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Why I Am Not a Libertarian
I recently listened to Tom and Sal’s podcast on libertarianism, but didn’t quite get in on the follow-up debate. So I thought I’d offer my critique in a separate post, as a non-libertarian who’s been trying to define libertarianism for years, with a little help from my Ricochet friends.
Here’s my current view on this. Libertarianism is best understood as a school of thought. It’s not the sort of thing for which it would be appropriate to draw up clear-cut identity conditions (as Tom and Sal were endeavoring to do). It has its own tradition, complete with revered thinkers such as Rand, Hayek, and Friedman. It has its own lingo and established relationships to particular disciplines (notably economics). But the difference between a libertarian and, say, a small-government conservative may have more to do with background and influence than with actual content.
In the podcast, Sal compared libertarianism with Christianity, making the point that there can be a broad range of perspectives that still meaningfully fit under one big tent. I see what he’s driving at, but the analogy is problematic, not only because Christianity involves explicit admission rituals (e.g. baptism), but also because Christianity is defined by some rather striking claims that non-Christians are very unlikely to affirm. To claim with any plausibility the title “Christian,” you must believe that a man lived in Palestine two millennia ago — and was God. You must believe that he literally died and came back to life again. And you must believe that there is a holy book that records these events, which was divinely inspired. These are weighty claims. You won’t find many people who declare, “Oh, I believe all of that of course, but I would never consider myself a Christian.” We can quibble about the dirty details, but that’s insider baseball. For most normal purposes, the sheep and goats aren’t so very hard to separate here (particularly in a world where Christianity is becoming more counter-cultural, which is steadily minimizing the incentives to pretend to believe.)
I can’t see that libertarianism has any equivalent claims that would enable us to neatly separate members from non-members. Libertarians want the government to be smaller, and they value individual rights and autonomy. But plenty of people share those views without regarding themselves as libertarians. I don’t believe it’s possible to tailor a definition that is specific enough to exclude all non-libertarians, while including everyone who plausibly claims the title.
This really shouldn’t bother us too much, because we’re constantly using loosely-defined terms in meaningful discourse. “Conservative,” for instance. Or “patriot.” Or “educated citizen.” We deal with somewhat-imprecise terms all the time. Why is it a problem here?
I think it seems like a problem to many people because for many, the appeal of libertarianism lies in its appearance of being highly consistent and principled, without relying on a complex metaphysics to press its claims. Libertarianism is very similar in that respect (for non-accidental reasons) to the branch of ethics known as “utilitarianism.” Like libertarianism, utilitarianism can hang its flag on some beguilingly simple and reasonable-seeming claims. (“Individuals should be permitted to do whatever they like, so long as no one else is harmed.” “The right thing to do is whatever brings the most happiness to the greatest number of people.”) Like utilitarianism, the devil ends up being in the details, and the more we try to work out those details, the more we find ourselves hamstrung between 1) a distinctive philosophy with meaningful content, which most people nevertheless find implausible and unattractive, and 2) a philosophy which is reasonable and probably true, but so flexible as to add virtually nothing to pre-existing theories.
My point isn’t that we need to abandon libertarianism. I have benefitted greatly from my interactions with thoughtful libertarians. I would suggest, though, that we should probably abandon the goal of defining “libertarianism” in some very precise way. At the same time, we may need to give up on the idea that libertarianism can live up to its appeal, on the surface, as a philosophy that ostensibly justifies the demand for small government without needing to rely on metaphysically complex claims about human good.
If libertarianism is more of an intellectual tradition, or school of thought, then identifying with it doesn’t clearly commit you to very much, although it will be suggestive of many things. Because metaphysical minimalism is a noteworthy characteristic of this school of thought, it is probably highly misleading to say (as Tom and Sal both did on the podcast) that their lack of religious faith “has nothing to do with” their libertarianism. There may not be a direct and obvious connection, but there are good reasons why libertarianism and atheism tend to overlap substantially. Libertarians like Mollie Hemingway or Midget Faded Rattlesnake would then be unusual libertarians in noteworthy respects, which in fact I think they are. But that doesn’t mean they’re fakers! They do have some meaningful relationship to the libertarian intellectual tradition. They just bring an unusual set of external commitments to the table, which make them atypical but also interestingly distinctive.
Similar claims, I think, could be made of many other characteristics that Tom and Sal rejected as “not libertarian.” They may not be membership conditions for self-identifying as libertarian, but they’re related, for reasons we could explain.
I have never self-identified as a libertarian. I doubt I ever will, even though I realize that there are self-declared libertarians whose views are quite similar to mine on most of the bellweather questions. Here are my own reasons for not being libertarian:
1) Metaphysical minimalism is, if not per se a membership condition, at least a highly characteristic feature of libertarianism. It seeks to justify small government in a way that avoids weighty claims about human nature, or the nature of the universe broadly speaking. As a Catholic Aristotelian, I dislike metaphysical minimalism. I’m willing ally myself to some of its adherents, but I’m not going to wear their colors.
2) Libertarianism is associated with a set of thinkers; for intellectual types, claiming the label tends to signify that these thinkers were highly influential on your in your formative years. (I suspect that has a lot to do with Mollie’s identification, though I haven’t discussed it with her.) I respect Hayek, Friedman, et al., but they were not my formative influences.
3) I see libertarianism as historically contingent. It arose in response to the overgrowth of the modern state. That’s fine and reasonable up to a point, but my own tradition (Catholic Aristotelianism) has far more historical breadth. So I don’t see much point in claiming the additional label; to me it feels like jumping out of a lake and into a stream.
All of these reasons are, to varying extents, personal and idiosyncratic. Libertarianism is an interesting flavor of conservatism, which I’ve come to appreciate more these past few years, but it won’t ever be a good description of me. Figuring out who it does describe might be more fruitful than trying to generate explicit membership requirements.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Every time we have a discussion like this, someone libertarian goes there in some way. “You like zoning laws? You don’t believe in private Property”.
The whole attitude of “You agree with me, or you are only no better than the left” gets old.
Or, “What’s your limiting principle?”
Or maybe even the implication that we are all hypocrites.
Life is hard and messy, and no one is consistent all the time. It is adolescent to complain so much about hypocrisy.
In the list of libertarians in another thread, I listed Richard Epstein and no one there complained. However, in hearing and reading him, I don’t think he would past muster as a “libertarian” for most of our libertarian posters here.
And in another thread, it seems to libertarians that progressives and conservatives are not all that far apart.
Since the other libertarians don’t come out against statements like that, I have to assume this is not a fringe, right?
Fair challenge. For the record, I do not believe that the differences between conservatives and progressives are marginal. The differences are in kind, not in degree.
As Sal and I said in the podcast, most American conservatives are classically liberal, though a few — e.g., Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum — are really not.
I agree on Huckabee 100%. Santorum has his moments. I’d rather Santorum be a city mayor.
I think, though, there is a meaningful limit to ethics being knowable by reason. The way it’s described and argued it seems that the end result is assumed and then reasoned to, which is doable. However, there are other results, even opposite results, that can also be reasoned to. Nazism was reasoned to; communism was reasoned to; racism is reasoned to.
So while it’s possible to reason to the same ethics and morals we believe are revealed, it’s also possible to reason to other and terrible results.
“…conservatives are classically liberal, though a few — e.g., Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum — are really not.”
I’ve always had a hard time claiming people like Huckabee and Santorum as fellow conservatives. The conservativism ingrained in me has some pioneer west, keep your nose out if you want to keep your nose kind of self sufficiency in it. I suspected that labeling people like that as conservative was a leftist progressive conspiracy to impugn hardy freedom loving conservatives.
To the contrary, I think those types are more “conservative” than most of those of us who use the term in that they’re more in line with the traditional, European usage of the term. The rest of us are only “conservative” because the US was founded by liberals, and so the desire to preserve true liberalism in the face of progressivism came to be seen as a “conservative” stance. Which is confusing because actual conservatism (as represented by Santorum, Huckabee, and, I would argue, the Bush family) didn’t go away.
Which may explain why the true liberals who call themselves, “conservative” are so frequently disappointed when they vote for “conservatives” expecting fellow liberals and end up with classic conservatives.
None of this is helped by the fact that our political language has become so corrupted that referring to myself as a “liberal” makes my hair stand up even though I know it shouldn’t.
In a recent Law Talk (I forget which episode) Prof. Epstein explained the difference between libertarianism and classical liberalism, and why he considers himself firmly in the latter camp.
Absolutely agree. I was about to jump in when I saw your comment. True conservatives are not classical Liberals. We may have taken on some elements of classical Liberalism, but we are Burkean in our philosophic root, not from John Stuart Mill. Liberals and Libertarians trace their roots to Mill.
Not even close. This is such a gross misreading of the intellectual history behind all three movements that it will take a good while to untangle. Mill started out misunderstanding classical liberalism, and progressed to Socialism. He departed from the tradition of classical liberalism that led to modern Libertarianism, which is also the tradition of conservativism—unless you are a real conservative, and believe in the divine right of Kings.
You might start here, as it sounds like you have a lot of reading to do:
“Hayek on Mill”
Then you should probably read this: