[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

Since Christopher Hitchens gave up socialism, I’ve ironically enough gone from disagreeing with him 40% of the time to disagreeing with him 80% of the time. I used to look forward to his mordant skewerings of the mighty, but lately he seems to have morphed into a mean-spirited shill for the establishment.

But at last comes a Hitchens editorial I can happily endorse; despite his having fallen to the neocon/prowar dark side, he makes a good case against executing Saddam Hussein. (Conical hat tip to Christopher Morris.) I share Hitchens’ misgivings both about the death penalty in general, and about the legitimacy of the vanquished being tried by the victors rather than by a neutral court.

While I’m on the subject of Hitchens, though, I also want to comment on something he said about libertarianism in his Reason interview a few years back. While this was after the beginning of his rightward shift, it’s basically a left-wing criticism, and like most left-wing criticisms of libertarianism it’s partly right and partly wrong:

I threw in my lot with the left because on all manner of pressing topics – the Vietnam atrocity, nuclear weapons, racism, oligarchy – there didn’t seem to be any distinctive libertarian view. I must say that this still seems to me to be the case, at least where issues of internationalism are concerned. What is the libertarian take, for example, on Bosnia or Palestine?

There’s also something faintly ahistorical about the libertarian worldview. When I became a socialist it was largely the outcome of a study of history, taking sides, so to speak, in the battles over industrialism and war and empire. I can’t – and this may be a limit on my own imagination or education – picture a libertarian analysis of 1848 or 1914. I look forward to further discussions on this, but for the moment I guess I’d say that libertarianism often feels like an optional philosophy for citizens in societies or cultures that are already developed or prosperous or stable. I find libertarians more worried about the over-mighty state than the unaccountable corporation. The great thing about the present state of affairs is the way it combines the worst of bureaucracy with the worst of the insurance companies.

Part of being a left-libertarian is that on the one hand you’re constantly trying to prod fellow libertarians into moving farther left, while on the other hand you’re constantly trying to show fellow leftists that libertarianism is already farther left than they realise. This is certainly an occasion for both responses.

Hitchens is certainly right to say that libertarians have often been less concerned about issues like racism, oligarchy, and corporate power than they should be – that they have stressed the evils of state oppression but often turned a blind eye to nonstate forms of oppression. On this general topic see this recent post of mine and this recent post of Wally Conger’s.

But at the same time Hitchens is certainly mistaken in supposing that libertarians have neglected these issues entirely. I need hardly point out to the readers of this blog that there exists, for example, an enormous libertarian literature both on war and on corporate power, and indeed on issues of class generally; in fact libertarians pioneered modern class analysis. (One suspects Hitchens hasn’t spent much time poring through Left & Right, Libertarian Forum, New Libertarian, or the JLS.) And he is also right to worry that his inability to “picture a libertarian analysis of 1848 or 1914” or other such historical events may stem from “a limit on [his] own imagination or education,” since here too there is plenty of such analysis available.

Thus I close with the ringing slogan, proudly inscribed on the streaming banners of the left-libertarian vanguard: Libertarianism: Less Left Than It Should Be, But Lefter Than You Think.

Robert Kaercher - 11/14/2006

Hitchens is a self-styled "revolutionary," which makes him incompatible with libertarianism. It's pretty clear that he doesn't see individual freedom as being in and of itself the highest political end, and would consider it only as a means to his "revolutionary" goals.

Roderick T. Long - 11/9/2006

His brother, Peter, has far more in common with us.

Well, in some ways. But Peter Hitchens has a lot of social-conservative baggage: he's a big booster of the drug war, he favours "family values" legislation (he wants to make divorce more difficult, for example), etc. He's anti-EU (good) but on somewhat creepy nationalist grounds (bad). He tends to be bad where his brother is good and vice versa.

If you combined Christoper and Peter Hitchens together you'd get either one really good guy or one really bad guy, depending on which aspects dominated.

Sheldon Richman - 11/9/2006

I had my own substantial contact with Hitchens in the '90s and brought some of these matters to his attention. Our common ground was our analysis of the Palestine question. Alas, it did little good, although at one point he spoke of a convergence between his brand of leftism and libertarianism. His interpretation of 9/11 changed everything.

David T. Beito - 11/8/2006

I agree. I don't see any evidence that he is even aware of the classical tradition tradition, or even curious about it. His brother, Peter, has far more in common with us.

Mark Brady - 11/8/2006

"I threw in my lot with the left because on all manner of pressing topics – the Vietnam atrocity, nuclear weapons, racism, oligarchy – there didn’t seem to be any distinctive libertarian view."

As someone who knew Chris Hitchens (as he then styled himself) when he was an undergraduate, I doubt that he seriously (or even casually) inquired into any distinctive libertarian (or classical liberal) perspective before he decided to join the Trotskyist student group Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students (ORSS). Of course, this is not surprising since most students were unaware of the existence of this intellectual tradition, let alone introduced to it by a faculty member. My own intellectual development in a libertarian direction was fostered through my choice of reading, talking with my best friend (a fellow student who was also sympathetic to individual liberty), and attending a talk by Ralph Harris of the IEA to a politically conservative student club that hosted speakers while drinking mulled claret.