Libertarianism is a controversial political theory. But it is often presented as a resting upon a simple, indeed commonsense, moral principle. The libertarian “Non-Aggression Principle” (NAP) prohibits aggression against the persons or property of others, and it is on this basis that the libertarian opposition to redistributive taxation, legal paternalism, and perhaps even the state itself is thought to rest. This paper critically examines the NAP and the extent to which it can provide support for libertarian political theory. It identifies (...) two problems with existing libertarian appeals to the NAP. First, insofar as libertarians employ a moralized understanding of aggression, their principle is really about the protection of property rights rather than the prohibition of aggression. Second, the absolutist prohibition on aggression, which libertarians typically endorse and which is necessary to generate strongly libertarian conclusions, is grossly implausible. The paper concludes by setting forth a version of the NAP that does not suffer from these problems. It argues that this more moderate and defensible version of the NAP still has important libertarian implications, but that a full defense of libertarianism cannot rely upon appeals to non-aggression alone. (shrink)

Libertarians often rely on arguments that subordinate the principle of liberty to the value of its economic consequences. This invites the question of what a pure libertarian theory of justice—one that takes liberty as its overriding concern—would look like. Grotius's political theory provides a template for such a libertarianism, but it also entails uncomfortable commitments that can be avoided only by compromising the principle of liberty. According to Grotius, each person should be free to decide how to act as long (...) as her actions do not violate the equal liberty of others. According to this principle, however, people are free to enter any contract and alienate any rights, permitting even contracts of slavery or the alienation of rights of bodily integrity. Libertarians can escape this commitment to absolute freedom of contract only by adopting ad-hoc amendments to the principle of liberty. (shrink)

Non-consequentialist libertarianism usually revolves around the claim that there are only “negative,” not “positive,” rights. Libertarian nega- tive-rights theories are so patently problematic, though, that it seems that there is a more fundamental notion at work. Some libertarians think this basic idea is freedom or liberty; others, that it is self-ownership. Neither approach is satis- factory.

In his critique of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, David MacGregor argues that my book trivializes dialectical method. He fails to notice the many nondialectical assumptions that pervade contemporary social theory and practice. Dialectics, as a context‐sensitive methodological orientation, can provide tools for a better grasp of systems and processes in the real world—the goal, as I understand it, of the “post‐libertarian” approach Jeffrey Friedman advocates.

A state's foreign policy is constrained by parameters that inhere in the structure of the international system and in the nation's own political‐constitutional, social, and economic systems. The latter, domestic parameters, include “public opinion.” Because the public is largely ignorant of foreign affairs, policy‐making elites have wide scope for acting more rationally than would otherwise be possible, although public opinion operates on the second‐order effects of foreign policy (e.g., taxes, casualties)—inviting mismatches of objectives and means. The prevalent nonrational theories of (...) foreign‐policy derivation are themselves largely ignorant of the dominantly rational processes of the state, particularly in its foreign and military functions. (shrink)

Abstract In his critique of modern libertarian thinking, Jeffrey Friedman (1997) argues that libertarian moral theory makes social science irrelevant. However, if its moral claims are hypothetical rather than categorical imperatives, then economics, history, sociology, and other disciplines play a central role in libertarian thought. Limitations on human knowledge necessitate abstractly formulated rules, among which are claims of rights. Further, Friedman's remarks on freedom rest on an erroneous understanding of the role of definitions in philosophy, and his characterization of the (...) ?right to do wrong? as a ?logical contradiction? reveals a misunderstanding of logic. (shrink)

G.A. Cohen has produced an influential criticism of libertarian‐ism that posits joint ownership of everything in the world other than labor, with each joint owner having a veto right over any potential use of the world. According to Cohen, in that world rationality would require that wealth be divided equally, with no differential accorded to talent, ability, or effort. A closer examination shows that Cohen's argument rests on two central errors of reasoning and does not support his egalitarian conclusions, even (...) granting his assumption of joint ownership. That assumption was rejected by Locke, Pufendorf and other writers on property for reasons that Cohen does not rebut. (shrink)

In “Libertarian Natural Rights,” Siegfried Van Duffel endeavors to illuminate shortcomings in libertarian defenses of natural‐rights theory. Noting that defenses based on freedom beg the question, Van Duffel explores whether libertarians can find salvation in the concept of the sovereignty of the will, and concludes that this approach leads to incoherence. But because his arguments ignore the actual moral basis of natural rights, they at best fell a straw man, not libertarianism. They do, however, call into question the viability of (...) the entire moral enterprise. (shrink)

Hayek's political theory is directed against coercion, which he defines as the intentional control of one person by another. The element of personal intention ensures a clear conceptual distinction between the freedom from coercion—i.e., the “liberty”—that is exercised in the private sphere, and the freedom of choice and opportunity that may be severely constrained by the impersonal, unintentional operation of market forces. Hayek's narrow definitions of coercion and liberty therefore suggest that he was more intent on defending the benefits conferred (...) on us by market forces than on affirming any value intrinsic in freedom—a suggestion confirmed by his lack of interest in species of freedom, such as autonomy, that might conceivably be fostered by state coercion. Hayek's consequentialist defense of liberty, however, was grounded in economic doctrines such as his own view that prices served a vital epistemic function. Given his strictures against the ignorance of modern electorates, Hayek was driven to propose extravagant limits on democracy and to embrace traditionalism; a different Hayekianism might limit inequalities of wealth and encourage the ability to learn from experimentation. (shrink)

In “Popper, Weber, and Hayek,” I claimed that the economic and political world governed by social democracy is too complex to offer hope for rational social‐democratic policy making. I extrapolated this conclusion from the claim, made by Austrian‐school economists in the 1920s and 30s, that central economic planning would face insurmountable “knowledge problems.” Israel Kirzner's Reply indicates the need to keep the Austrians’ cognitivist argument conceptually distinct from more familiar incentives arguments, which can tacitly reintroduce the assumption of omniscience against (...) which the Austrian economists rebelled. Callahan's Reply illustrates the need to keep in mind the hypothetical, conditional nature of economic arguments. Notturno's Reply changes the subject by asserting the intrinsic value of social‐democratic participation, regardless of its outcomes—even while, like Talisse's Reply, ignoring the evidence that public ignorance and elite dogmatism probably can't be mitigated by more information or by appeals to be open minded. And Hill focuses on the very real imperfections of market and other private‐sphere decision making, without weighing the shortcomings of the political alternatives. Markets and other private‐sphere decision arenas don't have to be perfect for them to improve upon public‐sector processes. In the latter, cognitive demands tend to be much greater, because of the divergence of modern social problems from the conditions that would have faced the hunter‐gatherers whose cognitive apparatus we have inherited. (shrink)

Palmer's defense of libertarianism as consequentialist runs afoul of his own failure to provide any consequentialist reasons for libertarian conclusions, and of his own defense of nonconsequentialist arguments for the intrinsic value of capitalism‐cum‐negative freedom. As suck, Palmer's article exemplifies the parasitic codependency of consequentialist and nonconsequentialist reasoning in libertarian thought. Sciabarra's defense of Ayn Rand's libertarianism is even more problematic, because in addition to the usual defects of libertarianism, Rand adds a commitment to ethical egoism that contradicts both her (...) concern for the consequences of capitalism and her commitment to the rights of everyone, not just herself. (shrink)

A political epistemology that enables us to determine if political actors are likely to know what they need to know must be rooted in an ontology of the actors and of the human objects of their knowledge; that is, a political anthropology. The political anthropology developed in Power Without Knowledge envisions human beings as creatures whose conscious actions are determined by their interpretations of what seem to them to be relevant circumstances; and whose interpretations are, in turn, determined by webs (...) of belief built from somewhat heterogeneous streams of incoming ideas. This anthropology, then, has two components. Ideational heterogeneity undermines the aspiration of technocracy to predict human behavior and the aspiration of social science to arrive at lawlike generalizations about it. Ideational determinism, however, which is less important than ideational heterogeneity to the critique of technocracy, may be more important to generating epistemological approaches to other forms of politics, all of which involve the actions of human beings who, as such, are largely at the mercy of the fallible ideas to which they have been exposed. (shrink)

In Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Z. Muller attempts to resolve Milton Friedman's paradox: Why is it that Jewish intellectuals have been so hostile to capitalism even though capitalism has so greatly benefited the Jews? In one chapter Muller answers, in effect, that Jewish intellectuals have not been anticapitalist. Elsewhere, however, Muller implicitly explains the leftist tendencies of most intellectuals—Jewish and gentile—by unspooling the anticapitalist thread in the main lines of Western thought, culminating in Marx but by no means ending (...) with him. Thus, Milton Friedman saw a paradox where none existed. This may have been because Friedman was an economist, and economics is the one strand of Western thought that is, by and large, procapitalist. To an economist, opposition to capitalism may be paradoxical; to noneconomists, economics is alienating in its form and in its content. There is thus no mystery as to why intellectuals, including Jewish intellectuals, tend to shun economics and therefore gravitate to the left. (shrink)

In Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Z. Muller attempts to resolve Milton Friedman's paradox: Why is it that Jewish intellectuals have been so hostile to capitalism even though capitalism has so greatly benefited the Jews? In one chapter Muller answers, in effect, that Jewish intellectuals have not been anticapitalist. Elsewhere, however, Muller implicitly explains the leftist tendencies of most intellectuals—Jewish and gentile—by unspooling the anticapitalist thread in the main lines of Western thought, culminating in Marx but by no means ending (...) with him. Thus, Milton Friedman saw a paradox where none existed. This may have been because Friedman was an economist, and economics is the one strand of Western thought that is, by and large, procapitalist. To an economist, opposition to capitalism may be paradoxical; to noneconomists, economics is alienating in its form and in its content. There is thus no mystery as to why intellectuals, including Jewish intellectuals, tend to shun economics and therefore gravitate to the left. (shrink)

In a certain sense, voluntary communities and market relationships are relatively less coercive than democracy and bureaucracy: they offer more positive freedom. In that respect, they are more like romantic relationships or friendships than are democracies and bureaucracies. This tends to make voluntary communities and markets not only more pleasant forms of interaction, but more effective ones—contrary to Weber's confidence in the superior rationality of bureaucratic control.

ABSTRACT Twenty years ago Leif Lewin made the case that altruistic motives are more common than selfish motives among voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. We propose that motives and beliefs emerge as reactions to immediate feedback from technical-causal, material-economic, and moral-social aspects of the political task environment. In the absence of certain kinds of technical-causal and material-economic feedback, moral-social feedback leads individuals to the altruism Lewin documents, but also to righteousness (moralized regard for the in-group and disregard for the out-group) and (...) myopia (disregard for distant consequences). The mix of altruism, righteousness, and myopia increases the focus on winning the next high-stakes election rather than on discovering or enforcing socially productive institutions. (shrink)

Previous scholarship on states’ autonomy from the interests of society has focused primarily on nondemocratic societies, raising the question of whether “state theory” is relevant to modern states. Public‐opinion research documenting the ignorance of mass polities suggests that modern states may be as autonomous as, or more autonomous than, premodern states. Premodern states’ autonomy was secured by their ability to suppress societal dissent by force of arms. Modern states may have less recourse to overt coercion because the very thing that (...) legitimates them in the eyes of society—democracy—virtually ensures that society will not control the state, since the putative agent of control, the electorate, cannot possibly be well informed about the multitudinous tasks undertaken by modern governments. Instead of focusing solely on armies, taxes, and bureaucracies, state theorists can now direct their attention to how the vagaries of public opinion and the legitimating effects of popular elections may fuel state autonomy. (shrink)

Recent theories of the state often draw attention to states’ autonomy from social preferences. This paper suggests that the phenomenon of public ignorance is the primary mechanism responsible for state autonomy in democratic polities. Such theorists as Skocpol and Poulantzus, who do not take account of public ignorance, either underestimate the state's autonomy or stress causal mechanisms that are necessary but not sufficient conditions for its autonomy. Gram‐sci's concept of ideological hegemony is promising, even though it is far too insistent (...) on the penetration of ideology of any kind beyond relatively small numbers of political sophisticates. (shrink)

Mark Pennington’s Robust Political Economy is a systematic exposition of a framework for analyzing institutional performance. The Robust Political Economy framework evaluates institutions according to their ability to solve knowledge and incentive problems. On grounds of robustness, Pennington combines insights from Austrian market-process theory and public-choice theory to defend classical liberalism from several compelling critiques. These include theories of market failure in economics; communitarian, deliberative-democratic, and liberal-egalitarian theories of justice; and concerns with social capital, domestic and international poverty, and ecology.

In this paper I criticize a growing movement within public policy circles that self-identifies as neoliberal. The issue I take up here is the sense in which the neoliberal label signals a turn away from libertarian political philosophy. The are many import ant figures in this movement, but my focus here will be on Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center, not least because he has most prolifically written against libertarian political philosophy. Neoliberals oppose the idea that the rights that libertarianism (...) claims people have are useful guides for making the world a freer place because they forestall too much governmental/democratic political action that they purport to be necessary for increasing freedom. Wilkinson mistakenly takes libertarianism to be a set of ideal public policies for achieving a perfectly free society. If it were, he would be right to turn away from it. But placing rights to freedom at the center of their theory of justice does not commit libertarians to an all-or-nothing approach to political change. Consequences and strategy matter – particularly in a non-ideal world – without abandoning the idea that each individual has a right to freedom. In mistaking libertarian moral claims as a set of policy prescriptions, Wilkinson complains that idealistic policy prescriptions not only fail to take account of how those who disagree will respond to such policies if implemented, but also thereby undermines the justice of those policies in the first instance. Wilkinson proposes that change in the direction of freedom must go through the proper channels of actually-existing democratic legitimacy. It as this stage that Wilkinson’s project comes into direct conflict with libertarianism. Whilst libertarianism is not committed to any particular method of creating a free society under non-ideal conditions, and therefore does not rule out democratic political activism as one among many means of doing that, it cannot be committed to the permanence of democratic political authority, and this is what Wilkinson’s neoliberalism demands above all else. It turns out that Foucault’s characterization of neoliberalism long ago is still accurate to Wilkinson’s own view: that neoliberalism is not about creating a society of free individuals, it is about designing the state apparatus in ways that are inspired by the workings of free society – it is about legitimizing the chains, not breaking them. Neoliberalism is not a pragmatic alternative to libertarianism, but rather a gross misapplication of it. (shrink)

Kukathas’s proposed libertarian dilemma is introduced and two key criticisms of it stated. The following critical commentary then makes several main points. Kukathas’s account of libertarianism offers no theory of liberty at all, nor a coherent account of aggression. Consequently, he cannot see that his “Federation of Liberty” is not libertarian by a basic understanding of morals and non-invasive liberty, still less by a more precise theory of liberty. In trying to explain his “Union of Liberty,” Kukathas evinces considerable confusion (...) about the nature of libertarianism. His argument that a monopoly legal system is inevitable is also neither plausible nor libertarian. He has apparently overlooked the cogent arguments against Nozickian minarchy, and in favor of anarchy. It is concluded that the neglect of libertarian theories of liberty and anarchy is the underlying problem. (shrink)