Posted on 04/13/2003 3:40:52 PM PDT by RJCogburn
The Objectivist political ideal is a society of trade, in which people interact by voluntary means to mutual benefit, rather than by coercion, plunder, and the exercise of power. A society of trade is a free society, in which individuals enjoy rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, and in which government is strictly limited to the function of protecting those rights through a system of law, with no authority to regulate belief, speech, the arts, or economic markets except to prevent one citizen or group from violating the rights of others.
This political outlook puts Objectivism squarely in the tradition of thinkers like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, as advocates of the political position known as "classical liberalism," "market liberalism," or, in Europe and Latin America, simply as "liberalism." All of these terms derive from "liberty" and signal someone who is a strong advocate of individual freedom. Classical liberals, unlike the leftist "liberals" in America today, advocate both freedom of speech and economic freedom—"free minds and free markets," as Reason magazine puts it.
Libertarians are also classical liberals. Sometimes, indeed, the word "libertarian" is used simply as a modern equivalent for that broad political approach. More often, it means something narrower: Libertarians recognize that an individual's rights can be violated only by the initiation of force against him. Liberty therefore requires a political order that bans the initiation of physical force from human relationships (excluding, to some degree, relationships with children and the mentally incompetent). The implication, as David Boaz of the Cato Institute writes in Libertarianism: A Primer (New York: The Free Press, 1997), is that "the only actions that should be forbidden by law are those that involve the initiation of force against those who have not themselves used force—actions like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and fraud" (p. 2). And government exists for the purpose of seeing that these actions are forbidden—period. This limitation excludes certain functions that other classical liberals ascribe to government, such as providing roads and schools.
Objectivists agree with this strict limitation on government. It was John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, who said: "So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others" (p. 949, paperback). The clarity and insistence of Rand's cry—"do you hear me?"—resounded through her essays and speeches on individual rights and limited government, igniting the birth of modern libertarianism in the 1960s. Indeed, Rand remains a major influence in the general libertarian movement.
Some Differences However, there are significant differences between Objectivism and the views of many—perhaps most—libertarians. Rand herself thought these differences so great that she rejected the label "libertarian." She preferred to be known as a "radical for capitalism."
One key difference is over the need for government. Objectivism holds that liberty requires an enforceable system of adjudication based on objective principles, that is, a legal system. Such a system establishes when force has been used and allows for the rational settlement of disputes on the basis of individual rights to life, liberty, and property. Only an institution that effectively dominates and regulates the use of force in a given geographic area can provide and enforce such a system of law. So we need government to set us free from force.
While many libertarians would agree, others are anarchists who believe that some "free-market" system of competing law courts and for-profit police agencies can ensure a "non-monopolistic" system of rights protection. Objectivists would reply that freedom cannot come from the marketplace: it is a precondition of the marketplace, which can operate only to the extent that individuals can act, trade, and own property by their own choice, free from the use of force. It is thus impossible to have the market provide the protection that frees one from force in the first place. Anarchism, in practice, would amount to civil warfare (Virtue of Selfishness, pp. 112-13).
If we exclude anarchism, we can say that libertarianism is the Objectivist position in politics. But Objectivism includes more than politics. It is a systematic philosophy that also includes a specific view of reality, human nature, and the nature of knowledge. It includes a specific code of morality based on the requirements of life in this world. The Objectivist commitment to individual rights and a ban on the initiation of force is grounded in its view of nature, knowledge, and values. Its political conclusions thus stand on a firm and quite specific foundation. Ayn Rand put it this way: "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows" ("Introducing Objectivism," The Objectivist Newsletter, vol. 1 no. 8, August 1962, p. 35).
Philosophically, some libertarians are Objectivists, or would at least agree with the core elements in the Objectivist case for liberty, such as the individual's need to act by means of reason in pursuing his life and happiness as ultimate values. Others hold that liberty is grounded in some other philosophical (or religious) viewpoint, such as Christianity, utilitarianism, Kantianism, or postmodern subjectivism. Others still would deny the need for a philosophical basis altogether; in their view, the principle of non-initiation of force is an "axiom" of social organization that is self-evident or to be taken on faith.
What Does It Matter? These differences matter for two reasons. First, anyone who advocates a free society must appeal to some philosophical foundation or other. A foundation that is unsound yields bad arguments that undermine the credibility of libertarianism. For example, one cannot argue that libertarianism is true, good, or useful if one denies that it is possible to have objective knowledge in the first place; yet some libertarian thinkers embrace skeptical or relativist views that have exactly that implication. In the long run, the political principles of a free society cannot gain widespread acceptance without broad acceptance of the underlying moral and cultural values that make freedom an ideal. Creating such a culture must therefore be a long-term goal for advocates of liberty, and that goal requires us to understand what the essential values are.
Secondly, political principles are not self-contained units that can be swapped among philosophical systems without alteration, like beads moved from one necklace to another. A philosophy like Objectivism is a systematic whole, and the meaning of each principle is affected by the manner in which it is derived. Because Objectivism bases liberty on an ethic of individual happiness, for example, it does not reduce the essential purpose of rights to nothing more than the negative goal of freedom from force. The function of rights is primarily positive: enabling people to pursue their lives by reason and trade. This conception of rights has more in common with classical liberals like Thomas Jefferson—who believed that individual rights existed to enable the pursuit of happiness—than with those libertarians who deduce rights from an axiom banning the initiation of force.
An underlying philosophy affects not only the meaning of broad political principles but also the answers to specific policy questions.
When does a "person" come into being? At what level of mental or physical competence does he gain or lose rights?… Do animals have rights?… What rightful claims do children have on their parents? Do adults have the right to have sex with children? Do you have the right to shoot trespassers? to build an atomic bomb in your basement?… Does a nation have the right to bomb an aggressor nation in self-defense, even if innocent civilians will be killed? Does morality demand that we abolish all improper government interventions and programs overnight, rather than gradually?
The answers to these and dozens of similar questions will shape what "libertarianism" means in actual practice; yet surveys have shown that libertarians are deeply divided on many of the answers. Why? Because their concepts of freedom, rights, and justice are shaped…by clashing philosophical premises (Robert Bidinotto, "The Roundtable," IOS Journal, August 1997, p. 14). In light of these philosophical concerns, some Objectivists have concluded that libertarianism is utterly indifferent to philosophy and that libertarians are therefore nihilists. But that's a non sequitur. Though some libertarians advocate philosophical views that are deeply at odds with the requirements of liberty, many do not. And the libertarian movement in general is a positive force for political change. Libertarians have sought to make common cause in pursuit of liberty, despite disagreements on other issues—an approach that, within limits of broad compatibility, makes sense. Objectivists can benefit from taking part in the movement for liberty. And libertarians can benefit from the moral and epistemological insights of Objectivism.
The label "Libertarian" describes a political party. To many (including many Libertarians) the word describes no more than the party, and a loosely associated set of political positions.
But why do Libertarians hold those positions?
What unifies those positions?
It is in answering those questions, that we enter the realm of philosophy... no?
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