Published March 1990

The Libertarian as Authoritarian

At the 1987 Libertarian Party convention, I decided to get into the spirit of the event by wearing a political button. I was loath to support any of the candidates offered for my allegiance, so my choice of buttons was somewhat limited. I settled for an old stand-by: Question Authority.

Little did I suspect that this choice of buttons would cause one of my new acquaintances — one Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr — to dismiss me out of hand as a leftist! (See the section of his manifesto Authority vs. Coercion for his opinion on this slogan.) Of course, my views are so far from being leftist that no one with a lick of sense could mistake me for anything but a libertarian. Perhaps what Mr Rockwell hates so much about that button is that any libertarian wearing it cannot be mistaken for a right-wing conservative either, and this mistake is precisely what he wants to encourage.

There is something about the concept authority that conservatives love — despite (or because of?) all the murkiness and confusion surrounding it. Though the meaning of Question Authority is slippery, Support Authority is an even worse slogan. In addition to the obscurity of its meaning, it suggests servility and the fear of reason. While it might be best to avoid the term altogether, philosophic-minded libertarians must respond to Rockwell’s ostensibly libertarian defense of it. And the first challenge is to unravel some of the absurdities of Rockwell’s (s)creed.

Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts

Rockwell’s most obvious error is, alas, one all too common in the libertarian movement. He states that natural authority arises from voluntary social structures; unnatural authority is imposed by the State. Now, if there is one word that libertarians should avoid more than authority, it is natural. The old distinction between nature and convention — or nature and artifice — is one that, when applied to human action and social systems, becomes amazingly complicated.

The reason for this complication is that the conventional and the artificial are what is natural for man. Man is the animal most prolific in evolving conventions, flouting conventions with artifice and then turning those artifices into new conventions. The distinction just made between convention and artifice is a subtle one, but one of the inevitable difficulties involved when bringing the terms wholly into social theory. An artifice is a deliberate, purposeful human construct, system, or organization, while a convention can be either (a) an artifice that has become habitual and expected among a group of people, thus requiring less forethought and deliberation to coordinate the activity that constitutes the convention, or (b) a spontaneous response to a common situation that is adopted with little thought, first by one person, then by others. In human society, the tension is not between natural and unnatural, but between the conventional and the artificial, with the possibility of unintended [Hayekian] coordination occurring in both categories.

To put it as politely as possible, Rockwell’s use of natural and unnatural is a hold-over from outdated social theories. Less politely, it is naive and rather crude. (Ironically, this crudity is one that his paleoconservative friends are unlikely to make; they have long opposed this kind of facile theoretics. Paleocon Thomas Fleming’s The Politics of Human Nature, though flawed, is a good antidote to this ploy.) But a dismissal of his terminology does not completely destroy his characterization of the two authoritarianisms. His understanding of this distinction seems to rest on the idea of imposition. State authority (unnatural authority) is imposed, while social authority (natural authority) arises. He is undoubtedly thinking of the State’s coercive practices, and yet reliance on the concept of coercion (another staple libertarian program) will not work.

When the State possesses authority it is not solely because the State uses brute force (or threats of force) to impose it; the State possesses authority only when the coerced accommodate the coercion in a particular way, by sanctioning it in some sense. To the anarchist, though he be coerced and perhaps quelled, the State is not an authority. Because he does not sanction it, it is a mere criminal organization to him. Archists, of whatever variety, usually grant to the State the legitimating support of authority, even though they recognize that it coerces them. But most (all?) such people will only let the coercion go so far, beyond which line they cease to regard the State as possessing authority and see it like the anarchist always sees it, as criminal. When enough disenchanted people realize that enough other people are likewise disenchanted, then they rebel and the State loses power as well as authority.

Thus the crucial element of political authority is not coercion but accommodation to coercion. And this accommodation can be said to arise as much as the authority of any of the natural institutions Rockwell praises. In every case the authority of these institutions arises from the accommodations of the socially weaker. In the family, for example, parents gain authority only when the children acquiesce to their parents’ demands for respect and obedience. Similarly in churches, in the Boy Scouts, etc. Authority is a bond between unequals in which the lesser nevertheless has a say. This pertains to domestic and ecclesiastical institutions as well as political ones.

An imposition thesis of authority will not cut it; authority is more like what Etienne de la Boetie explored — voluntary servitude. Libertarians still hankering after a bifurcated theory of authority must look elsewhere. The most obvious alternative is to concentrate even more on coercion, claiming that only State-authority is buttressed by coercion, while domestic institutions, for example, are not. This theory self-destructs, however, as soon as you acknowledge the great degree of coercion in the family!

The next try might be to construct a convention/artifice theory, claiming that while political authority must always be engineered, natural authority arises without ideology, without contrivances, without rhetoric, in small steps, with the ease of habit. But this also will not succeed: because man is a purposive animal, able to consider alternatives, all forms of authority require the occasional (sometimes constant) aid of moralizing and other forms of persuasion. The inertia of habit can carry convention only so far, and then it peters out.

A bifurcated theory of authority cannot be constructed on a priori grounds. This leaves, of course, a consequentialist, or utilitarian justification for Rockwell’s distinction & something I suspect Rockwell would not care to elaborate. In any case, his distinction between natural and unnatural forms of authority collapses into the distinction between authority he does and does not like — and I, for one, will not accept this view of authority on Rockwell’s authority. After all, who is he to tell me to accept his categories?

Towards a Qualified Equalitarianism

It may be noticed that I have reinforced Rockwell’s contention that Authority will always be necessary to society. This is correct, but because I have demolished his two authoritarianisms thesis, I have also reinforced the propriety of the slogan Question Authority, which he abhors as leftist! All repositories of authority should be questioned, so as to discover which are appropriate and which lack respectable rationale.

By this point many libertarians will be rather impatient with me. How can we fight the State, they might ask, if there is no distinction allowed between the State and non-political institutions? My first and surest answer would be what I suggested at the outset: by means other than using the word authority. I told you that authority raises complications . . .

But perhaps complications are what we need. Too many libertarians yearn for the quick and easy solution to the theoretical problems they face. The most important lesson they have to learn is that in philosophy quick and easy usually means quick and dirty. Nevertheless, there is a common meaning of authority that does conform to a libertarian (and anti-conservative) perspective, and which flows fairly reasonably from a sophisticated analysis of the concept. I will try to present it here.

The place to start, of course, is with Max Weber’s theory. Weber believed that there are three forms of authority: traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal.

1. Traditional authority is authority conferred by long practice - it is the most conventional of the three, with its most salient reason for acquiescence being that everyone knows what to expect from it, thus it requires the least amount of mental effort to sustain the social practice of accommodation.
2. Charismatic authority, on the other hand, is characterized by reverence for a particular person, who is seen as having exceptional qualities. This can sometimes be interpreted as simply an acknowledgement of expertise (which could elicit the slogan: Question Expertise - you may learn something), and thus a recognition of a need for a division of labor, but is usually associated with less rational impulses, with allegiance growing out of love and adoration and taking the form of self-abnegation and faith.
3. The rational-legal form of authority is in marked contrast to this: acts and offices possess authority only when they conform to rules or formal reasons — which seems to make this form of authority the most obviously artificial of the three.

Now at this point a number of thoughts immediately come to mind —

1. When people speak of an authoritarian personality, they are thinking especially of the charismatic and traditional types of authority. The authoritarian individual is one who expects to get compliance simply because he is who he is, and that’s just the way it is.
2. Rational-legal rules are often accepted not because of any salience they may have, but simply because they are traditional. This is one of the many ways Weber’s three categories overlap.
3. It is the rational-legal form of authority that most modern societies concentrate on in practice and in ideological battle. Libertarianism is part of this modernist tendency.
4. To most moderns, the problem of the authority of some legal practice collapses into the problem of political obligation in general. Indeed, the authority of a legal system is often thought of in moral terms, and the moral foundation of the system is seen as rational, and thus in an important sense not authoritarian. The word authority is thus completely relegated to the traditional and charismatic forms, and an authoritarian approach to politics is seen as one eschewing explicit reasons and high moral principle.

And it is the cogency of this fourth point that explains why libertarians tend to be suspicious of paleolibertarians whoring after paleoconservatives, for paleoconservatives, being conservatives, are deeply suspicious of the whole modernist project of finding rational reasons for political obligations; in the modernist project, in theory, at least, everyone is supposed to have a rational reason to support the political order. Nearly all the various modern political theories built on consent, contract, or utility express a conception of man’s essential moral equality. Man as seen by many conservatives, however (and this includes many paleoconservatives, no matter how suspicious they may be of the State), is radically unequal in the moral realm, and obligations are seen as arising from my station and its duties (in F.H. Bradley’s famous phrase) rather than from a universalistic moral perspective.

Libertarianism — as indeed suggested by Rockwell — is in at least one sense egalitarian: all people (or at least all adults) are seen as possessing the same basic rights and thus the same basic obligations, with all other specific rights arising from whatever particular acts they engage in. Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is understood by most people — especially those leftists and libertarians who wear Question Authority buttons — to mean an approach to politics diametrically opposed to the idea of equal rights. Obligations are ordered hierarchically, not from an even plane of humanity.

And it is from this very libertarian perspective that we should oppose Rockwell’s defense of authority. His discussion of the authority of the employer is profoundly archaic, and, well, deeply offensive. Every business requires a hierarchy of command, he writes, and every employer has the right to expect obedience within his proper sphere of authority. But we do not need to defend the employer’s right to command his employees in a hierarchical system by reference to an essentially hierarchical moral theory — in fact, we must defend it in reference to an essentially egalitarian one. All we have to do is defend the free contract; for at the constitutional level, the wage contract is an agreement between equals. To speak of the authority of the employer smacks of slavery and feudal theories of servitude, which no libertarian should advocate. Paleo, we note, means primitive or archaic; Rockwell has in this case gone way too far back.

I will skip Rockwell’s discussion of religion, and move directly to the very controversial subject of the family. Now, families are obviously inegalitarian — the gulf in status separating parents and children is great. But the danger in speaking of the authority of the family is that it tempts us to interpret it as the authority of parents and this, in turn, as a defense of authoritarian disciplinary systems. And this would be disastrous. Though children and parents are not morally equal, the primary obligation of the parents is to prepare their children for adult society, to make them able to participate in it as moral equals. Few things scuttle this task more than does the practice of authoritarian discipline.

This is not to argue against the parental use of physical punishment; what I am arguing against is a particular moral style that can be aptly characterized as authoritarian. When a child asks why he may not do something, the answer all too often given is because I told you so, or, because I am your father, etc. Though in our society — and, I believe, in a libertarian society — parents have special rights and special obligations relating to their children, these rights must not be seen as grounded in a traditionalist or charismatic inegalitarianism. The rules that parents make for their children must be defended using the moral style appropriate to the rational-legal forms of normativity; that is, by appealing to the self-interest of the child, empathic imagination, and universalizability, and not solely on the threat of parental superiority or the enticement of parental love.

Why? Because, as Rockwell states, families encourage the moral behavior necessary to society. If we want our society to be free, the moral values that families inculcate must not be authoritarian, but rational, humane, and libertarian. The style of moral suasion used in the family creates the style of moral imagination used by adults in the open society. One of the reasons for the eclipse of liberalism in the late nineteenth century may have been because the traditional styles of parental authority still used at the time trained people to regard individual liberty as unsatisfactory; people grew up still craving radically inegalitarian forms of governance, and many could not even conceive of the moral and political equality of all men. Unfortunately, as Bruno Bettelheim has observed, moral and disciplinary practices used by contemporary American families are still mired in archaic and stultifying practices that are inimical to a full life in an open society.

I am not sure just how authoritarian Rockwell really is on the family, because his account here as elsewhere is confused. But it is disturbing to note the values that he says families promote: parental love, self-discipline, patience, cooperation, respect for elders, and self-sacrifice. Instead of mentioning respect for others, he mentions respect for elders — the traditionalist-authoritarian preference, not the modern-universalistic one. He mentions self-discipline and self-sacrifice but not, interestingly enough, self-respect. And he includes cooperation (the fundamental necessity of social life) but not the will to not cooperate, or resist (the ability to just say no that makes individuality and independence possible). His inclusions are all virtues, I believe, but they are the virtues most important to an authoritarian, hierarchical society, and are not balanced by the virtues of a modern, open society.

Nevertheless, I share with Rockwell the view that domestic and other non-political institutions can be countervailing forces arrayed against the State; my complaint with his account is his insistence on conflating this idea with authority. Because authority is a bond between unequals, it cannot be taken as fundamental to libertarianism for the simple reason that libertarianism is, basically, egalitarian.

Of course, his own discussion of egalitarianism is completely beside the point: libertarians are not egalitarian in the sense that contemporary liberals (i.e., illiberals) are, and the evidence that some contemporary libertarians engage in reverse racism can be explained in other ways (which have nothing to do with a naive egalitarianism of outcomes). Rockwell’s defense of Christianity as a source of freedom, particularly in that Christians have taught that all men are equally children of God (although not equal in any other sense), comes closer to the point. Most humanistic libertarians, however, express the same idea in reference to such philosophical constructs as Aristotelian essences, social contracts, veils of ignorance, states of nature and the like. All libertarians — including Rockwell — are egalitarians in this sense. More importantly, they are egalitarians in an additional sense as well: they advocate equal liberty for all people.

Which brings us back to the State.

According to the modern rational-legal tradition of political obligation, all political obligations must be grounded in general rules that recognize the fundamentally equal moral status of all. This project has, of course, been fraught with many difficulties. The libertarian contribution to this tradition has been to concentrate on coercion, seeing political obligation in the equal limits applied to its practice. Liberty is defined as the condition of human beings when coercion is minimized and equalized. The State, which is in the business of practicing coercion in order to regulate coercion, is necessarily limited in the libertarian system.

All of which has little to do with authority. The authority of the State is justified if it conforms to the rational-legal principles of libertarianism. What this means, in practice, is that we should accommodate the coercions and demands of the State by the standards of libertarian justice as well as prudence, and we should encourage others to do the same. When enough other people begin to think as we do, the time will be ripe for change; power will devolve to the people; and, if we are careful, we might achieve a free society.

But to this task, preoccupation with authority yields us no help. Authority is too complicated and contentious a concept to aid in our emancipation. While it is a fine thing to use common language to approach conservatives with libertarian ideas, it is a serious mistake to abandon key libertarian insights in the process. The libertarian who is also an authoritarian is not a very good libertarian . . . by definition.

I wrote this article in response to a manifesto by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. (The Case for Paleolibertarianism, Liberty, Vol 3, No. 3, January 1990). Rockwell argued at length that the libertarian movement was enmired in egalitarianism and other leftist infections, and that respect for traditional values was the only road to success for freedom in America. Predictably, Rockwell’s proposed paleolibertarianism made few waves outside the beleagured libertarian movement. For some latter-day reflections on this brief moment in political in-fighting, Rockwell’s recent thoughts may enlighten and amuse. Back in 1990 I was not amused by Rockwell’s arguments, which seemed to me little more than calculated hate-mongering. In the essay that follows I treated his ideas seriously, however, and did not express every one of my suspicions about his little movement. I also revealed elements of my own view of social philosophy that I had up to that time not aired publicly. But let me ’fess up to the obvious: Rockwell’s article is more concisely written than was my response. —twv

Readers of the magazine were treated to a strange statement at the conclusion of the several articles attacking Rockwell’s manifesto: Llewelyn H. Rockwell, Jr., declined our offer to publish his comments on these responses. Mr. Rockwell did indeed write some comments (he dismissed my arguments out of hand as basically unworthy of thought), but in the communications that followed the tension between he and the publisher of Liberty grew. Liberty’s intern at the time referred to the communications from Rockwell as hate faxes, and it seemed obvious to us that Rockwell was picking for a fight. He soon broke with the magazine, and not long after his colleague Murray N. Rothbard more politely did the same.

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