01/18/07
I am such a grump. Britannica finally gets a decent article on libertarianism, and all I do is pick nits.
I should be thanking its author, David Boaz.
And yet, I really dislike the article. Strongly. With no small amount of disgust, even. It seems written in a style ill suited to an encyclopedia. Implicit in the whole article is that libertarians agree. Time and again, Boaz offers particular (sectarian) terminology as agreed terminology, particular arguments as points of agreement, where the agreement is loose at best.
According to the principle that libertarians call the nonaggression axiom, all acts of aggression against the rights of others—whether committed by individuals or by governments—are unjust.
First, the nonaggression axiom is Rothbard's term. Most libertarians don't use it. Many refuse to treat it as an axiom at all.
Second, this paragraph does not define the principle. The quoted sentence is a mere tautological statement: rights must be defended; encroachments against them are unjust. All that's added is that encroachments or abridgements of rights are to be called aggression.
Nonsense. What a misuse of language.
What libertarians tend to agree to is the idea that all our rights derive from a basic right, the right to liberty. Liberty is defined as something like an absence of opposing coercive force. Coercion — that is violence, compulsion, and the threat thereof — may not be initiated. When initiated, that's a violation of rights. But once there's a violation, coercion may be used in defense.
Of course, Rand and Rothbard and lesser thinkers like LeFevre have so polluted the language of libertarianism that there's little agreement among libertarians about the exact definitions of constituent concepts. Aggression
may or may not be a good word to use to designate initiated force, libertarians' main bugaboo.
Although various theories regarding the origin and justification of individual rights have been proposed—e.g., that they are given to human beings by God, that they are implied by the very idea of a moral law, and that respecting them produces better consequences—all libertarians agree that individual rights are imprescriptible—i.e., that they are not granted (and thus cannot be legitimately taken away) by governments or by any other human agency.
Well, maybe I should just give up, then, eh? Apparently, I'm not a libertarian.
Why do I say this? Because I'm not convinced of this talk of imprescriptability. Never have been. I understand the desire to see rights as imprescriptable. But just because you want something doesn't mean it exists.
There's a lot of this kind of stuff in the article. Here's a whopper:
Libertarians deny that their views imply anything like atomistic individualism.
Except, of course, for those libertarians who are very atomistic in their individualism, who despise social controls outside of law, too, who think of all social arrangements as contracts and nothing but, nothing more, nothing less, and . . .
Oh, well. Atomism is a defect in many libertarians' ideologies and in their private lives. Not David Boaz's, sure; and not mine. But I don't see why an encyclopedia article should avoid admitting that some libertarians are indeed stupid enough to embrace the errors that their debaters want them to embrace. Some libertarians' love their opponents' strawmen!
Yes: Many libertarians are utter fools. Many support strawman positions, positions that are risible, indefensible, and often just plain silly
(as my old boss Bill Bradford liked to put it). The standard, paradigm case for this was Ayn Rand. She took up the strawman of selfishness
and ran with it. But this wasn't easy, because egoism weighs heavily on the runner, it being nuts and all. And yet many libertarians, to this day, treat Rand and her new concept
(which was really just old-hat nincompoopery, older than Nietzsche, at least as old as Stirner, but in her version particularly jumbled up and incoherent) with undue respect.
Now that I think about it: why do I call myself a libertarian? Why not just give up? Let the One True Way folks and the strawman nutjobs keep the term as their own.
Maybe I should call myself by an old term, now unused. I'm a Locofoco!
Comments:
No Comments for this post yet...
Leave a comment:
Pingbacks:
No Pingbacks for this post yet...
RSS Feed