Why I’m Not a Libertarian

A personal reflection

As some are aware, I spent a few intellectually formative years as a proponent and expositor of libertarian political theory; dealing with some intricate aspects of its doctrine and definition, countering deviations in libertarianism, and laboring to defend it in a robust, systematic way. I took it seriously.

I was never intrigued by utilitarian arguments for libertarianism as a political theory. These would be along the line that libertarianism produces the best economic outcomes for the greatest number of people; or perhaps that libertarianism deals most effectively with the dangers of abuse of power. Instead, I had very much what was called a “deontological” approach: libertarianism was the best political theory precisely because it most consistently and purely applied the basics of an ethical standard.

For me, libertarianism was the only logically applied political theory on the basis of individual rights, which preceded society, and were granted directly by God as logically implied by commands such as Thou Shall Not Steal and others that could be related to the integrity of bodily freedom from the initiation of aggression. I was, though, open to non-theological formulations of man’s natural individual property rights, such as those conceived by Murray Rothbard (Ethics of Liberty) or even Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Argumentation Ethics).

My definition of libertarianism was (and is) the proposition that “individuals have an absolute right to their body and the external property they have acquired by non-aggressive means (such as trade, inheritance, original appropriation, creation, etc.).” The implied corollary to this is that “no man has the legal right to breach the rights of the property owner.” Man’s rights are individually held, and they originate in man’s nature prior to society and political order. The legitimacy or illegitimacy of laws flow from these propositions. A good law reinforces these standards, and bad laws breach them. Such is libertarianism.

Now, I must make it plain that for me, perhaps more than other ex-libertarians, one would first have to demonstrate the invalidity of this theory before honestly leaving it behind. Many ex-libertarians haven’t had the personal burden of needing to grapple with self-persuasion like I did. “Libertarianism no longer works” or “things are so bad that we shouldn’t be such sticklers in our present emergency” are not arguments that really meant much to me. At the very end of my libertarianism, my view was that libertarianism was still the only true and just theory, even if it isn’t viable or it could no longer do anything to save our liberties from our enemies. The question was whether Libertarianism was true, not whether it should be practiced. And on this, I was firm.

In my essay on the Triumph of the Political, I gave three general reasons why people are leaving libertarianism and pursuing a more reactionary or right-wing engagement with politics: the realist nature of power (in Burnham), the fundamental character of the political (in Schmitt) and the Achilles’ Heel of private-cultural radicalization (in Gramsci). I think these are very powerful arguments about the weaknesses of libertarianism. But none of these, really, get to the core of undermining libertarianism. So this short post explains how I justified my way out, never to look back.

I began to realize that my way out was in understanding the actual nature of the individual’s relation to society, which preceded him. All individuals are born into a family. The Natural Order of course has as the family a married Father and Mother and their children. We can address this topic by looking at the actual world around us, or we can go back to the beginning of society itself. Since looking at the present is considered to be a nonstarter for libertarians, who appeal to the state of nature (that is, Man independent of the society as it is) to understand the essence of rights, then we can do the same.

Incidentally though, this is precisely the way of thinking that so bothered counter-revolutionaries like Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke; the fruit of intellectually reconstructing society are not a grand rebuilding on justice and peace, but a tearing down without the means to build back. Nevertheless, I will engage the problem because understanding it properly is how I left libertarianism.

A fundamental aspect of the human experience is that individuals enter the world in pre-existing arrangements. If one takes up a Christian view of origin myths, as I do, there have only been two exceptions. There was a sort of reconstituting of the world with the Noahic story, so we can shift forward to that by working off the view that Noah’s three sons and their wives went forth to re-populate the world. Their children were born under the authority and legitimacy of their fathers as heads of the original political society, so to speak. This inevitably means that they had certain rights, but also certain restrictions as downstream members of a hierarchy. It could only have been this way, as children are wholly dependent on their parents not only for survival, but for the absorption of good and bad social behavior.

As families grow over generations, first brothers, and then cousins, must work out rules for living together, passing on the complex of rights and duties, liberties and constraints. Families transform into clans, which transform into tribes, and so on. Nations are downstream from this process. At all points in the growth process, the complex of rights and duties are passed forward, often changing, sometimes leaning in the direction of more freedom, other times in the direction of less. But always as the product of historical circumstances, leadership decisions, the adoption of new religions, the failures of certain customs, and the triumphs of others.

There has never been any man born outside such a context. One can think of alleged exceptions, in the abstract. But not only are these not fundamental to any actual society in history, but they also must somehow relate to society, even if they understand enough to know that they cannot breach the complex of the rights/duties by simply entering the society’s territory: they would be opposed with legitimate force.

Thus, rights are always socially-situated. They are always identified in the context of something, and are balanced against other restraints that prevent the society from disintegrating into chaos. Rights then, are the product of historical development; sometimes with appeal to higher ideals, but always within the limits of culture, political dynamics, and pre-existing legal formulations including definitions, institutions, and settled claims of authority.

While I will talk about this in a future essay, I’m willing to say that there are God given rights, but they are given indirectly through the historical development of the social order, rather than imputed directly. History is the mechanism by which God can, if he chooses, “give” rights. (I tell people often that I am basically a historicist, and then they are surprised when I have historicist takes.)

Now, Hans-Hermann Hoppe has talked about the idea of a Covenant Community—of individuals participating in a social order where there are rules that, by virtue of the Covenant consented to, restrict individual behavior. But what struck me about this concept was first that it is only in rare circumstances historically (I can’t actually think of any—because this isn’t the way pre-nineteenth century people thought) that such a covenant would depend on the ongoing, unanimous consent of its members. The covenant itself outlasts the individuals who designed it and their children, by virtue of their non-consensual tie to their fathers, are bound by it without ongoing formal consent.

While people like Burke and Hooker would actually describe this as consent (made on behalf of children and posterity), this isn’t the type of individualist consent that post-enlightenment thinkers (like Locke) have in mind. It’s a “covenant,” sure, but because it outlasts the originators of the covenant and binds those who are brought up in the context of this society, it should be described merely as a “society.” The society, then, is an entity of its own life; it is made up not merely of the individuals who actively and formally give over consent, but is characterized by a bond that transcends the living. This view of society, of course, would reject sociological nominalism (only the physical individuals are “real.”)

The other thing that struck me about this Covenant is that this describes much of the historical development of Western Europe; far from being a new innovative solution to the problems of libertine degeneracy for right-leaning libertarians, if you add a layer of perpetuity to the Covenant for reasons relating to organic family ties, you have the traditionalist understanding of the social order.

Now, naturally, the history of society is not always built on peaceful relations. There are elements of conquering, of plundering, of stolen land and occupied peoples. The debate then becomes what is to be done with the messiness of history? Thomas Paine and the revolutionaries who targeted inherited society advocated its unraveling and its reconstruction upon just and rational grounds. Burke famously warned against such moralizing radicalism. The historical details of societies, of nations, is cloudy and unknowable; one is completely unable to delineate accurately which ties and relations are just, and which are unjust. Burke declared:

Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burdensome duties towards those with whom they have never made a convention of any sort.

Children are not consenting to their relation, but their relation, without their actual consent, binds them to its duties; or rather it implies their consent because the presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the predisposed order of things. Men come in that manner into a community with the social state of their parents, endowed with all the benefits, loaded with all the duties of their situation.

What Burke means here is that history is complex and its purity level of Just relations unascertainable; in unraveling alleged unjust relations to try and refit society to be consistent with pure rules of natural rights, revolutionaries will be unwinding not only artificially formed relations, but also good and organic ones.

Now, the result of all this is that no man’s rights are more fundamental than the political order itself. The Order is upstream of the Liberty. This is what is meant by ordered liberty. In the Western tradition, this meant that our liberties were the benefit of our being connected to ancestors who earned them for us and bequeathed them to us. They are inherited liberties, not abstract liberties. They are liberties that derived from our being born of a People with a history, not as individuals disconnected to any heritage.

What this means is that we must not be pigeon holed by those who seek to prevent us from advocating political responses to activities that subvert and undermine the character of our culture and the integrity of our way of life. We don’t need to be hamstrung politically from exercising power against those who utilize claims of liberty in ways that weaken the very political order upon which our liberties were once dependent. We live in a world where the state has been weaponized against Heritage America and there should be nothing holding us back from exercising whatever power is necessary to confront enemies both public and private.

On this front, I agree with so much of the (paleo)libertarian opposition to the Managerial State, the Conservative Movement, global militarism, the American Empire, central banking and so on. But it is because all these things are antithetical or threatening to my heritage, the customs I want to uphold, and the traditions I want recovered… not because they breach the Non-Aggression Principle.

The problem with liberalism is precisely that it became an “ism.” And libertarianism is liberalism perfectly applied. There are contexts where we could be just fine with more politically liberal tendencies (liberalism being the absence of government intervention—like in the eighteenth century), but there are also times when liberal dynamics and restraints on power can undermine a society. The historicist view of liberalism (as opposed to the universalist liberalism) is that there are moments (say, in a relatively homogenous, Christian, and cultured society) where we wouldn’t oppose liberality as viciously as we must now (in an age of moral anarchy, ugliness, and privately-sponsored cultural revolution).

We seek political solutions to our political problems, because underlying all our old ways of life, as free as it was, sat a layer of political hegemony that produced and passed on the rights and liberties once enjoyed by our fathers. Because my conception of this complex network of rights and restrains stem from history and are therefore not universal, and not pre-social, I am not a libertarian.

It follows from this core aspect of my political thought that I am free to make the derivative observations about the typical libertarian personality, neglect of political realism, and any contradictions in application. I can now continue to emphasize the three big weaknesses of libertarianism (power per Burnham, the political per Schmitt, civil subversion per Gramsci), now that I have expressed the core of my transformation.