Divide and Conquer?

by Liberty and Power

David Brooks makes an interesting point in his NYT column today. He argues that dissent and division within conservatism is actually a healthy thing, because (among other reasons) it requires them to pay attention to the philosophical underpinnings of the different wings (e.g., neocon vs theocrat, free-market vs trad-values, etc.). It occurs to me that this is also applicable within libertarianism. Brooks notes that (modern) liberalism doesn't really have any philosophical parentage. I'm not sure whether this is true - Rawlsians might argue that Rawls is the philosophical underpinning of welfare-state liberalism, but OTOH the existence of the liberal-democratic welfare state predates A Theory of Justice. But in any event, it's clearly true that libertarianism, both in its minimal-state and anarchist varieties, does have a rich philosophical heritage, which, according to Brooks, ought to be able to help us in the battle of ideas.

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Gus diZerega - 4/7/2005

Good to hear - thank you - but it is unlikely to be in print again. Out of print books don't get reprinted unless there is demand - and there is no demand for a never reviewed out of print book. Ig you wnat to see editorial comments on it that I arranged - showing how such an argument could appeal across a broad range of ideological views, check it out on Amazon.

When it did come out even Critical Review refused to run a review, and at least one person offered to write a review. And I am on their damn academic board - at least till Freidman reads this.

The problem is systematic and covers more than my own experience. Since I brought CR up, even Jeff Friedman once told me that when he started CR he hoped that it would provide a forum where libertarians could criticize nonlibertarians and nonlibertarians could criticize libertarians - but that in his experience it was the libertarian scholars who were least interested in this approach. Libertarians had the most to gain, and turned it down - or so Friedman told me.

Libertarians to the extent they want to be part of the mainstream debate with other schools of thought need to explicitly address their criticisms of libertarian arguments in ways that try and do justice to the critical points made. I personally think some approaches to free market liberalism will end up intellectually defeated - but not the centrral place of the market in a free society or the goodness of having social institutions that minimize coercive dependence on government, or the emphasis on independent initiative and creativity needed to take advantage of dispersed local knowledge, and so on - all elements wherev libertariuan thinkers did a far far better job of advocating and explicating thes evalues than did anyone else for a long time.

Aeon J. Skoble - 4/6/2005

"The book is now out of print."
If it comes back into print, I would like to have it reviewed in Reason Papers.

Gus diZerega - 4/5/2005

To offer a critical thought on Bill Woolsey's closing question, back when I was a traditional Rothbardian libertarian (if that is not a contradiction in terms) I continually heard that libertarians were ignored by social scientific and philosophical thought, and that this wasn't fair.

It wasn't fair.

Today libertarian ideas are frequently discussed by all manner of social scientists and theorists. For example, in this afternoon's civil society and communitarianism class here at St. Lawrence University we read and discussed Alan Wolfe - who in the article concerned several times brought up criticisms of libertarian thought. (We have also read libertarians and near libertarians.) The problem in my experience is that libertarians are just not interested in joining the debate. They make their case, and leave. Everyone is either a convert or a problem. Period.

Consider a post here some months ago by Arthur Silber on some interesting and important theretical points that, at the surface, were critical of classical liberalism. It was almost completely ignored. If libertarians do not actively confront those of us who are FRIENDLY critics and who ourselves owe a great deal to classical liberal and Austrian theory, they will always be odd man out in the social sciences - because they aren't interested in real discussion - only in witnessing.

I remember I once asked a libertarian author to review my book Power, Politics, and Persuasion: A Theory of Democratic Self-Organization. I offered to do the same for his new book. He was "too busy." My book took Austrian and Hayekian theory and used it to explore what a theory of "contractual federalism" would look like. It was very different from traditional anarcho-capitalism and libertarian analysis because it took public values seriously - but also argued many of them could be addressed in nonstatist ways. The book was never reviewed in print anywhere. Despite being perhaps the only Berkeley Ph.D. dissertation ever written in political science that was rooted in libertarian and Austrian thought, not one singke libertarian source to my knowledge published a review - critical or otherwise. (A critical review opens up ground for discussion. Ignoring it does not.) But the book didn't fit the template of orthodoxy, despite suggesting how a great deal of what we think of as political action could perhaps be better done in a purely contractual context.

The book is now out of print.

I think the Austrian and classical liberal approaches are extraordinarily important - but I have been deeply disillusioned by the lack of interest in so many theorists actually seriously confronting and perhaps being changed by dialogues with other schools of thought. Is libertarianism a church, or is it a research program?

i think for most it is a church.

Bill Woolsey - 4/5/2005

Gee, a liberal can't name his favorite
philosopher?

I think the "problem" is a poverty of
riches. Pick just about any respected
philosopher and you have a good liberal
one. The same is true for history, sociology,
psychology.......

Now, with economics, you could go wrong.
Pick a well-respected economist, and you
might get a libertarian one. But you
would probably get a liberal one. (With
the problem being that this guy's
policy positions are at odds with a lot of
what most liberals believe.)

On the other hand, what is your favorite
"conservative" philosopher? Easy, if you
can name one respectable one, you've got
your "favorite."

Maybe there is more to it, but I sure wish
we libertarians had the "problem" of near
complete domination of academia.