( Part I not relevant to the issue of
libertarian origins, etc )
One of the core suggestions by Chris
Clarke [at the website Pendagon ] on
how to make a libertarian's head explode is
to confront them with the "true history" of
their ideology. What is ironic is that most
libertarians already understand their
history better than Clarke does, and those
that would be surprised by Clarke's
statement hardly hold a consistent
libertarian ideology. Clarke's claim:
Most American Libertarians have precious
little grasp of the history of their
political philosophy. They seem to think
that the Libertarian school of thought
sprang fully formed like Athena from Ayn
Rand’s beetled brow, with Robert Heinlein
as attending midwife. Libertarianism’s
true origins, however, unsettle most
Libertarians to the point where the mere
acceptance of that history often starts
those rusty old mental gears grinding
again. To wit, and here is tactical
nuclear sentence number one:
"Libertarianism originated in the
philosophy of a left-wing French
political philosopher who also
influenced Karl Marx."
The French Philosopher in question is, as
some of you have guessed (and with whose
description a few of you are no doubt
ready to quibble), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
who famously penned the Libertarians’
Sekrit Motto, "Property is Theft." Of
course unlike modern Libertarians,
Proudhon meant that as a condemnation.
Among the pre-Marxist political thinkers
strongly influenced by Proudhon was Johann
Kaspar Schmidt, who under the pen name Max
Stirner wrote one of the first true
capital-L Libertarian texts, Der Einzige
und sein Eigentum, which can be translated
either as "The Ego and Its Own" or, more
literally and more tellingly, "The
Individual And His Property." Stirner
became a nucleus of a nascent school of
political thought then called
"individualist anarchism,"*** whose
inheritance-tax-free heirs include Ludwig
Von Mises, The Austrian and Chicago
Schools, Murray Rothbard, Alan Greenspan,
and so on.
No, Ayn Rand is not the mother of
libertarianism, her ideology is Objectivism
and many of her most loyal followers look
down on libertarianism. More than
anything else, one of my primary goals
with this series is to hammer home the
point that Ayn Rand's movement is
Objectivism, not libertarianism, and the
two are not one in the same.
Objectivists believe that they have a
comprehensive philosophy that guides all of
their actions, including their political
views. To them, libertarianism is just a
set of opinions and beliefs about
government. Many, if not most, libertarians
find Ayn Rand's ideas interesting and
believe that she got some things right.
Occasionally similar ideas and conclusions
does not mean that they are the same. Al
Gore and Jerry Falwell are both Christian
but they are not identical. Alternatively,
some liberals and progressives may agree
with some of the critiques of capitalism by
Karl Marx without being full fledged
supporters of the Communist Revolution. Ayn
Rand remains a controversial figure within
libertarianism as her outlook focused on the
ends, not so much the means. As such,
Objectivists at times end up supporting
government as a means to an end, while
libertarians are fundamentally distrustful
of government as a means, regardless of the
end. Objectivists, far more than
libertarians, are supportive of the War in
Iraq as a way of spreading "liberty" and
"democracy."
Clarke is right to point out the influence
that Proudhon had on Von Mises, Rothbard,
the Austrian and Chicago schools, and others
who have built American libertarianism.
This is not news to libertarians. But I
think that Clarke is right in that some
libertarians do need to be criticized for
their view of history. There is a constant
claim within libertarianism that the
movement is nothing more than the classical
liberalism of the Founding Fathers still
alive in today's modern world. Not all
libertarians make this claim, but enough do
for it to warrant deeper discussion.
Find yourself a copy of the United States
Constitution. Perhaps you have a copy handy
on your bookshelf, otherwise you can just look it up online.
A lot of Libertarians will hold up the
Constitution as a great and sacred document,
a kind of a political Garden of Eden that we
have fallen from. Michael Badnarik, 2004
Libertarian Presidential nominee, styles
himself a constitutional scholar
for the masses; 1988 Libertarian
Presidential nominee Ron
Paul votes no on anything that isn't
specifically enumerated in the
Constitution. Even without directly
mentioning the Constitution, the right-libertarian Cato
Institute talks about "the principles
of the American Revolution--individual
liberty, limited government, the free
market, and the rule of law." Over and over
again, the modern day libertarian movement
turns to our founding document as a
patriotic reassurance that they are in the
right. Yet they are unable to overcome a
simple problem: the Constitution is not a
libertarian document.
To equate libertarianism with the classical
liberalism that influenced our Founding
Fathers is a philosophical error. While no
doubt many classical liberals call
themselves libertarians today, the modern
movement has been heavily influenced by
Austrian economics and Murray Rothard and
takes a far more negative view of the state
than the old men with wigs who wrote the
Constitution. Even the minarchists
(libertarians who believe that society needs
a state, in contrast to anarchists who
believe that society doesn't need a state)
who stop short of outright anarchism and the
abolition of the state would have been seen
as the most radical of radicals in the early
Republic; they would have made the Locofocos
look mainstream. John Locke, Adam Smith and
the rest of the classical liberal gang did
express a mistrust of state power and its
granting of monopolistic privilege, but they
also supported a state for the maintenance
of law and order in the face of natural
anarchy. A quick glance at the Constitution
reveals that the Founding Fathers, far from
consistently favoring a system that viewed
the state as a necessary evil, saw a role
for government to "establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common
defence, promote the general Welfare, and
secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves
and our Posterity."
The minarchist may still argue that these
broad general principles are fully
compatible with a limited government favored
by modern day libertarians. But the
Constitution is also the source for
Congress's power to lay excises (the
ancestor to our modern day sin taxes, which
libertarians often criticize), to lay
tariffs and regulate commerce
(protectionism, a huge no-no to
libertarianism), to borrow money and
therefore establish a national debt (say
goodbye to balanced budgets, another
libertarian ideal), to establish post
offices and post roads (see my previous complaints
about this monopolistic agency), and to
grant patents and copyrights (which is a
contentious subject within libertarianism,
some favoring it and some opposing it).
Even a strict interpretation of the
Constitution would grant the government
powers that libertarians today complain
about.
General welfare, that loosely defined term
that continues to drive libertarians crazy
in discussing constitutional
interpretations, was a very real concept to
these classical liberals. The patent system
is one example of how government
intervention in creating monopolistic
privilege was justified because of its
positive impact on the general welfare. "To
promote the Progress of Science and useful
Arts," Congress was granted the ability to
grant patents and copyrights. While this
was undoubtedly an intrusion into the free
market as understood at the time (patents in
British law were specifically treated as a
form of monopoly), it was seen as a proper
role of government in promoting the general
welfare through encouraging science.
Overtime, of course, the argument would
develop that inventors had some type of
"intellectual property right" to a patent,
but that was hardly the focus of the
Founding Fathers. Far from being a
political Garden of Eden, the original
Constitution was itself a fall from
libertarian utopia. While L. Neil Smith
sees the Constitution itself as the original
sin with the Articles of Confederation the
libertarian Garden of Eden, it is more
realistic to accept that the Founding
Fathers and the newly independent states
that they represented were not libertarian.
Other libertarians try to place the fall
from grace at the Civil War, when President
Lincoln and his Radical Republican Congress
implemented a host of statist policies
ranging from protectionism to massive
transportation subsidies to well connected
businessmen. See here
for an example of libertarianism criticism
of Lincoln Yet one can hardly defend the
antebellum republic as libertarian given the
system of slavery. The Constitution did
nothing to change this, it in fact
solidified by including Article 4, Section
2, Clause 3: "No Person held to Service or
Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof,
escaping into another, shall, in Consequence
of any Law or Regulation therein, be
discharged from such Service or Labour, But
shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party
to whom such Service or Labour may be due."
And how do we view the track record of
expansionism? President Madison started an
avoidable war in an attempt to seize control
of Canada, while President Polk provoked war
with Mexico to fulfill Manifest Destiny.
Part of the fame of Andrew Jackson was his
role in seizing control of Florida as
General, without Congressional approval it
should be noted. John Anthony Quitman and
William Walker were less successful in their
own filibustering expeditions.
Interventionism seems to have a long
history in American history, and I can only
guess how liberventionists (people who claim
to be libertarians yet have an approach far
closer to Objectivism, with its support of
state intervention for the cause of
liberty--this is one form of vulgar
libertarianism) who today cheer on the Iraq
War in the name of "liberty" would react to
my criticisms of the expansion of our
republic.
The United States of America has never had
a libertarian government, assuming there can
be such a thing. The existence of legal
slavery ought to rule out the antebellum
republic, regardless of how limited its
financial resources were compared to the
nation as a whole. It seems to me that only
the critics of libertarianism and vulgar
corporate apologists who like the idea of
monopolies running the economy attempt to
argue that the Gilded Age was libertarian.
And once you get up into the Progressive
Era, no one, not even critics of
libertarianism will make such a claim,
although I do think we somehow always end up
getting blamed for the Great Depression. Of
course, other critics (or even the very same
that will in another breath point out that
we've tried libertarianism) will also say
that libertarianism is a utopian scheme
because it's never been done before. I've
never seen someone eat their cake and have
it too, but it seems like people keep trying
anyway. It is no fault of libertarianism
and the strength of its ideas that it hasn't
been tried before.
Libertarianism is something new, there is
nothing classical about it. As I
illustrated above, the classically liberal
constitution granted Congress the explicit
ability to grant patents and lay tariffs,
two of the four cornerstones of privilege
and statism according to Benjamin Tucker (a
very influential American anarchist). And
it left unchallenged the system of privilege
in the land and money monopolies, although
the period of free banking in the antebellum
republic probably did come close to breaking
the latter. By opposing the statist status
quo, the libertarian movement no doubt
appeals to those that still have a
classically liberal view of politics. But
the libertarian movement is larger than just
that, it holds a radically skeptical view of
government's ability to promote the general
welfare without creating privilege and
inequality. Following through this critique
of government to its natural ends arguable
will result in anarchist conclusions, but
libertarianism still has the perception of
being minarchist. I don't think it matters
if libertarianism advertises itself as
explicitly minarchist or anarchist, the
critique of government is the founding
principle and it is what distinguishes it
from classical liberalism.
Much as modern day Christianity and
Rabbinical Judaism developed out of
radically different Temple Judaism over two
millennium ago, modern day liberalism and
libertarianism share a similar ancestry.
This is something that is disputed by some
activists on both sides of the debate. But
ancestry does not mean that they are one and
the same, libertarianism has expanded on
classical liberalism's critique of
government while modern liberalism has
instead focused on classical liberalism's
belief in democracy and the ability to
govern with a mind toward the common good.
Classical liberalism held both of these
seemingly paradoxical principles, with some
followers leaning more toward one or the
other. Following the abortive attempt by
Hamilton and the Federalists to establish a
truly conservative society in the Americas,
most of our political debate has been within
the range of liberalism. While adopting
some of the programs of Hamilton, the
American System of Clay was designed to
encourage broad economic growth and
intensification, not a new aristocratic
elite. This is illustrated by Clay and the
Whigs favoring high tarrifs, which would
have a widespread impact in benefiting all
domestic manufacturers of the protected
good, in contrast to Hamilton's support for
subsidies and bounties that, like today's
agricultural subsidies, would benefit larger
producers at the expense of the small
independent artisan.
Libertarianism is not a fetish worship of
liberty, nor is it clinging to our
Constitution as an ideal document. It is
intellectually dishonest to claim classical
liberalism as our own and modern liberalism
as some form of a bastard son; both movement
can claim classical liberalism as an
influence. Focusing on rolling back the
clock to 1859 or 1800 is not libertarian, it
is both radical and conservative in clinging
to the past as better than our present
condition.
You may ask though, just how has
libertarianism gotten itself caught up with
Objectivists and corporate apologists. In
this political
typology by David Bruhn, he attempts
to distinguish between ends and means.
Libertarianism is ultimately an ideology
focused on means, it is critical of
government as a means to any end. However,
political activists in the past have
influenced the conventional wisdom of what a
society without a government, or with little
government intervention, would look like.
During the fusionism of the 1950s, it was
argued that social conservatives should be
libertarians because without a strong
government to influence society and culture,
family and church would be the two primary
institutions to impact morality. Decades
later, social conservatives have jumped off
the libertarian bandwagon and are now
pushing for a large degree of government
intervention in society to enforce their own
moral code.
So you can see, libertarianism can attract
two types of people:
1- Those that are libertarian because
they agree with the libertarian means of
minimal government.
2- Those that are libertarian because
they believe that libertarian means will
produce the end result that they desire.
As conventional wisdom changes, so does
this second group. The biggest problem for
overcoming stereotypical views of
libertarianism comes from this second group.
They are the individuals who are first
drawn to libertarianism because they think
it will give them what they want, and
overtime they identify libertarianism not
with the means, but the end result they
desire. And soon you have the corporate
apologists, the vulgar libertarians, who
believe that libertarianism means taking the
side of corporations in any political
dispute. This is in contrast to the
authentic libertarian position, which is
critical of corporations because of their
manipulation of the political process in an
attempt to distort the free market. As
anarcho-capitalist David Friedman says, "The
capitalist system of coordination by trade
seems to be largely populated by
indigestible lumps of socialism called
corporations." Libertarianism is not
simply an ideology that believes that those
poor old bosses need all the help they can
get.
