On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 22:12, David B. Shemano <[email protected]> wrote: > Sean Andrews writes: > >>>Pro-business >>> libertarians usually base their use of the state to defend private >>> property on arguments of natural law or some such thing. In any case, >>> they just want the nightwatchman, negative liberty, etc. And most of >>> them are evidently also completely ignorant of the rich literature >>> written about the way that positive and negative liberty are >>> ultimately distinctions without a difference. > > The only thing that truly annoys me on this list is when people argue that > libertarians, classic liberals, conservatives, etc. are "ignorant" of some > argument. Trust me, such people are fully aware of and fully capable of > addressing such arguments. Just because you find an argument so convincing > that you believe the matter is settled and never needs to be rethought again > does not mean everybody agrees with you. > > David Shemano
I am speaking from experience, not just making blind pronouncements. Perhaps they do know, but when "libertarians" act as if the idea of liberty is a transparent, uncontentional concept about which we are all in agreement it certainly appears as if you are ignorant of the arguments to which I'm referring--those of legal realists and what Barbara Fried called the "first law and economics movement" or what was known in the 80s as Critical Legal Studies. These arguments are far from settled and quite a few scholars who are reflexively libertarian (I'm thinking here of people like Cass Sunstein) have felt it necessary to revisit these arguments in light of the current circumstances. And before that, in the 1990s, scholars like Anthony Giddens tried to do this from the opposite direction--take the arguments about redistribution from the left and make them square with the market centered ones on the right. But many of the people who I read and speak to about "liberty" seem to find it such a transparent concept (along with property) that they can't actually engage in a debate about it--either abstractly or in terms of the long history of arguments about it. They simply assert that they want to protect individual liberty and assume that settles the matter: if they are for individual liberty, then I must be for totalitarian oppression--and, by the way when did I stop beating my wife? When you do this--when they do this--I can only assume that they are either ignorant or dissembling and making a concerted effort to act as if there is not a contentious argument here. If you believe that argument to be settled, that may be your belief, but it doesn't follow that, in the context of a debate ABOUT THAT MATTER you should be allowed to ignore the fact that others don't find it to be settled, that others feel that argument is at the very center of the debates we are having today, and that many others before them have presented what were, at the time and afterwords, quite compelling and intellectually challenging arguments about the matter. Ironically, you end your statement with precisely my point. "Just because you find an argument so convincing that you believe the matter is settled and never needs to be rethought again does not mean everybody agrees with you." But I'm not saying that people should agree with me: I'm saying there is a disagreement and when people act as if there isn't one I can only assume they are being dishonest or they really believe there is and never has been a debate. I'm afraid that you give a little too much credit to the current spate of libertarians of, for instance, the Ron Paul variety. They are so enamored with their own arguments and so impressed at their own intellectual superiority that they don't bother noticing the animated debates about these very subjects that have occurred over the past two centuries. I'm sure you are an exception, but in my experience you prove the rule. s _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
