It's The Libertarian in Me ...

by Cliopatria

Some time before the formation of Cliopatria, my friend, David Beito, invited me to join a new libertarian group blog he was organizing, Liberty & Power."You've got to be kidding," I thought."I'm no libertarian." Not that there's anything wrong with that, necessarily. I'd just never thought of myself being that particular other. Libertarian heroes like Ayn Rand tended to turn my stomach rather than ring my chimes; and when my Lutheran friend David sought to baptize one of my real heroes, Martin Luther, into the libertarian camp, I yelled like hell and called for help. Fortunately, another Lutheran friend, Allen Brill at The Right Christians, knew just where to stick the fork in it.

Belle Waring and John Holbro at John & Belle Have A Blog have been having fun with the libertarians lately. It began with a libertarian roundtable at Reason, which included The Volokh Conspiracy's Randy Barnett. With a keen eye for the flaws, Belle caught them in an odd moment of speculation about the libertarian last end of things and followed it with a commentary on libertarian illusions about human nature. John followed with a piece on the folly of the focus on final ends. I don't know that the folly is uniquely libertarian. Whether it's a libertarian, a Christian, or a Marxist one, eschatologies have a way of being embarrassments to the whole enterprise. They are there as a statement of the end toward which you believe things move, but they don't bear scrupulous analysis. By contrast, it seems to me, classical conservatism and classical liberalism express no eschatological hope. They are, a libertarian, a Christian, or a Marxist might say, easy compromises with the interim.

What is quite remarkable is the widespread influence of libertarianism on the academic net, far greater, I suspect, than in academic communities in general. They are especially effective as critics of state action, of course, and have a substantial influence in setting the discussion agenda. Bryan Caplan's Libertarian Purity Test is circulating among libertarians and conservatives on the net. On a scale of 0-160, says Caplan, 0 means"You are not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination. You are probably not even a liberal or a conservative. Just some Nazi nut, I guess." 160 means"Perfect! The world needs more like you."

Well, the returns are in on some of us. Steve Horwitz at Liberty and Power gets a 117. [Steve: Otherwise, you sound like a very reasonable guy!] Gene Healy at L & P gets between a 105 and a 111. The fellows at National Review Online report scores from Romesh Ponnuru's 73 and Charles Murray's 72 to Jonah Goldberg's 41 and a 29 for Robert P. George of Princeton."A bit higher than Aristotle would have scored," says George."Probably about where St. Thomas Aquinas would have ended up, give or take a few points in either direction." By that reckoning, Oxblog's Josh Chafetz's 21 may fall just shy of Aristotle's golden mean. But my 13 and, at Brian's Study Breaks, Brian Ulrich's 12 tell you why we're not posting over at Liberty & Power. We're not in Caplan's"Nazi nut" camp, but David will just have to think of us as missionary territory.

Fuller compilations of results on the test are found at Tim Lambert's Deltoid and The Evangelical Outpost.

comments powered by Disqus

More Comments:

Richard Henry Morgan - 3/12/2004

I only got a 40, which throws me in with Richard Brookhiser (not bad company). I've now decided that anything higher than 44 is clinically mad -- that's an objective judgment, I'm sure. Wait a minute -- doesn't that put me close to the edge?

Jonathan Dresner - 3/10/2004

The Randian/Libertarian fixation on "individuals" suggests a hyper-structuralist social model which takes any significant deviation from norm as a good thing. Undiscriminating, and remarkably close to the anarchist position. Except for that pro-capitalist Hobbsian thing, of course.

Jonathan Dresner - 3/10/2004

I'm no libertarian. But I'm always up for a good on-line poll....

I took the test, too: 12. Which, according to them, means that I have "libertarian leanings" which I should explore. I think it just means that I read Mill's "On Liberty"; if they were serious about this, and asked the right questions, my score would probably be negative. There's no distinction between social and political economy issues, and while I am pretty close to the L&P position on gay marriage, for example, their positions on the government and other prominent institutions of civil life are pretty much mirror opposites.

Oscar Chamberlain - 3/10/2004

I think the bi-partisan internal security response to 9/11, and the Bush administration's ability to simply take America into a dubious war without a real check, has increased interest in a more restrained government.

Whatever libertarianism's practical limitations as a governing philosophy--and there are many--it does offer a clear-eyed perspective from which to analyze the present situation. I think that has gained it some converts and a generally more respectful audience

PS Yes, I know Congress approved a resolution on Iraq. That's a puppet show. It's the latest installment in a polite, post Vietnam reality show that has emerged concerning Congressional power over military action.

1. No recent president admitted that Congress could restrain his ability to deploy troops (not even Carter).

2. No Congress agrees.

3. The presidents are right. Our founders never anticipated a standing military of this size or the ability for rapid world-wide deployment. They assumed that anything beyond an immediate defensive reaction (or naval policing of commerce) would require a prior request for funds and men. Thus the clear exclusive right of Congress to declare war has died because there is nothing that can check the president until deployment has occurred and the conflict begun.

4. So presidents always get a majority for a war resolution, because we have never had a majority in Congress that wanted to deal with consequences of a war in defiance of a resolution.

It's precisely this sort of problem that is getting libertarians more attention.

Ralph E. Luker - 3/10/2004

Sorry, David, if I mischaracterized what you said. Even the thought of Martin Luther in Randian terms distresses me.

David T. Beito - 3/10/2004

I never claimed that Luther was a "libertarian." Perish the though. I claimed that he was a Randian hero, in the sense that he represents an example of a lone individual standing up against the power structure. In this sense, I suppose that the hyper-fundamentalist, Mel Gibson, could be ranked in that category. If Ralph can show me an example in which I claimed that Luther was libertarian in terms of his ideas, I'd love to see it.