I’m trying to remember the source of a quote, and the quote itself — roughly, it says “Individualism is a transitional stage between two kinds of social structure.” It sounds like something “Simmel”:http://socio.ch/sim/index_sim.htm would say, or maybe “Amos Hawley”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226319849/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/. Libertarianism has always seemed to me to depend for its realization on features of the social structure that it officially repuditates. It wouldn’t be the first ideology of which that was true. But I’m not going to defend that idea here. All I want to say is that I think we’d all be better off if “Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_02_22.html#005104 got the kind of traffic that Glenn Reynolds gets, and maybe “Julian Sanchez”:http://www.juliansanchez.com/notes.html got “Virginia Postrel’s”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000339.html job at the _Times_.
{ 25 comments }
bob mcmanus 02.28.04 at 2:19 am
Can’t argue with you. Jane Galt of Assymetrical Info is not too bad either.
Is Postrel the Thorsten Veblen of her age? The kind of Libertarian who thinks the revolution has already happened.
Libertarianism is obviously dependent on a highly evolved system of government. I view my own aims as decreasing government involvement in large group projects, but increasing its protection of individual liberty. So EPA, maybe not; Legal Aid, 1000 times as much as now.
Brett Bellmore 02.28.04 at 2:32 am
Well, dependent on a highly evolved culture, anyway. It amounts to the same thing, when you’ve had big government for quite some time; Government is remarkably effective at destroying the social institutions it replaces, so as to make itself genuinely indispensible, at least in the short run.
praktike 02.28.04 at 3:11 am
Glenn Reynolds may have once been a libertarian, but he’s been swallowed by the right.
I’m not sure he even realizes it yet.
decnavda 02.28.04 at 3:53 am
The three pillars of libertarianism have traditionally been:
1. Free Markets
2. Individual Liberty
3. Limited Government
Libertarian ideology claims that, inevitably, these three intertwined: Some may rais or fall faster than others, but the trend is certain that, in the long run, all three will advance or retreat together. In the time since, say, the Libertarian Party was founded, what has been the results?
A. Markets have gotten considerably freer. (Debate whether this is good, but I think it is a fact.)
B. Personal liberty has increased beyond many people’s imagination. (We are debating gay marriage.)
C. Government has grown dramatically.
This has lead to two camps of libertarians: Optimists who see history on their side, and expect the state to wither away any time now, and pessimists who point to the growth of government and predict we are on the verge of a fascist/totalitarian take over.
I think this empirical evidence shows that big government is compatible with freedom. Libertarians need to deal with this empirical challenge to their philosophy.
asg 02.28.04 at 4:13 am
Glenn Reynolds may have once been a libertarian, but he’s been swallowed by the right.
I’m not sure he even realizes it yet.
Right, which is why he still posts stuff critical of the drug war, sympathetic to music downloading, gay marriage, and abortion. Apparently on CT anyone who expresses the remotest skepticism that Israel might not be 100 percent absolutely responsible for the Palestinians’ unfortunate habit of blowing up nightclubs full of teenagers has been “swallowed by the Right.”
It’s too bad CT doesn’t support the “eye roll” emoticon so common on sports message boards.
Sarek 02.28.04 at 6:46 am
So I went over to Instapundit to find some posts to prove asq wrong and, guess what? I couldn’t. There’s plenty there to criticize–from his frustrating tendency to link to things and then say “but don’t pay attention to this,” to his inability to tell the difference between running a campaign and running a country. But from an ideological standpoint, he seems to be fairly consistently libertarian, not right-wing. I’m not saying there’s nothing there that could be construed that way, but by and large I don’t see the evidence that he’s been “swallowed by the right.”
Kieran Healy 02.28.04 at 6:50 am
Apparently on CT anyone who expresses the remotest skepticism that Israel might not be 100 percent absolutely responsible for the Palestinians’ unfortunate habit of blowing up nightclubs
It seems the trolls are out today. Do not feed.
John Quiggin 02.28.04 at 7:02 am
My mildly embarrassing anecdote is that when I first linked to Jim Henley, I described him (on the basis of limited reading, obviously) as a “left-liberal”. From me (and with reference to an American) it was a compliment, but not an accurate one.
More seriously, thinking about why I share Kieran’s approval of Henley and Sanchez compared to, say, Reynolds or Postrel, I think there’s more to it than agreement on particular issues like Iraq. As a first approximation, I would say that Henley and Sanchez argue like liberals (in the broad sense of the term) while a lot of libertarians remind me of the Trotskyists and other Leninists I used to argue with in my youth.
Russell Arben Fox 02.28.04 at 1:57 pm
Jim or Glen, Julian or Virginia: libertarianism is way the hell over-represented in the blogosphere regardless. I honestly don’t see any significant reason why it should matter whether we’re innundated by it from one source or another.
digamma 02.28.04 at 2:02 pm
I just went through the front page of Instapundit.com doing ctrl-f for “marriage”. Most of the stories are either about how Bush’s position is being unfairly represented or about how Kerry is no better on the issue. On this issue, Glenn Reynolds makes Andrew Sullivan look like Paul Krugman.
Jim Henley 02.28.04 at 2:17 pm
It seems the trolls are out today. Do not feed.
What’s weird is how asg immediately leapt to the conclusion that praktike MUST have been thinking about Glenn’s stance on Israel.
Denavda: You’re right to an extent. It’s an interesting empirical problem, one I’ve been thinking about a lot. One point to make is that, in addition to ways in which we would both agree that Americans are more free, there are all sorts of ways in which libertarians consider Americans have grown less free that liberals, rightly or wrongly, simply wouldn’t consider diminutions of liberty. Also, that bigger government that has been making us all free has given us the Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996, the PATRIOT Act of 2001 and its skulking successors, the widespread practice of civil asset forfeiture, continuing erosion of the posse comitatus act and the Bush Administration’s unilateral assertion of the power to revoke American citizenship and detain non-citizens without trial indefinitely. We have the statements of various defense lawyers in recent terror cases that they advised their clients to plead guilty because they feared the government throwing the case into our spanking new (and largely formless) military tribunal system. So long as the Bush Administration assertion on citizenship revocation stands, we are NOT a free society – we are a repressive country where the government has, so far, not deigned to deploy its full powers.
So I would say that, liberty-wise, the US is “filling a bucket with a hole in it.” The liberal response is “That’s just the evil Bush administration.” The libertarian says, rather, “That’s the welfare-warfare state. The same public demand for and government promise of perfect safety that leads to the banning of lawn darts and handguns directly feeds the national security state when threats like terrorism come along.” In the libertarian view, the best liberals do is keep the rhetorical seat warm for (authoritarian-wing) conservatives – assuming that liberals are much better at all, which is not a case I’d want to make based on the Clinton Administration’s drug policy and domestic security measures. (Keep in mind that Clinton asked for more in the 1996 law than he ended up getting.) Now, we could be wrong about this, but if so, we are far, I think, from self-evidently wrong.
All that said, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is possible revisions and qualifiers to Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” thesis – mindful that Hayek himself saw the RTS as possibly lengthy. (It took decades, on Hayek’s view, for Bismarck’s welfare state to evolve into National-Socialist government.)
Kieran: I certainly appreciate the kind words and the traffic. I’m not sure that either Julian or I would find much to disagree with in Postrel’s NYT article, though. My main disagreements with VP are in the area of current foreign policy, and while I can’t speak for Julian, I’d be surprised if that wasn’t the case for him too.
Rich Puchalsky 02.28.04 at 3:44 pm
There are intuitive but difficult to explain reasons why Jim Henley is a must-read while most libertarians are not. One of them is that he argues like an adult. I don’t know why, but a large majority of libertarians encountered through the Internet argue like petulant children who have just discovered an ideology that they think must cover all situations and which can never be wrongly applied, much less wrong in theory.
But that’s a negative reason rather than a positive one. There’s no doubt that he has more original ideas and is a better writer than, say, Postrel, as well.
Jim Henley 02.28.04 at 5:06 pm
I don’t know why, but a large majority of libertarians encountered through the Internet argue like petulant children who have just discovered an ideology that they think must cover all situations and which can never be wrongly applied, much less wrong in theory.
Rich, do not imagine that the same does not obtain of many liberals on the internet. As a liberal yourself, you just may not notice it as much.
Rich Puchalsky 02.28.04 at 5:40 pm
Actually, I do imagine that. Liberals may be on average equally bad arguers, but I think that when they are bad they tend to be bad for different reasons. Liberalism has no longer any central core body of ideological text, and liberals are used to having to exercise power pragmatically while being in contention with other long-running political tendencies such as conservatism and socialism. As a result, liberals may believe that everyone else is wrong, but they don’t generally expect to be able to prove it. Nor do they generally exhibit the same urge towards ideological completism that I often observe in libertarians; the drive to claim that every conceivable problem must be best solved through a liberal solution and that those problems that do not seem to must therefore not exist.
MQ 02.28.04 at 11:11 pm
Whether you agree with its conclusions or not, Postrel’s NY Times article was a disgracefully shoddy piece of journalism. There was no real investigation of the facts she purported to be talking about and she didn’t take counter evidence seriously at all. This is what happens when you assume a priori that your argument *must* be correct, so you need take only the most cursory glance into the surrounding world to “confirm” it. It was real ideologue’s work.
As for Jane Galt and Instapundit, they both evidence a real tendency to front for the Bush administration, minimizing its faults in ways that have little or nothing to do with libertarian ideology. E.g. Galt had a long post about how Senate Democrats were racist for opposing the nomination of a conservative Hispanic to the Federal bench. Pure National Review spin and nothing but.
And yes, a consistent libertarian should be disturbed by Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, in particular collective punishment and denial of rights to a whole people for the actions of a few. Or is that now part of “liberty”?
Jim Henley 02.29.04 at 3:09 am
And yes, a consistent libertarian should be disturbed by Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, in particular collective punishment and denial of rights to a whole people for the actions of a few.
Don’t forget the massive abuse of Palestinian property rights, pretty much from 1947 to this weekend.
bad Jim 02.29.04 at 9:22 am
For a great many values of “liberal”, Jim Henley is a liberal, though he might hate to hear that.
His site is certainly congenial
seth edenbaum 02.29.04 at 11:15 pm
I mumble this under my breath every time a discussion of this sort arises: Anyone who is interested in culture or the arts should prefer conservatism to libertarianism. There is no art without tradition; there is no communication without shared understanding. Libertarianism transforms objects into empty vessels and words and images into illustrations. One extremely limited definition of practical functionality determines meaning, and the very ability to reason suffers as a result.
I disagree with conservatives. My response to Libertarianism is a violent, sort of contempt.
Jim Henley 03.01.04 at 3:51 am
Libertarianism transforms objects into empty vessels and words and images into illustrations. One extremely limited definition of practical functionality determines meaning, and the very ability to reason suffers as a result.
Uh, riiiiiiiiiiiight.
Thanks for the warning about the violent part, though. Dangerous AND clueless is a combination to beware.
seth edenbaum 03.01.04 at 5:10 am
Insults are a pleasurable waste of time best suited to end of an argument. I made my points and then mouthed off. Give me something worth responding to and I will.
Jim Henley 03.01.04 at 7:33 pm
Insults are a pleasurable waste of time best suited to end of an argument.
Actually you took no part in any argument here. Just sort of crashed in from some eccentric orbit around your own misinformed preoccupations.
Give me something worth responding to and I will.
And this is desirable how?
seth edenbaum 03.01.04 at 10:10 pm
The topic was the author’s preference, if given a choice, for libertarians over conservatives. I was arguing my preference as someone interested in culture and arts, for conservatives over libertarians. I’m not alone in this, (except perhaps on the web)
Anthony 03.02.04 at 4:53 pm
Jim – looking at the power that the government has arrogated to itself and comparing it to the everyday life of most Americans, it looks like on balance, people are freer than in, say, 1970, unless the government turns its attention on them. Then they’re much worse off.
Rich – “liberals may believe that everyone else is wrong, but they don?t generally expect to be able to prove it” probably explains the liberal tendency to assume that anyone who opposes them does so because they’re evil or venal.
Douglas 03.02.04 at 9:40 pm
What I don’t understand about libertarianism: if this is an accurate summation, per decnavda,
“The three pillars of libertarianism have traditionally been:
1. Free Markets
2. Individual Liberty
3. Limited Government”
But ‘free markets’ are legal artifacts. Consequently large amounts of Government are required to establish, maintain, and police those markets – without government there is no law. This seems to me a fundamental contradiction.
You don’t have to be libertarian to be appalled at the Bush assault on liberty. I grew up in a police state that had many of the powers that Ashcroft has arrogated to himself, and knew several people that were disappeared. I left that country to escape, but I find the police state is looming large over US.
Anthony 03.02.04 at 10:54 pm
The fundamental libertarian belief is that government should be limited to that required to defend the country from external enemies, defend people from internal predators, and assure the functioning of the market, which is mostly a matter of policing fraud and enforcing property rights and contracts. At least half of what the US government does is beyond that scope; probably more than ¾ is, though a truly libertarian state might require more government in certain areas than we currently have.
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