Argentina, 2023: Chainsaw Libertarianism
Javier Milei | El Camino del Libertario
He carries a chainsaw. He wears a mask. He wears a cape. He has five cloned dogs that he claims give him economic advice. He calls himself an anarchist. And now, he is the President of Argentina. History is most often written as tragedy rather than comedy, so ultimately, I doubt historians will have much to say about Javier Milei. It is awkward to write seriously about a person so flamboyantly unserious. But that is a mistake, because Javier Milei is not merely a surreal footnote to the story of our generation, cursed to live in interesting times. Instead, he is a living example of a larger uncertainty we are experiencing as our old definitions of politics break down and new ones emerge.
Milei has used quite a few different terms to define himself: Anarcho-Capitalist, Paleolibertarian, Minarchist, Ultra-Conservative, and Classical Liberal. In America, we use a simplified political vocabulary, where liberal means left-wing, Keynesian or Socialist, and progressive, while conservative means right-wing, capitalist, and reactionary. However, these terms have not always necessarily meant the same thing. Their meanings have changed over time, and change according to social context. In the USA, Libertarianism is normally identified with the right-wing Libertarian Party, and conservatives like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan. But in much of the rest of the world the term Libertarian refers to left-wing revolutionary socialists like Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas.
It is easy to be cynical and shrug these contradictions off as run of the mill political sophistry. But that would be a mistake. These contradictions are actually artifacts of a long social process that has been unfolding for hundreds of years, and each time a concept like Libertarianism seems to change its meaning, that change reflects a change in society, a change in what problems people face, and how they respond to them. So I’m going to use ten books to examine the history of libertarianism, left, right, and whatever, from the first use of the word to today so that we can learn something not just about politics, but about the desires and fears that drive our society.
England, 1789: Metaphysical Libertarianism
William Belsham | Essays, Philosophical, Historical, and Literary
The first use of the word "Libertarian" in English was by William Belsham. He wasn't using it politically. He was using it philosophically to distinguish two metaphysical positions, "Libertarianism" (which we today call free will) and "Necessitism" (which we today call determinism).
It is worth noting that Belsham was also a liberal progressive Whig and while he wasn't coining a political term, his philosophical libertarianism nevertheless led directly to his liberal politics. Namely, he believed people had free will, and thus, it was wrong to say they should not be allowed to decide their own fates. This was explicitly a critique of monarchists, who argued that Kings ruled through divine right. He wrote extensively on revolutions, starting with the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 where the British ended absolute monarchy and introduced their modern parliamentary democracy.
This was at the time the most radical leftist position in politics, because political divisions between left and right had not yet become a dispute over free market economics. Indeed, free market economists like Adam Smith were seen as liberal progressives because they argued against exploitative monarchical monopolies and against mercantilism, whereby states hoarded gold to maintain control over the economy. That last detail is important to think about, because even as definitions of liberal and conservative have shifted, the gold standard has consistently remained a right wing belief, although it is justified in very different ways at different times.
France, 1857: Political Libertarianism
Joseph Déjacque | Le Libertaire: Journal du Mouvement Social [Newspaper]
The first use of the word "Libertarian" to refer to a political orientation came in an open letter from Joseph Déjacque to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Déjacque was a radical who fled Napoleon III in France and relocated to America, where he supported radical abolitionists like John Brown. As such, Déjacque was critical of old-world anarchists like Proudhon who argued for economic freedom, but didn't adequately address racial or gender inequality.
This shows how, by the mid-19th century, anti-monarchism was no longer the primary political concern, and instead concerns of universal human suffrage had come to the fore. To this point, Déjacque's slogan was "Humanity is Humanity." He published his own newspaper in New York that detailed his thoughts at great length. While many things may have changed since Déjacque's time, it can be disconcerting to discover how his concerns about racial justice and women’s liberation don’t always sound antiquated in today’s society.
USA, 1880: Individualist Libertarianism
Benjamin Tucker | Individual Liberty
Just as by the 1850s monarchies were largely on the retreat, by the 1880s the issue of slavery was no longer central to American politics, and political divisions that are more recognizable today started to emerge. These mainly centered on debates about individualism and capitalism. In these debates, Benjamin Tucker occupies a truly unique position. He was both explicitly anti-capitalist, and yet also became the inspiration for many later pro-capitalist Libertarian thinkers. Tucker exemplifies a political split within Anarchism, and the left in general, over the importance of Individualism, which was philosophically at the core of the anti-Monarchism of Belsham's era, but was now losing its relevance as people grappled with the problems of non-monarchical governments in new, urban industrial societies.
Tucker is what would now be described as a Market Socialist, and he was among the anarchists and leftists that adopted the term Libertarian to distinguish themselves from Authoritarian Communists and Socialists. But while Tucker was critical of capitalism in a way that can make him seem leftist today, he was also critical of taxation in ways that conservative Libertarians often emphasize. In actual fact, he argued that taxation needed to be "contractual" rather than arbitrarily imposed on the poor by the ruling class. The idea of contractual taxation is different from the idea of no taxation at all, but sometimes these details get lost in history.
Russia, 1892: Libertarian Communism
Pyotr Kropotkin | The Conquest of Bread
At about the same time as Tucker, the term "Libertarian" was taken up in Europe for similar reasons (a rejection of Marx's authoritarianism) but with a profoundly different rationale (collectivist, rather than individualist). The best example of this is Pyotr Kropotkin.
Kropotkin was a Russian geographer and scientist who did extensive work in Siberia, and from that derived an influential anarchist framework for opposition to Tsarism. It is noteworthy that while most countries by now had limited their monarchies, Russia was one of the few countries to simultaneously have urban industrial capitalism and unlimited feudal monarchy, and this speaks to why the Russian radicals had markedly different concerns from their counterparts in America, France, and England.
Kroptkin simultaneously critiqued feudalism and capitalism observing that both systems derived their power from the poverty and division of people. He felt this was contrary to the natural ecologies he'd observed in Siberia, where animals generally worked collectively to ensure their survival. He felt that social relationships were an evolutionary characteristic of natural ecosystems and that domination and exploitation caused societal decay. While the Tsarist state he critiqued would not last much longer, his insertion of ecology into Libertarian thought would find new relevance nearly a century later.
USA, 1973: “Crazy Uncle” Libertarianism
Murray Rothbard | For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto
Almost everything that people have bad to say about Libertarianism today can be traced back to Murray Rothbard, but he's also probably the only reason people in America actually talk about Libertarianism at all. Rothbard was a Old-Right Paleoconservative who adopted the term Libertarian as an explicit propaganda ploy to take a leftist term and redefine it to confuse and confound his political opponents, but he was also an incredibly complex individual, and his belief in libertarianism wasn't entirely disingenuous.
If you can imagine a Jewish intellectual who was friends with prominent Holocaust Deniers and David Duke, who was a Barry Goldwater Republican that also found common ground with Adlai Stevenson Democrats, then you have a fantastic imagination, and you also have some inkling of how unusual Murray Rothbard was as a political thinker. This is why I tend to dub his brand of libertarianism “Crazy Uncle Libertarianism.” American political commentators today often frame our partisan divide by discussing a hypothetical “Crazy Uncle” who always ruins the holidays by forcing conversations about the gold standard or vaccinations or 9/11 being an inside job. That imaginary “Crazy Uncle” is Murray Rothbard.
Rothbard’s political colors seem to have been fixed early. As a student at Columbia he had already cemented the three major features of his political ideology: First, his ardent support for Strom Thurmond and segregation, second his intellectual devotion to Austrian Free-Market Economics and Ludwig von Mises in particular, and third his absolute delight in outraging the liberals and leftists of New York polite society. If, as they say, history rhymes rather than repeats, then contemporary political figures like Ben Shapiro rhyme with Murray Rothbard. And as strange as he was, Rothbard is a perfect example of how contradictions can really be a case of parallax, and once you understand the basis for someone’s point of view, you can understand why they might not see things as contradictory.
The one singular idea that unites all of Rothbard’s seeming contradictions is a simple one: he believed that equality was unnatural, abhorrent, and even evil. At the same time, he ardently believed in free will, and indeed, he thought it was through exercise of free will that the superiority of the few would become apparent over the mediocrity of the many. In many cases, Rothbard seemed to feel that the will to power was more important than any particular actual ideology. For example, though he was rabidly anti-communist, he explained once that the reason he really admired Joseph McCarthy was that McCarthy used the force of his personality and populist demagoguery to disrupt the “corporate liberalism” of a society smothered by human decency. As with everything he said, it is difficult to tell if he was being serious, joking, or seriously joking, and this was by design.
Rothbard had a truly profound impact on American politics in both style and substance. He was a truly chaotic and polarizing figure, and he had finely honed the craft of deriving power and influence from the chaos he created. In this regard, he is one of the forefathers of the political miasma our country finds itself in today. But while I’m extremely negative about Rothbard, it wouldn’t be fair to paint all conservative leaning libertarians with the Rothbard brush, which brings me to Robert Nozick.
USA, 1974: Minarchist Libertarianism
Robert Nozick | Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
The next generation of American Conservative Libertarians after Rothbard are probably best represented by Robert Nozick. Like Rothbard, Nozick was also Jewish, also from New York, also went to Columbia, was also profoundly influenced by the Austrian economists (this time Friedrich Hayek) and also became one of the foundational thinkers of American Libertarianism, but other than that, he was the total opposite of Murray Rothbard.
Most importantly, unlike Rothbard, Nozick wasn’t a bigoted and cynical troll and didn’t believe in sewing chaos and disruption to enhance his own power and influence. He was a thoughtful and practical idealist. This means that while Nozick explores some truly far-out implications of libertarianism, for example, postulating that there would be no reason to stop a person from selling themselves into slavery as long as there was no coercion, over the course of his life whenever he was confronted with a practical problem he moderated his tone on libertarianism, and when he would be accused of hypocrisy for not being an absolutist, he would reply “Sometimes you have to do what you have to do.”
As a result, while Nozick throws around the word “anarchism” a lot, he is really an advocate of Minarchism. He acknowledges the need for the state as well as government, whereas most anarchists advocate for non-state government. Nozick’s ideal was what he called the “Night-Watchman State,” where the state exists only to perform certain socially necessary functions, like making sure your house doesn’t burn down because you don’t have your own private fire department. He was involved in extensive debates with John Rawls about the nature of justice and the problems of utilitarianism.
Nozick is more relatable than earlier Libertarians because he is responding to problems that still trouble America to this day, with a perspective not so different from our own. Rather than rigidly adhering to one doctrine, his philosophy can be seen as an aggregate of particularized responses to the issues facing American society. Over the course of his life explored virtually every different solution to poverty and oppression that one could imagine, from voluntary self-enslavement to socialist wealth distribution. I don’t feel like Nozick ever settled on a single ideology, and perhaps he would have said that was the point. He was, after all, a Libertarian.
USA, 1975: Left-Right Libertarianism
David Morris & Karl Hess | Neighborhood Power: The New Localism
Although I’ve been focusing on Libertarian thinkers who were influential on the way we understand Libertarianism today, I would also like to take the time to highlight Karl Hess, who had distinctly bad luck when it came to picking his political battles. He started out as a conservative acolyte of Barry Goldwater and wrote the GOP platform in both 1960 and 1964. After Goldwater’s truly catastrophic defeat in 1964, Hess left the right all together and became a leftist, campaigning against the Vietnam War and working for the Black Panthers. He was still friends with Murray Rothbard and the two had worked for a time to create a left-right anti-war coalition, but Rothbard grew angry that Hess and the leftists wanted to work towards a multi-racial society, and that was the end of that. Later in life he sought to hybridize left and right libertarianism by focusing on local community making. Hess was the opposite of influential. He had fought with Goldwater in losing battles against Kennedy and Johnson, only to switch sides and fight losing battles against Richard Nixon. Hess’s fascinating community-based synthesis of left and right libertarianism represents a road largely not taken, at least in American politics, however, I would argue it closely parallels the path taken by Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan.
USA, 1982: Ecological Libertarianism
Murray Bookchin | The Ecology of Freedom
Murray Bookchin was another Jewish kid from New York growing up not far from Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick, but while they were both studying economics at Columbia, he was working in an factory making cars and getting his education from radical union organizers. The result is that his Libertarian philosophy responded to many of the same concerns that drove Rothbard and Nozick, but the answers he came up with were wildly different. In particular, as a rust belt factory worker, Bookchin understood first hand why there was a rising concern about the environment, and thinking about the relationship between the environment and community are at the core of Bookchin’s own version of Libertarian Municipalism.
Bookchin was particularly influenced by Kropotkin, who had previously used environmental and ecological rationales for arguments in favor of free and cooperative societies, but, writing in the late 19th century, he showed no apprehension of the coming environmental crisis. By the mid-20th century, however, environmental problems had intruded far enough into people’s lives that political theorists began addressing them.
Unlike previous Libertarian Socialists, Bookchin was not singularly focused on labor relationships within the wage economy, and saw Libertarianism not just as being about how people should govern themselves, but about what conditions people should live in. For Bookchin, environmental problems were created by a dysfunction in society, and dysfunction in the environment could cause problems in society. Creating a place and a way of life that can sustain a community is just as important as creating a community that can sustain a place and a way of life. He called this synthetic view of society and the environment “Social Ecology.” Needless to say, America did not adopt Social Ecology, but Bookchin’s ideas have had a profound impact elsewhere.
10. 2011, Rojava: Democratic Confederalism
Abdullah Öcalan | Democratic Confederalism
In 1999 Abdullah Öcalan, the founder and leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or the PKK, was arrested in Nairobi, Kenya, and deported to Turkey to stand trial for terrorism. He had been fighting a war against the Turkish government for the liberation of Kurdistan and the Kurdish people. He was sentenced to death, though this was converted to life imprisonment when Turkey abolished the death penalty. Now he is the only prisoner in a maximum security prison built on an island in the Sea of Marmara. While the PKK had been a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist organization, while in prison Öcalan began to rethink his politics and develop a new philosophy. He had been reading extensively, especially the works of Murray Bookchin, and began to develop a theory of social organization that was designed around cooperation rather than struggle, and addressed a full spectrum of social and environmental issues, rather than simply wage labor.
Publishing his evolving thoughts from prison, they were adopted by his followers who were based out of the self-governing region of Rojava in Northern Syria to try to create a new kind of community based on Democratic Confederalism. It is not a society without laws or government, but it is governed through the cooperation of the people who live there. Rojava functions under a system of “dual power” which has become a common tactic for anarchist and libertarian movements to work towards their social goals without embroiling themselves in conflicts to gain control over states. Rojava exists as a self-governing territory within Syria, and because they are not striving to create a state that supplants Syria, Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad has mostly made peace with Rojava, even as he continues to fight other dissident factions. Unfortunately, they have faced brutal attacks by ISIS, and they continue to be under attack from Turkey, which objects to any safe haven for Kurdish nationalism.
Rojava is not a utopia. The conflict with ISIS in particular has sorely tested its libertarian values, since it has been necessary to fight ISIS and imprison members of ISIS who were organizing the systematic killing and oppression of people in Kurdistan. However, through the turmoil of the Syrian Civil War, Rojava has remained a stable region with a functional civil society that successfully governs itself, and has even made important progress towards ideals of cooperative economies, ecologically sensitive development, collaborative industry, education, and social justice, without adopting a top-down state-oriented government.
With limited resources and facing constant attack by Turkish forces, Rojava may well not last much longer, but like the Communes in Republican Spain, it will remain an important example of what people were able to achieve, for better or worse, when they tried to organize a society around libertarian principles. This also highlights the real problem with Javier Milei’s cartoonish Anarcho-Capitalism. Milei, ultimately, has not done the hard work of actually trying to solve social problems. He has just loudly broadcasted his opinions, and opinions don’t fix anything. Ultimately, the biggest contradiction that will prevent Milei from going down in history as anything other than a comedic buffoon is the fact that he is an anarchist who wants to rule a country. He is trying to control a society, not build one.
In Anarchist circles, different forms of anarchism and libertarianism are described as “tendencies” rather than “beliefs” or “ideologies.” This is because they are not meant to be political roadmaps for what to do when you take control of a government. Anarchists do not traditionally aspire to control governments. The term “tendency” indicates a perspective, an outlook on how human beings living together should treat each other. This way of talking is useful in understanding American politics far beyond just Libertarianism.
We have seen that words like “Liberal,” “Conservative,” and “Libertarian” have meant different things to different people depending on the time and social context. This means that the only way to anthropologically understand them is as tendencies rather than beliefs. Being conservative is a way of acting, feeling, and relating to the world, not a concrete set of beliefs like monarchism or capitalism. Similarly, being libertarian is another tendency, the tendency to believe people should be free from coercion and oppression. What exactly that means depends on what you perceive as being coercive or oppressive.
In America, a nation founded in a Revolution against Monarchism and establishing a democratic government that placed the rights of people above the powers of state, a certain degree of libertarianism is inflected in each and every political ideology. Both liberals and conservatives, left and right all think they support freedom. So next time someone talks to you about freedom, ask them: freedom from what? That will tell you a lot about and their place in society.
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