Brian Doherty and Libertarians’ Unfinished Revolution
Jason Kuznicki on Mar 12th 2007
The libertarian ecumenism of Brian Doherty’s “Libertarianism: Past and Prospects” at Cato Unbound is rare, rich, striking stuff. It’s also a bit hard to believe:
Rand was right: we need to work on root metaphysical and ethical principles about humans and the state. Mises and Read and Friedman were right: we need to educate the public about the operations and richness of an unfettered free-market economy. Hayek was right: understanding the information-spreading functions of the free price system and the reality of spontaneous orders without central control is vital. Rothbard was right: an uncompromising moral passion about liberty and theorizing on how a wonderful social order could function without any monopoly source of force at all is bracing and inspirational. Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation is right: nuts-and-bolts work showing how market competition and deregulation can function and slot into an existing world of state functions can demonstrate that government doesn’t have to, and oughtn’t, do everything it has traditionally done.
It’s possible, but only just barely, for libertarians in the know to agree to all of these things at once. Anyone familiar with these thinkers and their works can tell you that they spent much energy trashing one another, often with good reason, and often without (for an assessment of the score that I find entirely accurate, see Sandefur, downblog).
A similar but inverted paragraph would be easy enough to write: Rand was wrong, because she mistrusted the notion of spontaneous order; Mises was wrong, because he placed too little stress on psychology and the life of the mind; Rothbard was wrong, because foundational questions in ethics must not be shunted aside; Hayek was wrong, because he could not account for how reasoning individuals confront traditional institutions; and so forth.
And, through all of this, the average American would be left… bewildered. Who are all these people that all these other people are arguing so passionately about?
The general ignorance, and dismissal, of the libertarian movement among mainstream Americans is one of the great paradoxes of our time: From roughly the mid-twentieth century up to the present, something remarkable has happened. A way of thinking about social and political questions, a disposition of mind that lay dormant for decades, has reasserted itself. Quietly, it has influenced even those who have nothing but scorn for libertarians and their ideals.
It came first in the exuberant system-building and radicalism of a few people who would have been counted serious eccentrics even setting their politics aside. And then, in the decades that followed, it developed into a set of institutions, cultural values, and basic assumptions about life itself, assumptions that have had an ever-wider currency and that have yielded surprising, usually unacknowledged results. (Someone should please, please write a libertarian history of the American republic of the last sixty years, giving credit where credit is due. What a revealing exercise this would be to the general public.)
The change in cultural values and attitudes has come so quickly that it could well be called a revolution. It’s also left libertarians scrambling, sometimes, to adjust our own paradigms: At a recent discussion, I overheard a much older libertarian disagree with a younger member of the movement who had made some remark on the constant downward spiral of statism: “You have no idea,” said the older one in effect. “You have no idea the stuff that used to happen, in this very country.”
He went on to mention the Interstate Commerce Commission, Nixon’s price controls, the military draft, and the onerous regulations on heavy industry that were dismantled in the Carter and Reagan administrations. He could easily have continued: the 90% tax bracket, the indecency laws, the blue laws, the “fairness doctrine”… all have either been abolished or severely curtailed.
Things have gotten vastly better on a number of fronts, and it’s actually arguable that we’re not on the road to serfdom anymore at all. While state power has continued to assert itself in many troubling new areas, it’s also faced a powerful and growing critique. These examples prove just how successful the attack has been; how much better off we are without them proves just how right the attack has been.
But libertarians have more to be proud of than just preventing or rolling back the improper use of state power. Libertarian tendencies have pervaded many of the most interesting new technological developments of the last few decades, and in the United States at least, the government has generally been content to follow a laissez-faire policy in these areas.
Perhaps the most spectacular libertarian achievement of all has taken place spontaneously, in the almost entirely unregulated growth of the Internet and the related communications media that now define how we learn, work, shop, and play. When most or all of us voluntarily abandon the regulated areas of human life, and when we enter new, unregulated areas, the result is… an increase in human liberty. Where do so many of us really live? Online. And the online world is almost as close to the libertarian utopia as one could reasonably get. Revealed preferences, anyone?
Now libertarians can’t claim full credit for what was, at the outset, a government-subsidized program. But the way that the Internet developed — I should say, the way that it was permitted to develop — reflects a profound cultural change. Had the World Wide Web arrived in the 1950s, I would probably need a government license just to be writing this. And yes, there is still government protection against online threats of force and fraud — but many libertarians have no problem whatsoever with the night watchman state as we find it online.
The degree to which ordinary voters and policy makers intuitively appreciate libertarian arguments and libertarian social arrangements has increased remarkably, and the effects of this tacit change can be seen all around us. Both online and in the so-called “real” world, libertarians have inserted into the public mind two vital questions: Should the government be doing this? And can the government do it successfully?
The short answer may well be no. The longer answer? Wellllll… Doherty writes,
Ayn Rand, a central inspiration for the movement, gadfly, truculent sometimes-comrade to the early generation of libertarians, and mentor and inspiration to many in the later ones, believed that when it came to libertarian political change, it was “earlier than you think.” The modern “radical for capitalism” must realize that generations of education are needed before a truly libertarian culture and politics would take hold. This was rooted in Rand’s belief that political change was insufficient if not reached for the right philosophical reasons—which means: by grasping her Objectivist philosophy from ontology through epistemology through ethics.
Earlier than you think, indeed. So often, the libertarian thought of the mid-twentieth century would supply principles, but it did not yet supply a convincing model of how a given problem would be solved if all the principles were faithfully adhered to. So often, it had its big, theoretical ideas shot down because no one could imagine — or make believable — a solution better than the one currently on offer from the government.
But things have changed a lot since then, and aside from leading an external revolution, the libertarian movement has changed a good deal itself. From big, far-reaching principles, libertarians have increasingly gained a quirky mastery of the small, unexpected stuff: School vouchers, market-traded pollution credits, taxi cab liberalization, even Julian Simon’s brilliant (and now ubiquitous) idea that airlines could use market incentives rather than randomly “bumping” passengers off of overbooked flights. If you ever agreed to layover in Atlanta rather than Newark, and got bumped to first class for your time, thank a libertarian. I’m old enough, but only just barely, to remember people ridiculing the notion that the U.S. Postal Service could ever be privatized — No private business could ever make money delivering the mail. No one makes this argument anymore; they cannot, as it has been refuted in practice: The allegedly unprofitable third class sector now sports not one but two private nationwide competitors. And now there is no remaining justification for the official monopoly on first class mail.
Libertarians, the erstwhile radicals, are learning to play the game, learning a general, intuitive feel for how to make things work in American political culture, and this manifests itself in dozens of little techniques of social management, each one driven by an understanding of market incentives and a respect for individual liberty. That we are learning to play the game at all is a matter of fierce internal debate, like everything else in libertarianism. But it is happening, it’s almost entirely inevitable, and it’s almost certainly a good thing for everyone concerned.
A good example of this comes in Tyler Cowen’s response essay, “The Paradox of Libertarianism,” in which he argues that not all increases in the size of government are either bad or avoidable. In principle, this is undoubtedly correct. While libertarians for decades assumed that every increase in the size of government was invariably a bad thing, this is not necessarily the case. If we accept that a night watchman state really is the best, there may still be times when the size and scope of the government must nevertheless grow, as when new forms of social and economic life require new forms of protection against force and fraud. Agreed entirely. But I cannot bring myself to accept uncritically the “package deal” that Cowen proposes, which seems to make a virtue — more government is good! — out of a necessity — libertarian ideas increase wealth, and wealth increases the temptation to compromise on libertarian ideas. More government still tends overwhelmingly to mean worse government, and the exceptions remain exceptional.
Indeed, one could almost make the case that all of the most interesting and provocative public policy initiatives of recent years have either come directly from libertarians or have at least taken some inspiration from libertarian thought. As if to prove my point, and before I even had the chance to proofread and post this entry, along comes a landmark judicial decision — It turns out that the Second Amendment really does confer an individual right to bear arms. Who knew? We did.
Now for the cold water. Sandefur writes of Objectivists as follows, but he would have been equally correct to write it of libertarians, vis-a-vis the general public:
It is true, of course, that Objectivism has its share of crazies and embarrassments. More than its share, probably, both because we are such a small minority, and because Objectivism tends to appeal to the young, whose natural awkwardness then increases the difficulties. But I wish Doherty were more willing to acknowledge that there are many of us who are not crackpots, not crippled with horrifying guilt and self-loathing, who read widely outside of Objectivist literature, who lead happy and successful lives of purpose and fulfillment. And I wish that he would have acknowledged more openly that there are legitimate reasons for us to criticize other libertarians, and to want in many cases to distance ourselves from them.
While Doherty may not have the most felicitous views of Objectivists, the public at large thinks likewise of libertarians. This state of affairs, where a great many perfectly sane and indeed brilliant people are characterized by the worst of their hangers-on, cries out for an explanation (I might say for an apology, but I am not a bitter person). So I’ll offer one here.
I call it Kuznicki’s Rule of Crackpottery: A crackpot does not choose his political beliefs through reasoned consideration, through emotion, through peer pressure, or through any other discernible mechanism at all. Instead, he lists every available ideology, large or small, in one big list — and then he selects one at random. In other words, the population of crackpots tends to distribute itself evenly among the various schools of political thought. But when they adhere to a small school, they are more readily noticed.
Enough about them already. Enough, too, about the libertarian infighting, most of which is counterproductive. A successful movement will be multifarious, even if we personally think that many or most of the factions are wrong (or even if all of us are wrong, but wrong in interesting and productive ways). This is only understandable, and it’s bound to happen whenever any reasonably sized group of people decides, collectively, to re-think politics from first principles.
The revolution, however, is well underway, whether we all agree on its means and foundations or not. So it is with all revolutions, and the effects of libertarian thought can already be felt in many areas of life, even if little or no credit comes to the pioneers of the movement.
Filed in The Bookshelf
Some ideas, just are. There is no revolution.
An interesting conundrum for libertarians and neo-libertarians is the internal contradiction between belief in smaller government and mounting a political ‘movement’ or ‘revolution.’ This conundrum might help explain why libertarians running for political office do so poorly, such as when they proudly identify themselves as libertarian but campaign on a platform calling for mandatory universal health care (a 2006 Texas libertarian office-seeker).
Perhaps the optimistic theme of Dr. Kuzinski’s analysis suggests a greater role for libertarianism, i.e., instead of attempting to achieve political power, libertarianism is much more productive as an intellectual force. Sartre’s ‘Existentialism’ comes quickly to mind. Despite betraying Existentalism’s foundational tenets of freedom and personal responsibility (when he came out of the closet to admit he was a Marxist, Sartre irrevocably crippled the best freedom philosophy since Mill’s), as an intellectual movement existentialism attracted some of the best minds on the planet. Yet no one ran for political office as an Existentialist, which somehow increases the standing of Existentialism as a philosophy, rather than it becoming another political ideology.
Ideologies are ‘calls for action.’ Power is implicit. In Arendt’s famous phrase, “ideology is an idea treated as if it were fact.” If libertarians were to recast their efforts at developing libertarianism as an intellectual movement—freedom as a philosophy—and eschew the acquisition of pragmatic political power, Dr. Kuzinski just might find a great many more positive results to write about in the years ahead.
I’d start with the contemporary writings of libertarian philosophers Tibor Machan, Jan Narveson, and Abdolkarim Soroush. Build human freedom as a philosophy, and watch the world beat a path toward libertarian doors, because freedom is what humanity already wants. We’ve had a belly full of blood-drenched idealisms and ideologies and theologies, I should think, and Nietzsche—and even Sartre—would heartily approve of freedom as a moral philosophy rather than freedom as an ideology.
Ideologies—calls for political action—come and go. But philosophy, if anabolic, endures for millennia. No one ever ran for political office as a Stoic, yet look how Stoicism still is so influential thousands of years later. If libertarians (like Machan and Soroush are doing at http://www.philohr.org) help make freedom a philosophy, the positive effects of libertarianism will endure for centuries.
‘Be free.’
A Duoist makes some very good points above. I’ve already read some of Narveson and Machan both, so now I am interested in Soroush, whom I’ve not yet read. It’s always perplexed me why Rothbard followed such explicitly Leninist organizational methods in the libertarian movement. If we start from the premise that Leninism is good at building a totalitarian state (and nothing else!), then it’s hard to see why his model is to be emulated.
Jason,
Do you know any examples in history or fiction which might serve as an a utopian vision of a Libertarian state? I’ve noted in the past that Fisher’s description of the Backcountry “folkway” in Albion’s Seed resembles a lot of the descriptions a libertarian society, but I also think that few Libertarians would actually want to live in such a society. I was wondering if you have a better example?
I suspect that libertarianism, both as a philosophy and as a political movement, is basically epiphenomenal in the developments described here. Markets have been preferred over time because markets typically _work_, and because Americans have a pretty healthy tendency, at least in the long run, to go with what works. But, where markets don’t work, Americans aren’t especially inclined to put special stock in them. I’d suggest that what you’ve seen is just a stretch of political road in which libertarian principles happened to be well-aligned with American not-very-principled pragmatism; but it’s the latter, not the former, that has been driving the car.
Philosopher –
You may be right. Yet there has always been a libertarian element to American political thought as well.
Sure, of course. (Well, maybe not _always_, but I catch your meaning.) And let me offer the following semi-concession, as a story how that libertarian element had an important _indirect_ causal contribution to the more liberty-friendly system of government we have now (modulo Bushoid creeping authoritarianism, that is). I think that one role that ideologies can play in the intellectual ecosystem is to provide a home for various ideas that they can survive in, even when the prevailing conditions are unfriendly to it. The ideologically committed make a great memetic niche, as it were, and preserve a large amount of ‘memetic diversity’. So, at some point the facts on the ground — like the general postwar economic flourishing, and the apparently _economic_ failure of the Soviet Union — started to support more market-friendly policies. At that time, the idea that free markets can be, in fact, a very very good thing indeed, which had been kept alive in the libertarian niche, was ready to be hoisted up & tried out in the public at large. Their reasoning itself wasn’t libertarian, but the reasoning that they did have might not have been possible, had market-friendly ideas not been preserved by libertarian reasoning.
“What works!” is the pragmatist’s clarion standard for all philosophies and sociologies, famously issued by William James.
By what measure does freedom ‘work’? By increased prosperity? Already empirically proven. By human happiness? An entire branch of psychology (Martin Seligman, et al) has been doing research for years on the health benefits of happiness, tracing unhappiness (depression) to learned helplessness and pessimism. Freedom is, by its nature, both optimistic and grounded in the trusting of others (which is itself the measure of good mental health). There is no guarantee of happiness in freedom, but human trust and optimism are about as good as anything can be, as the grounding of first principles, if ‘what works’ is the standard.
A leader of the Chinese Communist Party recently replied, when asked about the significance of the French Revolution to humanity, said it was still too soon to tell. That’s the Chinese long view. The American view, ‘what works,’ is an even longer view, and such a view recognizes that freedom is humanity’s future.
Mark –
I can point to several examples in both fiction and nonfiction that have some relevance here. The one that you give illustrates a real problem in libertarian thought, as it is possible for the laws to be of the proper character, but for life still to be quite unfree through pervasive social customs that also have the force of law. While I do not deny that it is a problem, I also do not think it is an insoluble one, or that any society whose laws were libertarian would necessarily be authoritarian in its social mores.
In fiction, there is Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which gives some idea of a very, very libertarian frontier society. In history, you may want to check out medieval Iceland, whose law enforcement was entirely privatized. And, as I suggested above, the Internet, with all its literature, commerce, religion, and art is nonetheless almost entirely free of taxes, regulation on content, entry or exit regulations, regulations on association among peoples, and so forth — except insofar as these are privately instituted. There are important constraints on using the Internet as an example, notably that space on the Internet is in principle infinite. But the fact that such a large part of human life is so unregulated should give anyone hope that a further expansion of liberty is both possible and desirable.
Would liberterian philosophy apply to any socieity be it the first century or the thirty first and how much does technology effects what works?
Jason,
It’s been so so long since I read Heinlein, and that book (I think it’s been about 30 years now since I read that). I’ll keep an eye out for it, to refresh my memory. In that period I read pretty much everything he’d written. I can see how he might be seen as Libertarian.
I’d agree that the Internet has a lot of anarchic features, but I don’t think it serves very well as an example from which we can extrapolate a society and a state. Or at least if you wish to do so, it very well might end up looking like cyber-punk dystopian visions as easily as a libertarian utopia.
I’ll keep Iceland in mind, after I finish reading a Wickham history (of Late Antiquity) that I’m reading now. I have a copy of The Saga’s of Iceland on my shelf only partially read so far, but that might not be the right period.
When you note:
I also do not think it is an insoluble one, or that any society whose laws were libertarian would necessarily be authoritarian in its social mores.
I wonder. Social mores and custom tie themselves to law in a very complicated fashion, which has a somewhat chicken and egg conundrum. As an extreme example, which came first the Law of Lycurgus or the Spartan military culture?
Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self interest, not of respect for the non-existent ‘rights’ of gang-rulers. It is not a nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.” (”Collectivized Rights,” in Virtue of Selfishness). And, again, if we believe that individual rights are natural and universal—rather than conventional and subjective—then her argument is correct.
This is perhaps the main source of the dispute between Objectivists and Libertarians, and I mainly mention it here, because I do not think the last sentence that I have quoted is true. I absolutely believe that individual rights are natural and universal, but that in no way implies that a free nation has the right to overthrow a gang-ruler. The first problem with this notion is that there are no free nations; from the standpoint of either Objectivist or Libertarian philosophy there has never been a truly free nation. It also ignores the fact that people that live under tyrannical governments also have individual rights and that killing those people in order to save them from their government is a clear violation of those rights. People living under tyrannical governments absolutely have the right to rebel against them, but an external agency overthrowing a tyrannical government is unlikely to produce anything other than another tyrannical government and is all but guaranteed to kill free citizens that most likely have nothing to do with said government.
John —
We’ve actually covered this territory quite a lot in the past (search the category “the Barracks” and you will sooner or later find Sandefur and I at one another’s throats about it).
I actually disagree with your two points, but only in some very limited circumstances. I’ll try to explain.
First, I don’t think it matters that no nation in the world is entirely free. If an 80% free nation attacked a 0% free nation and converted its government to 80% freedom — just like theirs — this would be a net gain. I can’t argue with it.
Second, though, there are the rights of the citizens in the invaded countries. Yes, their rulers treat them terribly. But they are still alive and, all other things set aside, we ought not to harm them. This is a weighty objection.
I think the objection is overcome, however, when the citizens of the invading country would otherwise face the sort of dangers that government is created to stop. In these cases, the government has the right to invade. But they are very few, and neither Iraq nor Vietnam were to my mind justified in this sense. Yes, we always have the right to end a dictator’s rule, because no dictator rules legitimately. But no — It’s not always a good idea for either our citizens or the dictators’ subjects, either.
As to the Objectivist/libertarian split on these matters, I am aware that the official ARI Objectivist line lately is strongly pro-torture, and unafraid to say the word (which boggles the mind, given how Rand wrote about torture). As I recall, they were pro-Iraq for quite some time but decided around a year into the enterprise that we were fighting for the wrong things there. (I agree, incidentally, that we are fighting for the wrong things there, in that we are trying to set up popular democracy rather than individual rights.)
Individual Objectivists will actually break in a lot of different ways here, as will individual libertarians. As for me, I tend to think that every word Ayn Rand wrote about Vietnam was true of Vietnam — and that almost all are equally true of Iraq.
Jason, I think on the whole that your argument is reasonable and quite compelling. The reason why I feel in practice it doesn’t tend to work, especially when you’re talking about an outside body overthrowing a government, is that usually when the 80% free government overthrows the 0% free government it does not produce a new 80% free government, it produces a new 0% free government. In the vast majority of these nation building cases, you do not have the net gain in governmental freedom, but you absolutely have the net loss in life on both sides caused by the invasion in the first place. Overthrowing a government is basically a crap shoot; if there isn’t a hugely compelling reason to believe that the new government will be significantly better than the old one, then overthrowing that government is not justified in my mind.
[...] As I’ve recently and somewhat unseriously written: A crackpot does not choose his political beliefs through reasoned consideration, through emotion, through peer pressure, or through any other discernible mechanism at all. Instead, he lists every available ideology, large or small, in one big list — and then he selects one at random. In other words, the population of crackpots tends to distribute itself evenly among the various schools of political thought. But when they adhere to a small school, they are more readily noticed. [...]