Liberty Alone

Okay, so this is akin to asking “What is jazz?”. There is no easy answer, but I know it when I see it.

Sean Gabb, director of the Libertarian Alliance recently said a libertarian is someone who:

Wants to be left alone
Wants to leave others alone
Wants others to be left alone

This covers a lot of positions. From anarchists, through minarchists to many liberals.
I think that there are several identifiable, but very loose, groupings.

European libertarian

The original libertarians were anarchists who adopted the term to avoid persecution and later to disassociate themselves with the violence of some anarchists. On the continent this meaning is still frequently used (in many languages there are two words for libertarian, one for this form, and the other for the anglo-sphere meaning)

The classical liberal

Once upon a time, liberalism was a philosophy of liberty and freedom. In the US this usage of the term is long gone and has been replaced by statism and authoritarianism. This led many US liberals to adopt the nearly abandoned term libertarian to describe their liberalism. This is the root of the common usage in the UK and US and many liberals of the past can easily be considered libertarian (Herbert Spencer for example).

The NAP/ZAP follower

For many, the Non (or Zero) Aggression Principle is the touchstone of libertarianism. Arrived at in many ways, it states that the initiation of force against another human is always and everywhere wrong. Applied consistently this leads to an anarchist outlook, but many advocate a small state on utilitarian grounds.

The ‘thin’ libertarian

For some, libertarianism is a theory of the just use of force and that’s it. It makes no moral argument about anything else. Personally I think this is too limiting, but many respected libertarian adopts this view. It is an area of much active discussion today.

The ‘thick’ libertarian

The thick libertarian draws further conclusions from their libertarian essentials and view other aspects of society. Usually anti-discrimination, deeply concerned with poverty, often concerned with environmental protection and worker’s rights. All within a framework of freedom and non-aggression.

The conservative libertarian

A sad corruption of libertarianism as far as I’m concerned is the conservative libertarian. I personally think this breed grew out of the move of the left from an anti-state position towards acceptance of state force, abandoning much of the liberal ground. The conservatives then adopted aspects of the liberal ground to defend their entrenched positions and views. Personally I find this inconsistent and overly concerned with upholding their prior beliefs.

The left libertarian

In my experience most thick libertarians are left libertarians. They are concerned with equality of authority far more than simple freedom to do as you please and other traditionally left-wing causes. Very often market anarchists, although not always.

The Randroid

The butt of many jokes. Narrow minded dogmatic follower of Ayn Rand. Often hate other libertarians, or not considered libertarian at all (dismissing libertarians and ‘hippies of the right’).

The ‘armadillo’

My own term for personal isolationists. They want to be left alone so much that they would happily withdraw into their own shell and leave the rest of the world behind. Not as common as seems to be thought.

These groups are non-exclusive and fuzzy, but I think they cover a good range.

A few misconceptions I want to rebut too:

Libertarians are extreme Tories

Libertarianism is fundamentally opposed to Toryism. True there are conservative libertarians and libertarians in the Tory party, but generally they were drawn by the rather un-Tory Thatcherism and its opposition to the state. Many have realised that Thatcher was in fact another authoritarian, others hope that the free market can still be gained through the Conservative Party. Just to remind people – Thatcher did some things which were liberal, but she wasn’t a liberal or libertarian herself.

Libertarians are selfish individualists/are opposed to altruism

Of course some libertarians are selfish, just as many liberals and socialists are too. As for individualism – libertarianism is individualist in the sense that it views the individual person as the basic unit of social analysis and that each individual is an end in themselves and never simply the means to an end for another or for a group. Many libertarians are extremely altruistic, we just reject the use of force to achieve our altruistic aims.

Libertarianism has nothing to do with liberalism

As I’ve suggested, many libertarians are in fact classical liberals, so how the two are unrelated I don’t know. Also, liberalism and libertarianism share much of the same history. Both look to people like the Levellers, the non-conformists who sought religious freedom, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, JS Mill, Bastiat and so on. If the two have nothing to do with each other, why does Liberal International list so many people who influence libertarians as liberal thinkers?

There’s much to go on with here. I personally hope to discuss many of the things which I’ve touched on in more detail.

As for what sort of libertarian I am: I consider myself to be a left libertarian. I hope to solidify that in time, but this post is not the place for that.

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