At the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Ilya Somin has responded to my recent essay on the way libertarian antipathy to democracy has influenced the small-government, free-market right. Somin’s gracious and thoughtful reply is most welcome. However, I’m afraid he has misunderstood my argument and the scope of my claims. I’m sure this is as much my my fault as his, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to clarify.
My argument, as Somin reconstructs it, is that libertarians are hostile to democracy due to an “absolutist conception of property rights,” this hostility has “infected the mainstream Republican right,” and has become “a major factor in [the right’s] undermining of various key norms of liberal democracy.” But this is totally wrong, Somin argues, because libertarian skepticism about democracy isn’t driven primarily by property rights absolutism, and “it is not a significant contributor to the pathologies of the conservative right.”
Somin does not dispute that libertarians are generally skeptical of and often hostile to democracy. It’s agreed on all sides that libertarians tend to be down on democracy. The contested questions then are “Why?” and “How much influence have libertarian anti-democracy ideas had on actual Republicans?”
I’m largely unmoved by Somin’s response. First, he somewhat misstates my view about the source of libertarian hostility to democracy. Second, Somin’s implicit theory of influence is overly intellectualized and unreasonably demanding, which allows him to wave off otherwise undeniable libertarian influence on Republican politics.
My argument is not, as Somin says, that property-rights absolutism drives libertarian democracy skepticism. This actually gets my diagnostic narrative backwards, which is why Somin’s response seems to me orthogonal to the argument I tried to make. That said, my argument wasn’t as clear as it might have been. I failed to clearly distinguish my story about the genealogy or history of certain libertarian ideas, on the one hand, and, on the other, the influence of those ideas in our political culture. I’ll try to clear that up.
But Somin and I are also running into a different confusion around the usage of “libertarianism” and “classical liberalism.” I’ll clear this up first.
Classical liberalism versus libertarianism: semantics and substance
I’ve told a historical story, which Somin doesn’t really address, that tries to say something about what distinguishes libertarianism from classical liberalism. In my story, there’s speciation in the intellectual lineage. Libertarianism branches off from classical liberalism, and the speciation event is the emergence of property-rights absolutism. It’s true that, as a matter of history and political sociology, classical liberals and libertarians continued to make common cause, and that, as a matter of linguistic usage, it became common to refer to classical liberals as “libertarians.” But in the context of a historical claim that a radical view about the inviolability of property rights accounts for the emergence of libertarianism as a philosophical and political stance distinct from classical liberalism, it begs the question to casually lump classical liberals and libertarians together.
Somin writes:
In modern times, the two most significant libertarian critics of majoritarian democracy were economists F.A. Hayek and James Buchanan (one of the founders of public choice theory). Neither of them favored absolute property rights either. Buchanan even advocated a 100% inheritance tax. Wilkinson tries sidestep this by classifying Hayek and Buchanan as “classical liberals” rather than “libertarians.” But whatever terminology we use, it is pretty obvious that Hayek and Buchanan’s ideas (combined with more recent works flowing from the same traditions) are the most influential bases for most modern libertarian skepticism about democracy. And these theories are not based on any notion of absolute property rights.
I’m not sidestepping anything by labeling Hayek and Buchanan “classical liberals” rather than “libertarians.” I’m saying that they aren’t libertarians in the sense I’m interested in, precisely because they aren’t property rights absolutists.
Cleaving libertarianism from classical liberalism at the property rights joint is neither historically nor philosophically arbitrary. Consider this passage from Samuel Freeman, a distinguished liberal political philosopher:
It is commonly held that libertarianism is a liberal view. Also, many who affirm classical liberalism call themselves libertarians and vice versa. I argue that libertarianism’s resemblance to liberalism is superficial; in the end, libertarians reject essential liberal institutions. Correctly understood, libertarianism resembles a view that liberalism historically defined itself against, the doctrine of private political power that underlies feudalism. Like feudalism, libertarianism conceives of justified political power as based in a network of private contracts. It rejects the idea, essential to liberalism, that political power is a public power, to be impartially exercised for the common good.
I resisted this for a long time, but I’ve come around to Freeman’s view. The implications for classical liberal/libertarian relations are profound. If Freeman’s right, classical liberalism isn’t simply a “soft” or less “principled” version of libertarianism. Rather, the distinction is that classical liberalism is a form of liberalism and libertarianism isn’t.
Now, I don’t think the distinction is really so starkly binary as that, since there’s a range of more-or-less strict views about the (in)violability of property rights. Still, it remains that classical liberalism is in conversation with the dominant liberal view (which Freeman calls “high liberalism”) on the question of the status of economic rights and liberties in a way that libertarianism is not. Should we grant economic liberties the same legal protections afforded to civil and political liberties, and thereby further restrict the scope of democratic choice by expanding the list of basic rights? Classical liberals say “Yes.” High liberals (e.g., Rawlsians like Freeman) say “No.”
Absolutist rights-based libertarianism isn’t really part of this conversation at all. It’s effectively an argument against liberalism and the legitimacy of liberal political institutions, which is why it’s so confusing that the folk taxonomy lumps libertarianism and classical liberalism together, and sets them against standard left-liberalism. The dispute between liberalism and hardcore libertarianism concerns whether it’s possible to justify democratic political authority at all. The dispute within liberalism, about the status of economic rights and the legitimate scope of democratic decision-making, is much smaller than that.
From this perspective, Somin and I both are firmly on Team Liberal. Our philosophical differences are actually exceedingly small. We both disagree with “high liberals” like Freeman more than we disagree with one another. And we disagree with liberals like Freeman less than we disagree with, say, Ron Paul. Likewise, Jason Brennan, author of Against Democracy, who I mentioned at the outset of my essay as an example of a libertarian democracy skeptic, isn’t libertarian, in this sense, either—as he has explained himself. Brennan, like me, is an updated classical liberal—he uses the term “neoclassical liberal.”
Political labels are confusing, and I encouraged confusion about labels myself by identifying Hayek and Buchanan as classical liberals rather than libertarians, in accordance with my historical theory about the emergence of libertarianism, but followed common usage at the outset of my piece when I identified Somin, Brennan, and Bryan Caplan as libertarians, despite the fact that none of them are property rights absolutists.
This is confusing, but I don’t think it is fundamentally confused. Brennan and Caplan (I’m a little less sure about Somin) are very culturally libertarian, in much the way that some atheists are culturally Jewish or Catholic of Mormon. And that’s why it makes sense to see their books as libertarian critiques of democracy, despite the fact that none of them is a property rights absolutist, and none of them argues from notably libertarian premises.
Each of these books is based, in one way or another, on the voter ignorance literature, which doesn’t really have an ideological valence. What’s interesting is that libertarians or ex-libertarians (starting with Jeffrey Friedman at Critical Review), already relatively disenchanted about democracy, were first to latch onto the deep implications of profound public obliviousness, and laid out the dire picture with a sort of told-you-so glee. Standard liberals, burdened with a romantic attachment to an idealistic vision of democracy, have fought these implications kicking and screaming, and are only now starting to square up, rather morosely, to the bleakness of the picture.
Political philosophies exist and develop in time, and political movements and identities are social and historical. Classical liberals and libertarians have been involved in the same institutions, going to the same meetings, and attending the same parties since libertarianism got off the ground. This has libertarianized the views of classical liberals a good deal. Moreover, many new-style classical liberals, like me, came through radical libertarianism, which has continued to shape our views both as a foil and as a filter through which we can’t help but continue to experience the world.
Influence is complicated. You can change your mind without changing your heart. Doctrinal communities structure our thoughts, sentiments, and group attachments long after we’ve strayed from orthodoxy or left the group. It’s impossible to understand how political ideas influence political culture without understanding this.
What drives libertarian antipathy to democracy, again?
I strongly agree with Somin that classical liberal ideas have been a very influential source of libertarian skepticism about democracy, but these ideas aren’t distinctively libertarian. I also agree that, in elite academic and legal circles, classical liberal democracy skepticism is much more influential than radical rights-based libertarian democracy skepticism. No one doubts that Hayek and Buchanan are classier than Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, and less likely to be sneered at in a university seminar room. But this doesn’t imply, logically or empirically, that radical libertarian democracy skepticism has not had a big influence on the political culture of the right.
Classical liberals have always opposed unconstrained majoritarian democracy. Madisonian anti-majoritarianism is a pervasive background influence on American liberalism, left and right. My genealogical/historical argument is that the specifically modern classical liberal fear of democracy was rooted in the worry that unconstrained democratic majorities, in the grip of radical socialist ideals of economic justice, would redistribute their way into penury and tyranny. Hayek is the representative figure here. His worries about democracy’s vulnerability to dangerous ideological fads motivated his constitutionalism and his conservative-ish defense of the independent political authority of the common law and established social norms against romantic majoritarians. This work has been enormously influential, and I’m a huge fan. (That I generally agree with Hayek’s view of democracy didn’t come across to some readers.)
The next step in my story, which I’ll expand on here, is that other, even more vehemently anti-socialist classical liberals, such as Isabel Patterson and Ayn Rand, were animated by the exact same worries, but feared that refurbished classical liberal anti-majoritarianism was too morally and rhetorically insipid to stem the surging red tide.
Hayek thought that, in order to survive, liberalism needed to be updated and refreshed for the modern era. But Hayek frankly acknowledged that the fate of the liberal order ultimately depends on vagaries of public sentiment, and he visibly struggled with the problem of how to make liberalism as inspiring as socialism without dishonoring the complexity of truth. If you’re worried about the survival of liberal capitalism, this is unnerving.
Rand took the problem of inspiration and moral passion head on. She developed a radical, individualist moral and political theory expressly designed to neutralize radical socialism, sold it to the masses by weaving it into thrilling anti-collectivist propaganda, and insulated it from criticism by packing it all inside a cult of reason.
So, again, my claim is that modern classical liberal worries about democracy largely motivated absolutist theories of property rights, like Rand’s, which created a new political philosophy distinct from classical liberalism. The initial political point of libertarian property rights theory was to serve as a countervailing cultural force to the idea that leveling redistribution is a requirement of justice, and to popular myths about the unique authority and legitimacy of unlimited majoritarian sovereignty.
This is the sense in which Somin is wrong to say that I’m arguing that property rights absolutism drives libertarian democracy skepticism. On the contrary, I’m arguing that classical liberal democracy skepticism drove the adoption of property rights absolutism, which launched libertarianism as a distinct ideology.
The gospel according to Murray Rothbard
I’ve suggested that the theory of rights in Rand’s fiction and nonfiction was the, um, fountainhead of libertarianism as a distinct philosophy and political movement. Her influence has been enormous. The opinions of millions, including some extremely powerful people, have been shaped by her books. But much of Rand’s influence has been indirect, flowing through the almost mind-boggling sway of Murray Rothbard. Pausing to detail the various channels of Rothbard’s influence will help make my claim about the influence of libertarianism on the ruling American right much less abstract.
Rothbard, effectively Jesus to Rand’s John the Baptist, created the orthodox, hardcore libertarian catechism by sprinkling Rand’s absolutist rights-based individualism with a pinch of secularized Catholic natural law doctrine and fusing it to Ludwig von Mises’ economic theories. As Jacob Levy recently noted, a smart historian looking to spin a gripping dark yarn about the influence of libertarian ideas on the American right would pass right over James Buchanan, a high-minded scholar’s scholar, and fix on Rothbard, an obscure but colorful figure who has exerted extraordinary influence on American political culture at every level of brow. high, middle and low.
On the high-brow side, Rothbard directly influenced the great Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which made hardcore libertarianism academically respectable, was a Rothbardian defense of the minimal state again’s Rothbard’s own anarchism. Untold thousands of undergrad and grad students have been exposed to libertarian ideas through Nozick’s reputable version of Rothbard and Rand.
At the cultural middle, Rothbard was a major influence on the billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, who co-founded the Cato Institute with Rothbard and Ed Crane. According to David Gordon, Koch “met Rothbard and was so impressed with him and his ideas that he decided to endow an organization to promote libertarian theory and policies.” More than a few of us here at Niskanen worked at that organization for more than a few years. It is not without influence.
On the low-brow side, Rothbard
Nichole M. Hearn 