Cows and Graveyards: My Problems With Libertarianism…
Steven Maloney’s “My Problems With Libertarianism…” seems worth a comment or two. Maloney lists seven points that he sees as “the cardinal porblems with libertarianism“. Let’s go over them.
“First of all, libertarianism violates a principle rule of politics that has been observed as far back as Western civilization has cared to observe it: all parties (individuals, groups, nations) will pursue ends that are ruinous by their own standards if they are not checked in some meaningful way.”
Maloney would have been correct to simply observe that a significant portion of all human decisions are plainly foolish and ultimately self-destructive. He went beyond that, though, to distort libertarianism. Libertarians don’t object to external checks on the behavior of individuals per se, but rather to the ethical character of what checks are used — objecting to aggression (initial, rather than defensive or retributive) force or its threat (coercion). It’s not clear from that if Maloney merely doesn’t understand libertarianism, or if instead he only considers aggressive violence “meaningful”.
Second, libertarianism carries an assumption that there is some practicable way to create power enough to arbitrate disputes and enforce mutually accepted law, but that somehow a small state ensures that this law and its enforcement is incorruptible. How?
The question misunderstands the problem. Power does nothing to arbitrate disputes, only suppress them. Genuine arbitration is a matter of intentional seeking of mutual common ground to the satisfaction of all concerned parties. The incentive for that to be sought flows naturally from unresolved conflicts having costs of various sorts associated with them.
Third, that somehow public actions are best left in the hands of individuals as much as possible rather than with states. Yet public speech and action lead to unintended consequences, and what binds people together is not reasonable agreement in a vacuum but a condition of equality that all in the world have to live with the same realities of all public action.
I perhaps shouldn’t dwell to long on Maloney’s contrasting reasonable agreement and equality beyond noting that it seems to imply, if taken literally, that Maloney thinks equality is unreasonable, which I’d have to disagree with.
More important is his apparent supposition that equality is something that must be imposed by a state — when in fact that supposition is contradicted by the very nature of states. State power depends on the existence of a widespread misconception — namely, that it is ethically correct for individuals acting under the aegis of “government” to do things to you that you could not ethically do to them. Inequality, therefore, is the very foundation that states rest on. For further clarification on this point, I recommend Professor Roderick Long’s “Equality: The Unknown Ideal“.
Fourth, that democratic negotiation leads to much better results in solving problems of collective action than most systems of private negotiation (for example, Coasian bargaining only works as advertised with a restrictive amount of parties and even then only in situations with a core).
That all depends on what is meant by “democratic”, “negotiation” and “private”.
No more thoroughly democratic approach to collective action is conceivable than the libertarian approach, which demands that collective action only take place in a context of unanimous consent. Plenty of people don’t like that because it frustrates their wishes to treat society as their own little tinker toy to manipulate through governmental force and coercion, but they hardly ought to be able to claim the mantle of “democratic” if they wish to autocratically use aggressive force or coercion to get others to go along with their plans.
Furthermore, the opposite of “private” is “public”. In a context of collective decision-making, “public” essentially means “of or pertaining to the state” — and the state is merely organized violence, which isn’t particularly democratic, as shown above.
Fifth, that in reality, the “strong do what they must and the weak suffer what they must.” Simply making the state not “the strong” in this case does not alter the validity of this condition between men, it just advocates making someone or something else “the strong” who force the weak to “suffer what they must” instead
Human nature is such that while most people do not victimize others, a significant minority of the population chooses such a path. That minority, the true “criminal element”, has no greater capacity for mischief than when they secure the acquiescence of the majority to their depradations by promulgating superstitions that say victimizing someone is ethically okay as long as the criminal wears a crown or a badge and is acting within the capacity of his or her state office.
Sixth, men are conditioned by many things besides the law, and it was Montesquieu and Machiavelli amongst others, who gave these non-state forces that condition the habits of men such force as to say that the law will not hold unless it conforms to these other forces, and not the other way around. Religion, memories of past things, climate, and culture - they are not legitimate because they rationally justifiable, they are legitimate in their force because they are forceful in fact.
This is not an objection to libertarianism by my reading of it, although Maloney is welcome to clarify. I do find it interesting, though, that Maloney here appears to confuse “force” with “influence”.
Seven, Libertarianism strikes me as equally susceptible to Sandel’s criticism of the “unencumbered self” as does Rawls’ pseudo-utilitarianism. Any claim of unencumberance is in some ways, dehumanizing on face, and also strikes me as a little sexist. We are, as I think only males could consistently forget, so clearly not encumbered individuals as to be carried in the wombs of mothers for nine months in order to survive. To talk about rational individuals in the context of pregnancy is an exercise in “fudging it” because the number of individuals and their relationship between one another does not lend itself to this considerations very neatly, and after pregnancy, to call each an individual becomes potentially even dicier. We can call mother and child two seperate and unencumbered individuals if we want, but we seem to preserve the value of the taxonomy at the expense of the value of the subject.
Actually, I would say no — libertarianism is not as susceptible to it, unless Maloney specifically means the watered-down libertarianism that Kevin Carson has christened “vulgar libertarianism” (which doesn’t, I believe, substantially differ from Rawls view in terms of real world application). The reason why is that a principled libertarianism has plenty of room for communitarian approaches, where such communitarianism is genuinely voluntary among all participants.
Where those approaches are not characterized by unanimous consent, the symbiosis of expectant mother and child is nowhere near as apt a metaphor as the host-parasite relationship presented in the movie Alien. Those who would use government (force and coercion) to oligarchically mold society to their own particular wills clearly don’t feel very “encumbered” by the natural rights of their victims.
In short, the Sandel vs. Rawls conflict is, essentiually, about what the state should look like. Genuine libertarians challenge the existence of the state. I was familiar with neither Rawls nor Sandel prior to looking into the matter, so Maloney or any others ought to feel free to comment about anything they feel I missed.
I should finally note that Maloney started off his post with an interesting remark.
I tend to see any relationship to my views on deomcracy and libertarianism as largely uninteresting, and largely because taking the time to try and draw it out carefully in full view of most libertarians leads to exchanges that only frustrate me,
I should say that I also often find exchanges with libertarians frustrating, usually in inverse proportion to their degree of libertarianism. I [ahem] strongly suspect that’s not quite where Maloney is coming from, though, and that raises an interesting point. If Maloney finds exchanges with libertarians frustrating, he ought to consider the possibility that it’s because their arguments make more sense than his own positions, despite his refusal to abandon them.
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First of all, I want to say that I really do appreciate the effort to argue your position contra the statements I made on my website. I would like to make a few clarifying statements on my own behalf, since, as I pointed out on my post, that I was merely compiling a list of categories of objections to libertarianism that I find credible, and was not so bold as to claim that I had written a set of complete arguments against it in such a small space on a blog. This does not mean that my comments did not warrant such a complete response, in fact I requested responses from any who read it, but simply that the reader may wish to pick up quite a few library books before arbitrating this dispute fully for themselves and considering the matter closed.
On the point of “pursuing one’s ends towards destruction”, I believe that what Mr. Simpson calls aggressive tools of enforcing and informing certain behaviors is deplorable in a vacuum. As a pragmatic point, I fail to see how non-state entities would lay using such tools of the trade aside in the face of a minimimalist state, given that many private organizations do not lay them down now. My concern here is that the relationship between power and authority as it is understood in most libertarian schemas is a very modern conception of power, and that I find it more pragmatically useful to examine human behavior through understandings of power and authority through the lens of something like Hannah Arendt’s “On Violence”. If power and authority are related in ways that mean that we only really reconfigure them as oppoed to change how much there is, then the commercial republic, in roughly the way it exists today, carries great appeal in the way that it channels the energies and abilities of all the various groups and interests in society.
As to my second point, I still do not see how in practice we would expect people to come to some sort of agreement privately when one side may simply abuse the other side. If there is some other party to prevent this abuse, what prevents them from abusing one party or the other? Here we find ourselves back to the original problems of modern political theory, and I am not sure that this line of argumentation takes very seriously many of these questions beyond how they are addressed by Thomas Hobbes.
Third, I might say equality is “unreasonable” insofar as that equality does not seem to flow from reason. It does not in the manner that I present it, and it does not in Hobbes’ “state of nature”. In the account I allude to in my blurb, equality comes from the condition that human beings find themselves in the world and their capacity to act. This is true even in Hobbes, where the “war of all against all” and the “fear of untimely death” are not derived from reason, but are simply the way things are in the world.
Fourth, I simply cannot agree that somehow the majority do not exploit their position over others in pursuit of their own interests. If one gazes upon Milgram’s “Obedience to Authority”, Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment”, the Rwandan Genocide, the Civil War in Corcyra(sp?), etc., I think you will find a great many people are willing to do a great many things simply because they can. Who stops this “criminal element” and what stops them? Is it reason? Is it force? Who uses the force? Who protects us from the people who use this force? What if it is simply opportunity rather than character that prevents most people from perpetrating these “criminal acts?” What if only the virtuous man can truly resist?
I find Sandel compelling not for his vision of the state (which I have concerns about) but for his steadfast belief that politics is messy, particular and uncertain, and that broad schema such as libertarianism, liberal egalitarianism, etc. tend to paint with a broad enough strokes that they talk about politics without talking about the actual stuff of politics. I still carry that concern.
Finally, I tend to find exchanges with libertarians frustrating because they tend to refuse to come out of the pardigm constructions of man, society, state (the ones I talk to tend to anyway) as they appear to them inside of their model, and they argue from a model that is all-encompassing and can never be wrong. It reminds me of the frustrations expressed by Karl Popper about arguing with Marxism that he expressed in “Conjectures and Refutations”. At which point most arguments with libertarianism have about as much value as two people of different religions arguing about what “the one, true faith” is. I say this, again, only to clarify my position. I have known many libertarians, and have come up against NYU debaters enough times in my college life to understand that libertarians are gifted and intelligent people, and I created this list to sort of “hash out” why I have never found such arguments alluring.
Again, I want to thank you for your lengthy and well thought out responses to my post, and let me say that this does not, in my book, qualify as one fo those “frustrating” libertarian encounters, but I have found it stimulating and valuable.
It’s nice to see a debate like this, since I’ve been havin the anarchism vs. social democracy argument inside my own head for nigh on a year. Which is probably why I lean ever more towards anarchism, as I’ve already thought through most of my early objections.
Just on one point: Hobbes was wrong. There has never been a war of all against all. He had never visited tribal peoples, had never seen a stateless society of even the most primitive sort. Some cultures are more violent than others, but some are positively egalitarian, even matriarchal and nascently democratic, like the Six Nations
And this quote, from Mr. Maloney’s post: What if it is simply opportunity rather than character that prevents most people from perpetrating these “criminal acts?â€
Have you ever killed anyone? I imagine not. And was it because you feared punishment, or because you knew it was wrong? I know that my friends could, theoretically, turn on me, that my neighbours could burn my house down while I slept, that my girlfriend could easily dispatch me in the middle of the night. But I don’t fear these things, and I know that the government is not what keeps them at bay.
I don’t hate the state, I just think we should consider that a stateless society might be better. Many anarchists seem to become more fervent in their beliefs when they see a government injustice. That bothers me, but what really tips me towards anarchism is when I see people working together, compromising, donating to charity and just getting along. I become more an anarchist when I am optimistic and hopeful. It seems to me you believe in Leviathan because you are afraid.
Matthew,
First let me say thank you for the kind reflections on our arguments. Now, on to papering over my own cracks. I did not mean to imply that Hobbes was somehow historically correct, and you are right to point out that the state of nature is a fiction, but instead I meant only to say that the father of the rationalistic justification of the state did not himself seem to base equality upon reason, but on the fact that “each man is his own author” (paraphrasing, its in the last two to three pages of Book I). It is, on some level, impossible to understand in completely in what ways our own thoughts do and do not carry the legacy of Hobbes’ work, but I would not consider myself to be “Hobbesian”. Instead I have a quite serious interest in the traditions of political theory and democratic ideas over a very wide spectrum of theorists, including, but not limited to: Montesquieu, Machiavelli, Arendt, Dewey, and Barber.
When you pose the question of my being a murderer being based on something more than circumstance, you open up an important avenue of thought, I believe. What is it that prevents me from being a murderer? I would agree that it is not the law, in fact that was the very point I was trying to make, the law has to conform quite a bit to what is already there in order to be manageable. But, why is that already there? Part of it, I would agree comes from me, but part of it may also come from mores, climate, religion, etc. If I belonged to a religious tradition that believed in human sacrifice, or if I lived in a climate so unbearably warm that it made one quick to flashes of anger, these would likely change my condition. They would be no guarantee that I would murder still, but if we remove the state from the equation, we by no means have only our own free will and personal values as the only viable alternative from which to derive our motives. Which, in turn, leads me to conclude that the state as commercial republic is not so powerful as libertarians tend to fear if it must conform to the “spirit of the laws” and that the absence of government does not make free will any more powerful than it already is now. I’m sorry if this is long and confusing, I am pumping this out before I run to the grocery store, but I hope this further clears up my position. Let me close by saying that our goals ultimately are similar ones, for I too prioritize the importance of “isonomy”, to neither rule nor be ruled in the conducting of the public affairs of citizens. I just fear the world does not operate in the fashion that libertarianism tends to fashion it.
I’d certainly agree that the state’s laws are not the only source of human motivations, and that culture is very important as well. But only a culture that internalizes respect for others and the principles of equality is even capable of becoming anarchist in the first place.
Virtually every culture in the world has produced philophies and religions that cough up the same Golden Rule over and over and over. If that isn’t a good starting point for a universal morality, I don’t know what is.
You argue that the state is weaker than supposed, and (if I understand you correctly) that it must react to the culture and mood of the people as much, if not more, than it can command them. That may be quite true, but it does not excuse any incident in which the leaders of the state use its apparatus to commit amoral acts. Hitler would certainly not have been able to launch his genocide in a nation that had no shred of antisemitism. But would so many Germans (and Ukranians, Italians, Romanians and others) have colluded in the final solution if they were not “just following orders”? The fact that they had given up their autonomy to a government allowed them to do things they would not have considered doing on their own, and on a monumental scale. A racist may kill one man, a group of them may even kill hundreds in a pogrom. Only a nation can kill six million.
Obviously, that’s an extreme example. But think about an environmental problem in the democratic west. Would the citizens of a community accept their air being polluted by a major mill if a) the government had not established pollution minimums that cannot be challenged by lawsuit or b) many members of the community are not dependent on that business for jobs, yet powerless to change how it operates, because they are banned from effectively striking by law?
There are a lot of different kinds of anarchists and libertarians out there. Brad Spangler is probably the most enlightened person I’ve run across who calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, and I generally lean much more far to the left in the kinds of anarchism I’m interested in. Check out Infoshop.org/faq, Kevin Carson’s Mutualist Blog, and Another Blog is Possible for individualist and lefty anarchism. Most people calling themselves Libertarians today don’t even know the bloody origin of the term. If you fear that libertarians do not believe the world operates the way you do, check around. Possibly you agree more with another branch of the thought.
On what stops one group from abusing another, weaker group: self interest and self defense. If a gang simply roams about stealing, they will still be dependent on others for trade and goods. Refusing to deal with them, or to offer them any legal standing until they make restitution, would be a good start. The second prong is the idea that people should make common cause to defend their local communities, with everyone who wants to having a say in how it is organized and carried out. In Spain, the anarchist fighters were horrible at offensive action, but pretty good at liberating their own areas and defending them.
[...] In addition to my post responding to Steves Maloney’s “My Problems With Libertarianism…â€, Timo Wirkman Virkkala also has a nice response and both Scott Bieser and the ever perceptive RadGeek have also chimed in. I may or may not have more followup myself. It depends on whether or not it would still seem timely by the time I have a chance to slow down and write something more extensive than short blog updates. [...]