One of the core suggestions by Chris Clarke 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.
This diary has already gone on very long, but I welcome you to offer up any and all questions you may have about libertarianism and its origins. I hope to continue these discussions in the future and attempt to talk more about the specifics of libertarianism, but for now I am focused on clearing up misconceptions about its origins.
