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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Libertarian strands+ contradictions « Previous | |Next »
March 22, 2007

Over at Cato Unbound Virginia Postrel says that the American libertarian movement is an uneasy amalgam of four distinctive yet complementary traditions, two cultural and two intellectual. Reading it I wonder how come libertarians have got into bed with big-government conservatism that pandering to populist prejudices and distributing patronage to well-off cronies.

Postrel's two cultural strands of libertarianism are:

Culturally, the “leave us alone coalition” encompasses two different traditions, outlined by historian David Hackett Fischer in his mammoth 2004 book Liberty and Freedom....The first and more politically prominent is the get-out-of-my-face-and-off-my-land attitude Fischer calls “natural liberty,” a visceral, sometimes violent defense of self and clan. Think “Don’t Tread on Me” and gun rights. The second is the live-and-let-live ideal expressed by the biblical prophecy “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.” Think “Follow Your Bliss” and gay marriage.

Mix the two and you get Ronald Reagan’s California, the land of property-tax rebellions and New Age seekers. These two traditions make American libertarianism distinctively American. Is this cultural strand of libertarianism here in Australia? I've encountered the natural liberty strand but I don't know how extensive it is.

Postrel says that two intellectual traditions---the deductive and the empiricist tradition are seemingly incompatible. The former is the schools of Rand and Rothbard. Everything you need to know follows from the nature of man and the definition of freedom. A libertarian society is not relative but absolute, and is utopian. The empiricist tradition

the Hayek-Friedman tradition...The tradition has produced great theorists, including Hayek, Coase, James Buchanan, Armen Alchian, and Richard Epstein, to name just a few. But their theories are informed, tested, and revised by empirical observation, just as Adam Smith’s were. Most of the libertarian movement’s persuasive and policy triumphs have come from this non-utopian, empiricist approach.

This is the dominant strand in Australia--eg., the free-market think tanks CIS and IPA. But these are allied with cultural and political conservatism. So how does that alliance or fusion square with the principles of libertarianism? Is it a pragmatic compromise for living in an unlibertarian world? I do not see how libertarian policies and traditional values are complementary.

As I see it Australian libertarians are in a state of dependency on the traditionalist political right (conservatism) that has no commitment to the small-government roots of classical liberalism. Conservatism's desire is to protect traditional values from the intrusion of big government; the new one seeks to promote traditional '50s values through the intrusion of big government.


| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:48 AM | | Comments (3)
Comments

Comments

So called "libertarians" are "profoundly" anti-cultural in their disposition altogether. They are the avante-garde of the forces of world wide cultural destruction. Their motives and actions have effectively destroyed ALL existing cultures. Cultures that were at their roots inspired by a deep understanding of the Spiritual nature of Reality altogether and the NECESSARY motive to COOPERATION as the working basis for any authentic culture.
It never ceases to amaze me at the capacity for sheer self deception that those on the "right" of the USA political spectrum can indulge in.
So called "libertarians" are in effect perpetual adolescents pretending to assert their presumed independence from all others and even the World Process altogether.
They are advocates of the hard machine "philosophy" of so called objectivism. Everything and everybody is reduced to heartless disconnected objects. Machine made social "realism". They are just the other side of the coin of communist social "realism". Each being a "profoundly" reductionist parody of the ideal of the autonomous "individual" and the superior cultural motive of cooperation.
My favourite "philosopher" has pointed out that when the entire human world is reduced to hard edged "objects", then it INEVITABLY becomes a vast slaughter house.
A quote from a recent essay.
" In the present-day, the culture and politics of illusion controls the world. The underlying idea that personal and collective egoic self-fulfillment is what life is supposed to be about is the root-source of the current global chaos. As a result, there are six billion individuals ( and, otherwise, large numbers of competitive and mutually dissociative groups, cultures, traditions, races, religions, corporations, and nation-states) that are, characteristically (and even strategically), out of touch with each other--like dust, and bombs, and petty traffic, all blowing in the wind. That wind steadily blows ALL prior unity into the bits and particles of human chaos"

Also:

" The modern "idealisation" of the presumed individual is, actually, a social and political device for isolating, fragmenting, and dis-empowering EVERYONE---so that humankind (as a whole) has NO collective power. If everybody is encouraged to be busy "meditating" on themselves as individuals, then there is no true collective of everybody-all-at-once that can make any demands on the powers that be. Thus, the global promotion of the notion that people should focus only on their individual interests and concerns---inclined toward self-indulgent purposes and the illusions of self-fulfillment---is a global power-game that subverts both the integrity of the human person and the inherent power and rightness of the totality of humankind.... That chaos and fragmentation leaves people open to being controlled and manipulated. The reason power-games can be played is that the six billion are fragmented. That fragmentation is what power-seekers exploit. The power-seekers are counting on the six billion remaining detached from one another. As soon as the six billion stop being detached from one another, the illusion-mongers and power-gamers of the world will be "out of business" "

John,
the only libertarian text I am familar with is that by a Harvard philosophy professor, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia published in 1974.

This took libertarian rights theory as a given and proving rigorously that if we believe in human rights, then there are a set of things government just cannot do—including most things modern governments do do.

It does not seem to be influential in Australia for some reason--because most libertarians are Hayekian?

John, who are you quoting here?