For the Balkinization Symposium on Andrew Koppelman, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed (St. Martin’s Press, 2022).
Matt Zwolinski
Ed Crane, one of the co-founders of the libertarian Cato Institute, once quipped that as a libertarian he always knew that it was important to be tolerant of alternative lifestyles, but until he walked into the conventional hall of the Libertarian Party, he had no idea just how many alternatives there were.
In the course of writing our book on the history of libertarian thought, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, John Tomasi and I had much the same experience. Both of us were already familiar with the main libertarian thinkers of the 20th century: Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises. But neither of us had sufficiently appreciated just how many differences there were between these thinkers. And we certainly didn’t realize how much deeper, messier, and more interesting this diversity would become once we expanded the scope of our vision. Libertarianism, we came to realize, was not the creation of 20th century American intellectuals. Libertarianism was born in the 19th century, and first came on to the scene in Britain and France, only later making its way to the United States, where it took on a strikingly different form.
In some of its
manifestations, as Andrew Koppelman notes in his
book, libertarianism has taken a conservative, even reactionary cast.
Libertarians have fought against the progressive redistribution of wealth; they
have fought against environmental regulation; and they have even in some cases lent
their support to witch-hunts against the supposed communist infiltration of
Hollywood.
In contrast, Koppelman
identifies Friedrich Hayek as a libertarian whose libertarianism takes a more
progressive form, or at least as someone whose ideas lend themselves to a kind
of progressive reinterpretation. Whereas the libertarianism of Rothbard and
Rand is radical and absolutist, Hayek’s libertarianism is pragmatic and
moderate. Hayek opposed state socialism and praised the free market, but he did
not view markets as morally sacrosanct, and even his most polemical work, The
Road to Serfdom, is replete with exceptions to the principle of laissez-faire.
It would be easy to come
away from this sort of contrast believing that moderate forms of libertarianism
are inherently friendlier to progressive ends than more radical ones. This
would be a mistake, but it is a mistake that becomes clearest only when we look
beyond 20th century libertarianism to its 19th century
antecedents.
Consider, for example,
the 19th century American libertarian Lysander Spooner. Spooner is
about as radical and uncompromising a libertarian as one is likely to find. But
his radicalism is, as I have argued elsewhere,
almost always directed against systems of privilege and power. Not only was Spooner
a strident
opponent of his slavery, but he was also a powerful critic
of the wage-labor system, which he regarded as the product of illegitimate
state restrictions on the availability of capital.
Or consider the British
reformer Richard
Cobden, and his French counterpart Frédéric Bastiat,
both of whom devoted the greater part of their careers to the fight against
economic protectionism. Both men regarded protectionist policies as
economically inefficient. But more important for both of them was the manifest injustice
of policies which, in their context, raised the price of basic necessities
for the poor in order to further enrich small but economically and politically
powerful groups of domestic producers.
Even the much-maligned
Herbert Spencer often deployed his libertarianism toward progressive purposes,
from arguing
against the legitimacy of private ownership of land, to criticizing British imperialism,
to decrying
the restriction of suffrage to the propertied classes.
Nineteenth century
libertarians were often progressive not in spite of their radicalism but because
of it. One of the most seductive aspects of libertarianism is its apparent
simplicity. At its core, libertarianism seems simply to say that what is wrong
for individuals to do is wrong for states to do too – a view that Tomasi and I
describe in our book as the “moral parity thesis.” According to this idea, if
it’s wrong for a private person to steal from their neighbor, to beat them up,
or to force them to work or fight for you against their will, then it’s wrong
for governments to do these things too. As Murray Rothbard pithily put
the point: “War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is
Robbery.” When the state uses its power to commit flagrant injustice, as it so
often did in the 19th century, libertarianism can help us to pierce
the veil of authority in order to see things as they really are.
But the simple
libertarian perspective can often be misleading, too. Consider, as an example,
the issue of environmental
pollution. Most individual acts of pollution cause zero tangible harm to
anybody else, by themselves. The emissions I produce by driving my car to work
are, considered on their own, too insignificant to make anybody sick or affect
the earth’s climate. Even the pollution created by a single firm generally only
becomes dangerous when added to the large amount of pollution created by other
firms.
What, then, should a
libertarian say about pollution? Is individually harmless pollution a violation
of others’ rights, in the same way that someone’s harmlessly trespassing
through your house would be? If so, and if we are to apply libertarianism’s
typically absolutist stance to this particular form of trespass, then the
libertarian stance on pollution would seem to be quite radical indeed –
prohibiting not just gross industrial pollution but even the relatively minor
pollution involved in driving, cooking, and even breathing. On the other hand,
ignoring individually harmless pollution seems implausible too, since the
cumulative effects of such pollution can be catastrophic.
Environmental pollution
is simply one example of a problem where large-scale injustice fails to map
neatly onto individual acts of injustice. But there are many others, including
the spread of contagious disease and the problem of structural racism. In cases
like these, the radical libertarian view embodied in the moral parity thesis
simply fails to provide a helpful understanding of the problem, let alone
useful guidance for dealing with it.
Still, I don’t think this
means that radical libertarianism is useless, or fundamentally deluded. It is a
well-known truth among moral philosophers that every major moral theory from
Kantianism to utilitarianism to Aristotelean virtue ethics is subject to
glaring counterexamples. The same is true, I suspect, of the major political
theories. If moral and political theories were only useful to the extent that
they could provide unambiguous answers to every question that falls within
their domain, this would be a devastating problem. But this is almost certainly
not the right way to think about such theories. Moral and political theories
are better
thought of as maps, and just as different maps are better-suited for
different contexts and different purposes (a perfectly accurate globe would not
be helpful if your goal is to find the quickest route across town), so too are
different moral and political theories helpful for understanding and grappling
with different kinds of problems.
Radical libertarianism
gets some questions glaringly wrong. But it also provides a lens through which
to see the world that helps us get a certain class of important questions right
– questions that we might have mis-answered, or not even noticed at all, had
we been looking through a different lens. In reading through the history of
libertarian thought, as John Tomasi and I did in researching our
book, readers will often be frustrated, disappointed, and even enraged by
the errors and blindspots of various libertarians. But, we think, they will
often also be delighted, surprised, and enlightened. That’s about as much as we
can ask for, from any political theory.
Matt Zwolinski is
Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego. You can reach him by
e-mail at mzwolinski@sandiego.edu.