Working Paper: “Libertarianism is unique; it belongs neither to the right nor the left: a critique of Long, Holcombe, and Baden on the left, Hoppe, Feser and Paul on the right” by Walter Block (Loyola University, New Orleans)
“The present paper defends the position of libertarian centrism, or plumb line libertarianism vis a vis its two competitors for the libertarian mantle: left wing libertarianism and right wing libertarianism. I see as a burgeoning schism within the libertarian movement, between left and right wing libertarians. Each is moving toward the position, as I see it, of excluding the other, or removing themselves from the other. That would be a tragic mistake. Both are in error in this regard.” FULL PAPER
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The whole left/right thing is so absurd. There is absolute freedom, and then there is the many different ways to institute slavery.
I see anarcho-capitalism as a point, and everything else as a DOWN arrow with different magnitudes.
I agree. The left/right thing is a personal cultural thing; it matters for personal preference as to what kind of people you want to associate with. It isn’t strictly associated with the NAA. That is, left/right isn’t a distinction that matters, qua libertarianism. It may have a moral component, but I don’t think it should be a political distinction.
This is quite good. I generally share Block’s “centrist” approach to “social issues”, but I’m a little more leftward on economic matters (kind of like Konkin or Carson). The point I think this raises is that most people identify more strongly with their own culture than they do with abstract ideological considerations like “libertarianism”? What are the implications of this for an anti-state movement? I think the kind of “cultural separatism” Block implies (leftoid communities in Berkley and NYC, conservative communities in the “red states”) is the most probable outcome.
The article has too many quotes and not enough commentary, in my view. I’d like to see a more detailed critique of Feser’s application of Eric Mark’s theory of self-ownership. Mack is plumb-line; Feser is not. But Mack’s theory of property rights, in my view, deserves a place in the canon, whereas Feser’s application does not.
Also, regarding Long: There is some worry that Walter has not dealt with the cultural challenge. If indeed it turns out that there are cultural commitments that go along with anti-statism, it is true that we should not begin arguing for aggression or endorsing everything those with the anti-statist cultural proclivities endorse. But certainly libertarians should immerse themselves in the works of those people, where they are reasonable and might have something to add.
A general comment:
I take Block to be warring against the following thesis:
Thick Libertarianism: Libertarianism can only be a stable and well-defined doctrine if its content is filled in by specific cultural commitments.
Feser thinks that libertarianism must be thick, but that it is unravelled by its thickness. This is why he is no longer a libertarian. Long and Hoppe think that libertarianism is completed by its thickness, but they see radically different cultural commitments filling in that thickness. From Thick Libertarianism two worries arise:
Thick Libertarianism leads to libertarianism unravelling, with those who grasp the unravelling departing the movement (like Feser).
Thick Libertarianism leads to libertarians splitting over their commitment to different cultural practices (like Long and Hoppe’s view might, although neither has shown the slightest interest in leaving the libertarian movement; if anything, the opposite is true).
The first worry is perhaps not serious. Feser and some analytic political philosophers have made this claim. But libertarianism probably has more content than that. As for the second worry, I have two comments:
1) Perhaps engaging in debate will not split libertarianism. Maybe we’ll come to some kind of synthesis or will find ways to get along.
2) Perhaps a schism will not be disastrous. Consider the Cato libertarian and Mises libertarian split: Has the split stifled libertarian growth? I think only in the opportunity cost paid by members of both camps wasting time spewing venom at one another. But in general, we libertarians understand that a movement need not be wholly united to make progress – after all, no other functional social organization needs unity.
So, maybe we won’t have a schism between Hoppeans and Longfellows. Perhaps they will merely define the movement’s edges. On the other hand, perhaps a schism will not be a disaster. So maybe Thick Libertarianism is worth pursuing.
~The Garbageman
P.S. Perhaps there are two kinds of plumb-line libertarianism. One is a thick plumb, and the other a thin one. Block defends a thin plumb-line – or a libertarianism without specific cultural commitments. But perhaps we can develop a thick plumb-line – with classical liberal cultural commitments, not specifically left-wing or right-wing cultural commitments.
I don’t know if Gregory and Huebert could ever live side by side, door to door, nor do they probably want to. I think it comes down to the people with a narrow view of libertarianism where all need to agree on the conditions for living or a wider view where people agree to disagree and live apart amongst conditions of their own creation.
miguel, agree or disagree is not important – it is the method employed in argument, either by peaceful discussion or the ol’ war club (and all its manifestations).
I’m still feeling my way around one what is left or right, up or down in libertarianism, so this essay provides some information. However, at least in the case of John Baden, founder of PERC and FREE, it seems Prof. Block is too eager to classify and over-simplify.
Block acknowledges Baden’s “impeccable free enterprise credentials”, but criticizes Baden’s support for the reintroduction of wolves by the government into the Yellowstone ecosystem as a violation of private property rights. Baden supported this because he was aware of the importance of wolves as a keystone species in managing the numbers of deer, elk and other prey species – and of how micromanagement by government bureaucrats was damaging the park and surroundings.
I am afraid that I don’t see a private propoerty rights violation: the government had no obligation to provide benefits to ranchers by funding bounty programs, which it is free to discontinue, and if there is an externality to the government’s reintroduction of wolves, then private ranchers may sue the government for nuisance. In any case, that’s merely a dispute between landowners and there is no eminent domain or taking of private property. Furthermore, if one reads the link Dr. Block provides, one can see that Baden’s support for the program was based not only on the ecosystem benefits and reduction of governmental interference, but also on a parallel program to compensate ranchers for livestock losses, so that ranchers are not forced privately to bear the costs of a public good.
I hardly see how these facts merit lumping Baden into a group of “New Age, feminist, hippie libertarians”. These labels just aren’t helpful, and Baden has a very practical, experienced and nuanced approach to property as the fundamental tool for good resource management.
quincunx, I really didn’t see that addressed in Block’s paper, in fact, I really didn’t see any resolution to the problem provided by Dr. Block. He seemed to do a good job of pointing out the differences amongst various libertarian “factions,” but where was the resolution? One man will live one place, another in a far away world, each with it’s own principles. The difference to today’s world will be that association is voluntary and coercion will be a thing of the past. The only common denominator will be that the non-aggression axiom is understood and enforced. If not, they will be relegated to the outskirts of society.
I find the criticisms of Holcombe on the inevitability of government to be rather weak. As I read Holcombe, his view is that every place will have one government ruling it. What Block attacks is the view that one government will rule every place. Now if Holcombe’s position actually implied the view that Block is attacking, then Block’s argument would work. But the implication isn’t there. What Block does is apply an invalid quantifier exchange to Holcombe’s position and attack the outcome. It’s as though Holcombe had claimed that “every person has a mother,” and Block responded by attacking the idea that “there is one mother of everyone.”
The free will argument is somewhat better; Government is not inevitable in the strictest sense i.e. absolute logical necessity. But I suspect that what Holcombe is claiming has more to do with overwhelming likelihood. In this case, the free will critique amounts to a disagreement over the imprecise use of language or over the actual likelihood of the necessary and sufficient conditions for anarchy.
That said, the criticism of Holcombe on condominium associations versus political governments is spot on. Given Holcombe’s affinity for procedural theories of justice, (See e.g. his own paper “Absence of Envy Does Not Imply Fairness.”) his position here is surprising. The procedures by which a condominum association and a political government come to control their respective territories are entirely different.
I see the difference between “right” and “left” libertarians to be one of emphasis. Take the issues of the last month or so. The left side may mention south central farmers and the increasing amount of war dead in Iraq. The right will mention the anniversary of the Kelo decision and Hurricane Katrina government relief fraud. Neither side is saying the other is incorrect, but perhaps focusing on the lesser priority.
Motivation or rationale is another. On the welfare state the right talks about lack of character and individual responsibility, while the left talks about loss of local control and the inherent conservatism of large scale politics (Iron Law of Oligarchy – even though a fascist apparently came up with the theory).
We’ll just have to muddle through these differences with diplomacy and a healthy dose of tact. And personally, I can’t gurantee that my loation here in northern Cali, with a planned move to the bay area, hasn’t influenced my own leanings.
Karl Hess ended his life most definitely as a non-Marxist. This from his posthumous autobiography:
The dippiest part of my association with the New Left was a brief attraction to the Marxian notion of the labor theory of value….It is a tribute to the numbing power of peer pressure, friendships, and disillusionment with old values that I could have had a brief interest in what soon struck me as the most fundamentally silly economic notion ever brough forth – a sort of economic Flat Earth Theory. Little wonder that people held thrall by this philosophy have never prospered. Fortunately, I recovered my senses before the labor-theory virus had become fatal.
Pretending ‘left’ and ‘right’ exist is a logical fallacy of the highest sort. I think it comes close to straight out mysticism.
I was interested in the part on Feser’s view of formal and substantive self-ownership. I find that Gordon’s answer to Feser’s view is incorrect, in that Gordon simply says that if I use a machine to suck out all the air in the vicinity of where you are sitting, I am killing you, and all that needs to be said is that libertarians oppose killing (innocent) people. But this is wrong, libertarians have specific reasons for opposing killing people. They do not rest on the so called non-aggression axiom, since the non-aggression axiom is not axiomatic: It is grounded in a theory of rights. It is pretty easy from reading Rothbard that what counts as aggression in his view is rights violations.
Gordon knows that issues about formal and substantive self-ownership are older than Feser, of course, since he has read GA Cohen’s Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality and Narveson’s response to Cohen’s arguments in The Libertarian Idea. Cohen invents a hypothetical world in which A owns all the land, and B owns himself, and so his labour. Cohen points out that in such a world B’s ownership of himself is rendered merely formal: There is nothing he can do with himself without asking the permission of A. This is not to say that he doesn’t own himself – after all, analogously, even if there are no corked bottles, and so nothing for me to actually use my corkscrew on, it nevertheless remains mine. No, Cohen’s point is that this situation has simply rendered self-ownership merely formal and valueless.
Narveson’s response is to simply say, so what, its not a realistic scenario. In fact, the more we approach the real world, where there are a multitude of land owners, the less of a problem this is; meanwhile, the more we approach Cohen’s prefferred “world-ownership” situation, where everybody altogether owns all land, the more likely this is. Self-ownership is rendered less formal and more substantive in the real world, and would be even more once statist monopolies were ended, than it is under Cohen’s world-ownership scheme.
But Feser’s point is different. He has introduced a scenario in which we would intuitively want to prohibit reductions in substantive self-ownership, which pressess libertarians into saying that the is a right to substantive self-ownership.
Richard,
The questions raised by Edward Feser may well be moot because Feser has effectively renounced libertarianism. Indeed, Feser is one of those kinds of conservatives whom Lew Rockwell characterizes as hating leftists more than loving liberty. If you sift through Feser’s writings (even when he was still calling himself a libertarian), you find him making arguments in favor of imperialist war, censorship, prohibition laws and other things that even many ordinary conservatives oppose. Indeed, I would say from my own reading of Feser that his perspective is very far removed from any kind of sincere libertarianism and instead reflects a type of nationalist-militarist-theocratic-collectivism.
I’m known for favoring a “big tent” for libertarians, anarchists and other anti-state radicals. I’m for including the entire umbrella of libertarian socialists and anarcho-capitalists, religionists and secularists, racialists and multiculturalists, cultural conservatives and counterculturalists, etc. but I don’t see any need to waste time with frauds, posers and opportunists.
http://www.attackthesystem.com/libimperialists.html
Feser, in particular, uses the most tortured, strung out and shabby reasoning imaginable to deny the freedom content of libertarianism in order to “justify” this or that brand of extreme statism. There is no reason to entertain such people in our midst. Let them go their own way and be heard from no more.
http://www.attackthesystem.com/libcon.html
I am aware that Feser no longer regards himself, and is no longer regarded as a libertarianism. I was just interested in this issue of whether there could be a right to substantive self-ownership rather than merely formal self-ownership.
“In a seeming strange left right overlap amongst libertarians, Hoppe, who I characterize below as a paradigm case of right wing libertarianism, would appear to support Long, who I see as a paradigm case of left wing libertarian, on the notion that not all property should be privately owned; rather, some of it should be publicly owned. States Hoppe (2001, 262):”
Hoppe: “… insurers would want to expel known criminals not just from their immediate
neighborhood bur from civilization altogether, into the wilderness or open frontier of the
Amazon jungle, the Sahara, or the polar regions.”
“…A far more reasonable one [interpretation] is that while these frontier areas are potentially open to privatization, at present they constitute sub-marginal lands which are too uneconomical to settle. So, those looking for evidence that Hoppe is a leftist on land privatization will have to look elsewhere.”
I agree with the final interpretation of Hoppe that Block arrives at. But I don’t get how this contributes to the thesis of the paper. I presume Block also subscribes to the view he ascribes to Hoppe on this issue.
In the footnote: “There is another sense, however, in which this statement of Hoppe’s cannot be saved from a left wing interpretation: this author coddles criminals. For a private insurance protection industry would not be willing to expel criminals; rather, they would squeeze the very life’s blood out of these miscreants in the form of forced labor, used to compensate their victims and pay their own fees. Only then might expulsion from civilization be considered.”
Hoppe coddles criminals? I think it is more reasonable to presume that Hoppe is also suggesting that AFTER compensation has been extracted from the criminal that he should be furthermore subject to expulsion. Given the context of Hoppe’s other writings, I don’t see the basis on which to interpret Hoppe any other way.
“A. Hans Hoppe
“a. Conservatives
“According to Hoppe (2001, p. 189): “… conservatives today must be antistatist libertarians and equally important, … libertarians must be conservatives.”
“…I cannot see my way clear to agreeing with the latter contention: that libertarians become conservatives. Indeed, to do so would be anathema to libertarianism. Surely, Hoppe cannot literally mean that libertarians should give up their philosophy and embrace that of present day conservatives. The only way to reconcile the latter part of this statement with the body of his other work is to say that libertarians should align themselves only with those conservatives who have themselves become libertarians, as per the first part of this statement. But this is just a highly convoluted way of saying that libertarians should be true to their own philosophy, a viewpoint I also enthusiastically support.”
I think a more straight forward interpretation of Hoppe is not that libertarians must “become conservatives”, but rather, that libertarians necessarily ARE socially conservative by nature. That is, that true libertarianism is held by those who also have conservative values such as family, self-sufficiency, non-egalitarian leaning etc etc. It’s his view. Right or wrong, it isn’t as absurd as suggesting libertarians should adopt neocon ideology. Nor does it seem to have anything to do with strategic political alignments.
On the issue of what “thick libertarianism” is and why some of us favour it, I recommend this piece by Charles Johnson:
http://charleswjohnson.name/remarks/2005/12/28/narveson
It’s all a matter of interpretation, IMHO.
I’m a big fan of Hoppe. Hoppe sees conservatism as the defense and preservation of the “Natural Order”. This natural order, in his view, is AnarchoCapitalism. Therefore, any attack(s) on the Natural Order, such as attacks on the integrity of the family, is an attack on AnarchoCapitalism itself.
So, when Hoppe states:
“conservatives today must be antistatist libertarians and equally important, … libertarians must be conservatives”
He is NOT contradicting himself. On the contrary, he is pleading with conservatives to preserve and defend traditions that reach even further back in time, those associated with the Natural Order. At the same time, Libertarians must be true true conservatives and preserve the Natural Order/
“c. Homosexuality
“But “physically remov(ing some people) from society … if one is to maintain a libertarian order” sounds very far away from such a concept, and is therefore erroneous, at least in my view, from the perspective of correct libertarian theory.”
It seems there are three issues to consider in analyzing this difference of view. The first is the implication of the covenant. The second and more difficult is: what actions are fundamentally inconsistent with libertarian law. Third and the trickiest is the question of whether incitement can ever be considered criminal under Austrian Law.
1. The covenant.
Hoppe: “Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal.”
Block: “…This is not to say that certain statements cannot be banned by contract, restrictive covenants, condominium agreements, etc., in a private property regime.”
It seems when it comes to covenantal restrictions, there is no controversy here between Block and Hoppe. A covenant can preclude advocating homosexuality.
2. What actions are inconsistent with libertarian law itself?
Hoppe: “Naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society.”
Block: “Prohibiting the advocacy of ideas that are harmful to society, moreover, comes under the heading of laws against incitement. I fully agree with Hoppe that the views of democrats, communists, queer studies theorists, etc., are very harmful for civilization. They do indeed amount to incitement. But here is what Rothbard (1998, 80) said about the prohibition of incitement…”
It appears further that Hoppe and Block both agree that the popularization of democratic or communistic ideas is a dangerous and harmful thing to society; harmful that is, to individuals who constitute this libertarian society. So there is no disagreement there. It seems implicitly then, the disagreement really hinges on the interpretation of the criminal or non-criminal nature of the act of incitement itself. That is: is it a crime to attempt to incite the crimes of rape or murder; is it a crime to attempt to incite the crimes of democracy or communism? This leads us to question 3.
3. Can incitement ever be considered criminal?
I think everything indeed boils down to this question. What is the Austrian Law in respect to incitement? It’s a great question and I’m aware of two positions on it.
Block holds Rothbard’s position:
“Should it be illegal …. to ‘incite to riot’? Suppose that Green exhorts a crowd: ‘Go! Burn! Loot! Kill!’ and the mob proceeds to do just that, with Green having nothing further to do with these criminal activities. Since every man is free to adopt or not adopt any course of action he wishes, we cannot say that in some way Green determined the members of the mob to their criminal activities; we cannot make him, because of his exhortation, at all responsible for their crimes. ‘Inciting to riot,’ therefore, is a pure exercise of a man’s right to speak without being thereby implicated in crime. On the other hand, it is obvious that if Green happened to be involved in a plan or conspiracy with others to commit various crimes, and that then Green told them to proceed, he would then be just as implicated in the crimes as are the others—more so, if he were the mastermind who headed the criminal gang. This is a seemingly subtle distinction which in practice is clearcut—there is a world of difference between the head of a criminal gang and a soapbox orator during a riot; the former is not, properly to be charged simply with ‘incitement.’”
Alternatively, one could take the view expressed by Kinsella/Tinsley (KT) in “Causation and Aggression” whereby a weakness in this approach is suggested due to admitted exceptions to the rule:
http://www.kinsellalaw.com/publications/kinsella-tinsley_causality-aggression_qjae-2004.pdf
“first, someone who forces another to commit a crime by use of threats is responsible for the crime committed (Block 2004,p. 15); second, someone who pays another to commit a crime (e.g., murderby-hire) is guilty of the crime (p. 17). And presumably Block would agree that the letter-bomb mailer in the example above is guilty even though he used an innocent courier and even though the victim himself, by opening the package, played a role in the ensuing explosion. With so many exceptions to the rule that one is simply not responsible for the actions of others, the rule itself is questionable.”
and they further argue that
“Moreover, these exceptions, especially the ones regarding threats and payment, are ad hoc and not based on any general theory. It makes more sense to scrutinize actions in terms of the praxeological means-end framework.”
KT argue that “some speech acts can be classified as acts of aggression in the context in which they occur because they constitute the speaker’s use of means calculated to inflict intentional harm. One clear example of this is threats of force.”
A verbal threat is aggression when it is considered under the praxeological lens which considers the speaker’s means towards aggressive ends.
“For the inciter’s action to be considered aggression, he would have to intend the prohibited result; and he would have to have chosen means that resulted in the rioting. We do not maintain that the inciter is necessarily responsible; the question turns on many specific facts and the context. What we maintain is that the inciter is not off the hook just because the rioters had free will. The question to be answered is: was the mob the means of the inciter? Was the inciter a cause of the mob rioting, or of their ensuing havoc?”
Similarly, I would argue, if the specific facts and the context must be considered when considering if an inciter is necessarily responsible for the criminal act of rioting, does not the same standard not also apply to consideration of the inciter’s intent in the question of the promoting of criminal acts against society, such as promoting democracy, socialism, or coercive taxation? I think once one comes to terms with a praxeological based analysis of the criminal nature of inciting a crime, that Hoppe’s position seems completely within the boundaries of Austrian Law, and is indeed a necessary position of one who upholds Austrian/libertarian Law.
Hans Hermann Hoppe:”There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarianvsocial order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or
communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.”
Some of this rings a bell. Where have we heard similar sentiments before?
“Citizens enjoy the freedom of speech, the press, organization, association, assembly and public manifestation.
The state guarantees the realization of these freedoms, it creates the conditions for them, and makes available the necessary material means.”
“The right to join various organizations which operate in the political, economic, cultural as well as in any other field of the country’s life, is guaranteed to the citizens.”
“The creation of any type of organization of a fascist, anti-democratic, religious, and anti-socialist character is prohibited.
“Fascist, anti-democratic, religious, war-mongering, and anti-socialist activities and propaganda, as well as the incitement of national and racial hatred are prohibited.”
Articles 53-55 of THE CONSTITUTION OF THE PEOPLE’S SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF ALBANIA
I,too, am a big fan of Hoppe’s work. I wrote a very positive review of DTGTF for anti-state.com (Hoppe even linked to it on his own site).
I also wrote a letter to the Las Vegas paper on Hoppe’s behalf when he came under attack by the PC police.
That being said, there’s a such thing as being such an ideologue that it becomes self-defeating.
The English Marxist William Morris (of “News From Nowhere” fame) once remarked that it was through his association with anarchists that he realized anarchy would never work in practice. That’s been my experience as well. All of the representatives of the major anarchist factions that I have ever encountered seemed to me to be advocating what amounted to an alternative type of state designed to promote their own ideological or economic preferences (Ex: anarcho-Marxism for Chomsky, anarcho-feudalism for Hoppe).
Economic systems are preceded by political and legal systems, which are preceded by cultural, religious, ideological, ethical, and philosophical systems. Ultimately, culture rules. The best friends of liberty can do is to push for the autonomy of separate and distinctive cultures and allow those with irreconcilable differences to mutually self-segregate.
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