Shades of liberty

Thanks to Oliver Kamm for drawing our attention to Jamie Kirchick's article in the New Republic about Republican presidential candidate Congressman Ron Paul - very particular kind of libertarian with a very murky past indeed:

The peculiarly American phenomenon of libertarianism was once described as "liberalism at wit's end". The phrase was coined by a political scientist called Stephen Newman, in an excellent book of that title. Newman's intention was to defend liberal politics from what he termed "a caricature of the Lockean original". Invoking Hannah Arendt's writings, Newman argued that the libertarian stress on private interests overlooked our common interest in equal liberty. It's from that omission that the appalling consequences of libertarian doctrine, consistently applied, would arise.

But the libertarian movement has heterogeneous constituents. These include the reasonable and often (on social issues) astute libertarians of Reason magazine, as well as the doctrinaire free-market and anti-interventionist Cato Institute. But at the furthest end of libertarianism are some very murky currents indeed. Jamie has done well not only to identify these but also to locate Ron Paul's position within "a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American history--the moment when a tyrannical federal government established its supremacy over the states".

Of course, libertarianism is not an exclusively American phenomenon, and not all libertarians are like Ron Paul, by any means. Indeed, not all libertarians are even on the political right: there are those who will call themselves libertarian socialists, and even libertarian communists, which ought to alert any interested party to the fact that as a political epithet, the term "libertarian" is unhelpful. The economist Friedrich von Hayek, often claimed as a champion by libertarians, rejected the term (he preferred "whig"). Ayn Rand's followers have also been described as libertarians, and dismissed the label.

Nevertheless, the label is attractive because it implies an attachment to freedom: it unites those who object to the banning of smoking in pubs with those who object to any restriction of sexual activity and those who just don't like paying tax. The problem with libertarianism as a political ideal is that it confuses liberty with libertinism - in Kirchick's phrase "the libertarian stress on private interests overlooked our common interest in equal liberty". This is the principal difference between liberalism and libertarianism: liberty for one cannot be pursued at the expense of liberty for others. There is more to liberty than sex, drugs and rock and roll.