Thoughts. His writing has appeared in Liberty and The Cato Journal. He earned a JD from the University of Denver.

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"That perfect liberty they sigh for-- the liberty of making slaves of other people-- Jefferson never thought of; their own father never thought of; they never thought of themselves, a year ago." -- Abraham Lincoln

Apparently someone's curse worked: we live in interesting times, and among other consequences, for no good reason we have a surplus of libertarians. With this article I hope to help keep the demand low, or at least to explain to libertarian correspondents why they don't impress me with comments like "You sure love letting people steal your money!"

This article has been rewritten, for two reasons. First, the original article had sidebars to address common objections. From several people's reactions, it seems that they never read these. They're now incorporated into the text.

Second, and more importantly, many people who call themselves libertarians didn't recognize themselves in the description. There are libertarians and libertarians, and sometimes different camps despise each other-- or don't seem to be aware of each other.

If you--

...then this page isn't really addressed to you. You're probably more of what I'd call a small-government conservative; and if you voted against Bush, we can probably get along just fine.

On the other hand, you might want to stick around to see what your more fundamentalist colleagues are saying.

Libertarianism strikes me as if someone (let's call her "Ayn Rand") sat down to create the Un-Communism. Thus:

Does this sound exaggerated? Let's listen to Murray Rothbard:

Or here's Lew Rockwell on Rothbard (emphasis mine):

Thomas DiLorenzo on worker activism: "[L]abor unions [pursue] policies which impede the very institutions of capitalism that are the cause of their own prosperity." Or Ludwig von Mises: "What is today euphemistically called the right to strike is in fact the right of striking workers, by recourse to violence, to prevent people who want to work from working." (Employer violence is apparently acceptable.) The Libertarian Party platform explains that workers have no right to protest drug tests, and supports the return of child labor.

On Nietzsche, as one of my correspondents puts it, some libertarians love Nietzsche; others have read him. (Though I would respond that some people idolize executives; others have worked for them.) Nonetheless, I think the Nietzschean atmosphere of burning rejection of conventional morality, exaltation of the will to power, and scorn for womanish Christian compassion for the masses, is part of the roots of libertarianism. It's unmistakable in Ayn Rand.

The more important point, however, is that the capitalist is the ber-villain for communists, and a glorious hero for libertarians; that property is "theft" for the communists, and a "natural right" for libertarians. These dovetail a little too closely for coincidence. It's natural enough, when a basic element of society is attacked as an evil, for its defenders to counter-attack by elevating it into a principle.

As we should have learned from the history of communism and fascism, however, contradiction is no guarantee of truth; it can lead one into an opposite error instead. And many who rejected communism nonetheless remained zealots. People who leave one ideological extreme usually end up at the other, either quickly (David Horowitz) or slowly (Mario Vargas Llosa). If you're the sort of person who likes absolutes, you want them even if all your other convictions change.

The methodology isn't much different either: oppose the obvious evils of the world with a fairy tale. The communist of 1910 couldn't point to a single real-world instance of his utopia; neither can the present-day libertarian. Yet they're unshakeable in their conviction that it can and must happen.

Academic libertarians love abstract, fact-free arguments-- often, justifications for why property is an absolute right. As a random example, from one James Craig Green:

Examples of natural property in land and water resources have already been given, but deserve more detail. An illustration of how this would be accomplished is a farm with irrigation ditches to grow crops in dry western states. To appropriate unowned natural resources, a settler used his labor to clear the land and dug ditches to carry water from a river for irrigation. Crops were planted, buildings were constructed, and the property thus created was protected by the owner from aggression or the later claims of others. This process was a legitimate creation of property.

The first paragraph is pure fantasy, and is simply untrue as a portrait of "primitive tribes", which are generally extremely collectivist by American standards. The second sounds good precisely because it leaves out all the actual facts of American history: the settlers' land was not "unowned" but stolen from the Indians by state conquest (and much of it stolen from the Mexicans as well); the lands were granted to the settlers by government; the communities were linked to the national economy by railroads founded by government grant; the crops were adapted to local conditions by land grant colleges.

Thanks to my essay on taxes, I routinely get mail featuring impassioned harangues which never once mention a real-world fact-- or which simply make up the statistics they want.

This sort of balls-out aggressivity probably wins points at parties, where no one is going to take down an almanac and check their figures; but to me it's a cardinal sin. If someone has an answer for everything, advocates changes which have never been tried, and presents dishonest evidence, he's a crackpot. If a man has no doubts, it's because his hypothesis is unfalsifiable.

Distaste for facts isn't merely a habit of a few Internet cranks; it's actually libertarian doctrine, the foundation of the 'Austrian school'. Here's Ludwig von Mises in Epistemological Problems of Economics:

The 'other sources' turn out to be armchair ruminations on how things must be. It's true enough that economics is not physics; but that's not warrant to turn our backs on the methods of science and return to scholastic speculation. Economics should always move in the direction of science, experiment, and falsifiability. If it were really true that it cannot, then no one, including the libertarians, would be entitled to strong belief in any economic program.

Some people aren't much bothered by libertarianism's lack of real-world success. After all, they argue, if no one tried anything new, nothing would ever change.

In fact, I'm all for experimentation; that's how we learn. Create a libertarian state. But run it as a proper experiment. Start small-scale. Establish exactly how your claims will be tested: per capita income? median income? life expectancy? property value? surveys on happiness? Set up a control: e.g. begin with two communities as close as we can get them in size, initial wealth, resources, and culture, one following liberalism, one following libertarianism. Abide by the results-- no changing the goalposts if the liberals happen to "win".

I'm even willing to look at partial tests. If an ideology is really better than others at producing general prosperity, then following it partially should produce partially better results. Jonathan Kwitny suggested comparing a partly socialist system (e.g. Tanzania) to a partly capitalist one (e.g. Kenya). (Kenya looked a lot better.) If the tests are partial, of course, we'll want more of them; but human experience is pretty broad.

It's the libertarians, not me, who stand in the way of such accountability. If I point out examples of nations partially following libertarian views-- we'll get to this below-- I'm told that they don't count: only Pure Real Libertarianism Of My Own Camp can be tested.

Again, all-or-nothing thinking generally goes with intellectual fraud. If a system is untestable, it's because its proponents fear testing. By contrast, I'm confident enough in liberal and scientific values that I'm happy to see even partial adoption. Even a little freedom is better than dictatorship. Even a little science is better than ideology.

An untested political system unfortunately has great rhetorical appeal. Since we can't see it in action, we can't point out its obvious faults, while the ideologue can be caustic about everything that has actually been tried, and which has inevitably fallen short of perfection. Perhaps that's why Dave Barry and Trey Parker are libertarians. But I'd rather vote for a politician who's shown that his programs work in the real world than for a humorist, however amusing.

At this point some libertarian readers are pumping their hands in the air like a piston, anxious to explain that their ideal isn't Rothbard or von Mises or Hayek, but the Founding Fathers.

Nice try. Everybody wants the Founders on their side; but it was a different country back then-- 95% agricultural, low density, highly homogenous, primitive in technology-- and modern libertarianism simply doesn't apply. (The OED's citations of the word for the time are all theological.)

All American political movements have their roots in the 1700s-- indeed, in the winning side, since Loyalist opinion essentially disappeared. We are all-- liberals, conservatives, libertarians-- against the Georgian monarchy and for the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You can certainly find places where one Founder or another rants against government; you can find other places where one Founder or another rants against rebellion, anarchy, and the opponents of federalism. Sometimes the same Founder can be quoted on both sides. They were a mixed bunch, and lived long enough lives to encounter different situations.

The Constitution is above all a definition of a strengthened government, and the Federalist Papers are an extended argument for it. The Founders negotiated a balance between a government that was arbitrary and coercive (their experience as British colonial subjects) and one that was powerless and divided (the failed Articles of Confederation).

The Founders didn't anticipate the New Deal-- there was no need for them to-- but they were as quick to resort to the resources of the state as any modern liberal. Ben Franklin, for instance, played the Pennsylvania legislature like a violin-- using it to fund a hospital he wanted to establish, for instance. Obviously he had no qualms about using state power to do good social works.

It's also worth pointing out that the Founders' words were nobler than their deeds. Most were quite comfortable with slave-owning, for instance. No one worried about women's consent to be governed. Washington's own administration made it a crime to criticize the government. And as Robert Allen Rutland reminds us,

The process of giving life to our constitutional rights has largely been the work of liberals. On the greatest fight of all, to treat blacks as human beings, libertarians supported the other side.

Crackpots are usually harmless; how about the Libertarian Party?

In itself, I'm afraid, it's nothing but a footnote. It gets no more than 1% of the vote-- a showing that's been surpassed historically by the Anti-Masonic Party, the Greenbacks, the Prohibition Party, the Socialists, the Greens, and whatever John Anderson was. If that was all it was, I wouldn't bother to devote pages and rants to it. I'm all for the expression of pure eccentricity in politics; I like the Brits' Monster Raving Looney Party even better.

Why are libertarian ideas important? Because of their influence on the Republican Party. They form the ideological basis for the Reagan/Gingrich/Bush revolution. The Republicans have taken the libertarian "Government is Bad" horse and ridden far with it:

Maybe this use of their ideas is appalling to 'Real Libertarians'... well, it's an appalling world sometimes. Is it fair to communism that everyone thinks its Leninist manifestation is the only possible one? Do you think I'm happy to have national representatives like Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry?

At least some libertarians have understood the connection. Rothbard again, writing in 1994:

Can you smell the compromise here? Hold your nose and vote for the Repubs, boys. But then don't pretend to be uninvolved when the Republicans start making a mockery of limited government.

There's a deeper lesson here, and it's part of why I don't buy libertarian portraits of the future utopia. Movements out of power are always anti-authoritarian; it's no guarantee that they'll stay that way. Communists before 1917 promised the withering away of the state. Fascists out of power sounded something like socialists. The Republicans were big on term limits when they could be used to unseat Democrats; they say nothing about them today. If you don't think it can happen to you, you're not being honest about human nature and human history.

The Libertarian Party has a cute little test that purports to divide American politics into four quadrants. There's the economic dimension (where libertarians ally with conservatives) and the social dimension (where libertarians ally with liberals).

I think the diagram is seriously misleading, because visually it gives equal importance to both dimensions. And when the rubber hits the road, libertarians almost always go with the economic dimension.

The libertarian philosopher always starts with property rights. Libertarianism arose in opposition to the New Deal, not to Prohibition. The libertarian voter is chiefly exercised over taxes, regulation, and social programs; the libertarian wing of the Republican party has, for forty years, gone along with the war on drugs, corporate welfare, establishment of dictatorships abroad, and an alliance with theocrats. Christian libertarians like Ron Paul want God in the public schools and are happy to have the government forbid abortion and gay marriage. I never saw the libertarians objecting to Bush Sr. mocking the protection of civil rights, or to Ken Starr's government inquiry into politicians' sex lives. On the Cato Institute's list of recent books, I count 1 of 19 dealing with an issue on which libertarians and liberals tend to agree, and that was on foreign policy (specifically, the Iraq war).

If this is changing, as Bush's never-ending "War on Terror" expands the powers of government, demonizes dissent, and enmeshes the country in military crusades and nation-building, as the Republicans push to remove the checks and balances that remain in our government system-- if libertarians come to realize that Republicans and not Democrats are the greater threat to liberty-- I'd be delighted.

But for that, you know, you have to vote against Bush. A belief in social liberties means little if you vote for a party that clearly intends to restrict them.

For the purposes of my critique, however, the social side of libertarianism is irrelevant. A libertarian and I might actually agree to legalize drugs, let people marry whoever they like, and repeal the Patriot Act. But this has nothing to do with whether robber baron capitalism is a good thing.

The libertarianism that has any effect in the world, then, has nothing to do with social liberty, and everything to do with removing all restrictions on business. So what's wrong with that?

Let's look at some cases that came within spitting distance of the libertarian ideal. Some libertarians won't like these, because they are not Spotless Instances of the Free Utopia; but as I've said, nothing is proved by science fiction. If complete economic freedom and absence of government is a cure-all, partial economic freedom and limited government should be a cure-some.

At the turn of the 20th century, business could do what it wanted-- and it did. The result was robber barons, monopolistic gouging, management thugs attacking union organizers, filth in our food, a punishing business cycle, slavery and racial oppression, starvation among the elderly, gunboat diplomacy in support of business interests.

The New Deal itself was a response to crisis (though by no means an unprecedented one; it wasn't much worse than the Gilded Age depressions). A quarter of the population was out of work. Five thousand banks failed, destroying the savings of 9 million families. Steel plants were operating at 12% capacity. Banks foreclosed on a quarter of Mississippi's land. Wall Street was discredited by insider trading and collusion with banks at the expense of investors. Farmers were breaking out into open revolt; miners and jobless city workers were rioting.

Don't think, by the way, that if governments don't provide gunboats, no one else will. Corporations will build their own military if necessary: the East Indies Company did; Leopold did in the Congo; management did when fighting with labor.

Or take Russia in the decade after the fall of Communism, as advised by free-market absolutists like Jeffrey Sachs. Russian GDP declined 50% in five years. The elite grabbed the assets they could and shuffled them out of Russia so fast that IMF loans couldn't compensate. In 1994 alone, 600 businessmen, journalists, and politicians were murdered by gangsters. Russia lacked a working road system, a banking system, anti-monopoly regulation, effective law enforcement, or any sort of safety net for the elderly and the jobless. Inflation reached 2250% in 1992. Central government authority effectively disappeared in many regions.

By the way, Russia is the answer to those testosterone-poisoned folks who think that guns will prevent oppression. The mafia will always outgun you.

Today's Russia is moving back toward authoritarianism under Putin. Again, this should dismay libertarians: apparently, given a little freedom, many people will demand less. You'd better be careful about setting up that utopia; ten years further on it may be taken over by authoritarians.

Or consider the darling of many an '80s conservative: Pinochet's Chile, installed by Nixon, praised by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, George Bush, and Paul Johnson. In twenty years, foreign debt quadrupled, natural resources were wasted, universal health care was abandoned (leading to epidemics of typhoid fever and hepatitis), unions were outlawed, military spending rose (for what? who the hell is going to attack Chile?), social security was "privatized" (with predictable results: ever-increasing government bailouts) and the poverty rate doubled, from 20% to 41%. Chile's growth rate from 1974 to 1982 was 1.5%; the Latin American average was 4.3%.

Pinochet was a dicator, of course, which makes some libertarians feel that they have nothing to learn here. Somehow Chile's experience (say) privatizing social security can tell us nothing about privatizing social security here, because Pinochet was a dictator. Presumably if you set up a business in Chile, the laws of supply and demand and perhaps those of gravity wouldn't apply, because Pinochet was a dictator.

When it's convenient, libertarians even trumpet their association with Chile's "free market" policies; self-gov.org (originators of that cute quiz) includes a page celebrating Milton Friedman, self-proclaimed libertarian, who helped form and advise the group of University of Chicago professors and graduates who implemented Pinochet's policies. The Cato Institute even named a prize for "Advancing Liberty" after this benefactor of the Chilean dictatorship.

The newest testing ground for laissez-faire is present-day America, from Ronald Reagan on.

Remove the New Deal, and the pre-New Deal evils clamor to return. Reagan removed the right to strike; companies now fire strikers, outsource high-wage jobs and replace them with dead-end near-minimum-wage service jobs. Middle-class wages are stagnating-- or plummeting, if you consider that working hours are rising. Companies are rushing to reestablish child labor in the Third World.

Under liberalism, productivity increases benefited all classes-- poverty rates declined from over 30% to under 10% in the thirty years after World War II, while the economy more than quadrupled in size.

In the current libertarian climate, productivity gains only go to the already well-off. Here's the percentage of US national income received by certain percentiles of the population, as reported by the IRS:

This should put some perspective on libertarian whining about high taxes and how we're destroying incentives for the oppressed businessman. The wealthiest 1% of the population doubled their share of the pie in just 15 years. In 1973, CEOs earned 45 times the pay of an average employee (about twice the multipler in Japan); today it's 500 times.

Thirty years ago, managers accepted that they operated as much for their workers, consumers, and neighbors as for themselves. Some economists (notably Michael Jensen and William Meckling) decided that the only stakeholders that mattered were the stock owners-- and that management would be more accountable if they were given massive amounts of stock. Not surprisingly, CEOs managed to get the stock without the accountability-- they're obscenely well paid whether the company does well or it tanks-- and the obsession with stock price led to mass layoffs, short-term thinking, and the financial dishonesty at WorldCom, Enron, Adelphia, HealthSouth, and elsewhere.

The nature of our economic system has changed in the last quarter-century, and people haven't understood it yet. People over 30 or so grew up in an environment where the rich got more, but everyone prospered. When productivity went up, the rich got richer-- we're not goddamn communists, after all-- but everybody's income increased.

If you were part of the World War II generation, the reality was that you had access to subsidized education and housing, you lived better every year, and you were almost unimaginably better off than your parents.

We were a middle-class nation, perhaps the first nation in history where the majority of the people were comfortable. This infuriated the communists (this wasn't supposed to happen). The primeval libertarians who cranky about it as well, but the rich had little reason to complain-- they were better off than ever before, too.

Conservatives-- nurtured by libertarian ideas-- have managed to change all that. When productivity rises, the rich now keep the gains; the middle class barely stays where it is; the poor get poorer. We have a ways to go before we become a Third World country, but the model is clear. The goal is an impoverished majority, and a super-rich minority with no effective limitations on its power or earnings. We'll exchange the prosperity of 1950s America for that of 1980s Brazil.

Despite the intelligence of many of its supporters, libertarianism is an instance of the simplest (and therefore silliest) type of politics: the single-villain ideology. Everything is blamed on the government. (One libertarian, for instance, reading my list of the evils of laissez-faire above, ignored everything but "gunboats". It's like Gary Larson's cartoon of "What dogs understand", with the dog's name replaced with "government".)

The advantage of single-villain ideologies is obvious: in any given situation you never have to think hard to find out the culprit. The disadvantages, however, are worse: you can't see your primary target clearly-- hatred is a pair of dark glasses-- and you can't see the problems with anything else.

It's a habit of mind that renders libertarianism unfalsifiable, and thus irrelevant to the world. Everything gets blamed on one institution; and because we have no real-world example where that agency is absent, the claims can't be tested.

Not being a libertarian doesn't mean loving the state; it means accepting complexity. The real world is a monstrously complicated place; there's not just one thing wrong with it, nor just one thing that can be changed to fix it. Things like prosperity and freedom don't have one cause; they're a balancing act.

Here's an alternative theory for you: original sin. People will mess things up, whether by stupidity or by active malice. There is no magical class of people (e.g. "government") who can be removed to produce utopia. Any institution is liable to failure, or active criminality. Put anyone in power-- whether it's communists or engineers or businessmen-- and they will abuse it.

Does this mean things are hopeless? Of course not; it just means that we have to let all institutions balance each other. Government, opposition parties, business, the media, unions, churches, universities, non-government organizations, all watch over each other. Power is distributed as widely as possible to prevent any one institution from monopolizing and abusing it. It's not always a pretty solution, and it can be frustratingly slow and inefficient, but it works better than any alternative I know of.

Markets are very good at some things, like deciding what to produce and distributing it. But unrestricted markets don't produce general prosperity, and lawless business can and will abuse its power. Examples can be multiplied ad nauseam: read some history-- or the newspaper.

Libertarian responses to such lists are beyond amazing.

Slavery is another example: though some hoped that the market would eventually make it unprofitable, it sure was taking its time, and neither the slave nor the abolitionist had any non-governmental leverage over the slaveowners.

(Libertarians usually claim to oppose slavery... but that's awfully easy to say on this side of Civil War and the civil rights movement. The slaveowners thought they were defending their sacred rights to property and self-government.)

And those are the better responses. Often enough the only response is explain how nothing bad can happen in the libertarian utopia. But libertarian dogma can't be buttressed by libertarian doctrine-- that's begging the question.

Or it's simply denied that these things are problems. One correspondent suggested that the poor shouldn't "complain" about not getting loans-- "I wouldn't make a loan if I didn't think I'd get paid back." This is not only hard-hearted but ignorant. Who says the poor are bad credit risks? It often takes prodding from community organizations, but banks can serve low-income areas well-- both making money and fostering home ownership. Institutions like the Grameen Bank have found that micro-loans work very well, and are profitable, in the poorest countries on Earth, such as Bangladesh.

A proven solution to most of these ills is liberalism. For fifty years liberals governed this country, generating unprecedented prosperity, and making this the first solidly middle-class nation.

If you want prosperity for the many-- and why should the many support any other goal?-- you need a balance between government and business. For this you need several things:

Perhaps the most communicable libertarian meme-- and one of the most mischievous-- is the attempt to paint taxation as theft.

First, it's dishonest. Most libertarians theoretically accept government for defense and law enforcement. (There are some absolutists who don't even believe in national defense; I guess they want to have a libertarian utopia for awhile, then hand it over to foreign invaders.)

Now, national defense and law enforcement cost money: about 22% of the 2002 budget-- 33% of the non-social-security budget. You can't swallow that and maintain that all taxes are bad. At least the cost of those functions is not "your money"; it's a legitimate charge for necessary services.

Americans enjoy the fruits of public scientific research, a well-educated job force, highways and airports, clean food, honest labelling, Social Security, unemployment insurance, trustworthy banks, national parks. Libertarianism has encouraged the peculiarly American delusion that these things come for free. It makes a philosophy out of biting the hand that feeds you.

Second, it leads directly to George Bush's financial irresponsibility. Would a libertarian urge his family or his software company or his gun club to spend twice what it takes in? When libertarians maintain that irresponsibility among the poor is such a bad thing, why is it OK in the government?

It's no excuse to claim that libertarians didn't want the government to increase spending, as Bush has done. As you judge others, so shall you be judged. Libertarians want to judge liberalism not by its goals (e.g. helping poor children) but by its alleged effects (e.g. teen pregnancy). The easiest things in the world for a politician to do are to lower taxes and raise spending. By attacking the very concept of taxation, libertarians help politicians-- and the public-- to indulge their worst impulses.

Finally, it hides dependence on the government. The economic powerhouse of the US is still the Midwest, the Northeast, and California-- largely liberal Democratic areas. As Dean Lacy has pointed out, over the last decade, the blue states of 2004 paid $1.4 trillion more in federal taxes than they received, while red states received $800 billion more than they paid.

Red state morality isn't just to be irresponsible with the money they pay as taxes; it's to be irresponsible with other people's money. It's protesting the concept of getting an allowance by stealing the other kids' money.

Ultimately, my objection to libertarianism is moral. Arguing across moral gulfs is usually ineffective; but we should at least be clear about what our moral differences are.

First, the worship of the already successful and the disdain for the powerless is essentially the morality of a thug. Money and property should not be privileged above everything else-- love, humanity, justice.

(And let's not forget that lurid fascination with firepower-- seen in ESR, Ron Paul, Heinlein and Van Vogt, Advocates for Self-Government's president Sharon Harris, the Cato Institute, Lew Rockwell's site, and the Mises Institute.)

I wish I could convince libertarians that the extremely wealthy don't need them as their unpaid advocates. Power and wealth don't need a cheering section; they are-- by definition-- not an oppressed class which needs our help. Power and wealth can take care of themselves. It's the poor and the defenseless who need aid and advocates.

The libertarians reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's description of people who are so eager to attack a hated ideology that they will destroy their own furniture to make sticks to beat it with. James Craig Green again:

Here's a very different moral point of view: Jimmy Carter describing why he builds houses with Habitat for Humanity:

Is this "confused hysteria"? No, it's common human decency. It's sad when people have to twist themselves into knots to malign the human desire (and the Biblical command) to help one's neighbor.

Second, it's the philosophy of a snotty teen, someone who's read too much Heinlein, absorbed the sordid notion that an intellectual elite should rule the subhuman masses, and convinced himself that reading a few bad novels qualifies him as a member of the elite.

Third, and perhaps most common, it's the worldview of a provincial narcissist. As I've observed in my overview of the 20th century, liberalism won its battles so thoroughly that people have forgotten why those battles were fought.

See the rest here:
What's wrong with libertarianism - Zompist.com