John Stuart Mill and Left-Libertarianism

Economics Political Theory
1

I highly recommend listening to Ralph Raico’s Mises University lecture on Liberalism. He is a pleasure to listen to and a font of wisdom.

His discussion of John Stuart Mill made me realize just how much of an influence the 19th century intellectual has been on left-libertarian thought. I’ve transcribed the parts of Raico’s lecture relevant to this below, and bolded the most relevant and interesting bits…

Raico notes that to many today believe that…

what liberalism is about is individual self-expression. The vast majority of the human race is interested in economic freedom: the sort of things that go along with private property. Intellectuals, however, are interested in individual self-expression. […].

How did this confusion come about? Much of the present contradiction and confusion about liberalism can be traced to a man named John Stuart Mill. […] He was called the “saint of rationalism” by Gladstone, but he was responsible for key distortions of the liberal doctrine that had come down to him. For instance, if you look at his little book On Liberty, he says at the very beginning that “I’m not going to be dealing with the doctrine of free trade”, by which he meant economic freedom: the use of property and so on, which of course is what the vast majority of the human race is interested in. Instead he’s going to deal with freedom of expression and “experiments in lifestyle” […]

To stay on point, here, I exclude some great stuff Raico said about Mill’s anti-capitalism and military interventionism.

But worst of all was Mill’s deformation of the concept of liberty itself. Liberty, it seems, is a condition that is threatened, not only by physical aggression on the part of the state or other institutions or individuals. Rather, society often poses even graver dangers to individual freedom. This it achieves through what he called the “tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling”. He says the tendency to impose by other ways than civil penalties its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them. What society does is compel all characters to fashion themselves upon a model of its own. True liberty requires what Mill called “autonomy”, because if you adopt the traditions and customs of other people, you’re simply engaging in ape-like imitation. Where we would say that men and women choosing goals laid out for them by institutions whose authority over them they freely accept, Mill perceives the extinction of freedom. In a striking and utterly preposterous illustration, the “saint of rationalism” says, “An individual Jesuit is, to the utmost degree of abasement, a slave of his order.” One wonders what is supposed to follow from this. Must we form abolitionist societies to emancipate the willing slaves of the Society of Jesus? How should we go about selecting our John Browns to lead the storming of the slave pits of Fordham University and Georgetown? [laughter] You have to ask yourself by what right Mill and his alter ego, his girlfriend Harriet Taylor, could ever have imagined themselves entitled to pass judgment on the status of members of Catholic and Eastern Orthodox religious orders, on Orthodox Jews and devout Muslims, or any other religious believers. […] Mill’s comment on the Jesuits illustrates a facet of Mill too rarely noted. There’s a British philosopher, I think who passed away since, who calls Mill one of the most censorious of 19th century moralists. Mill constantly passed judgments on the habits, attitudes, preferences and moral standards of vast numbers of people of whom he knew nothing. […] Hanburger and Linda Reider conclude that Mill was not in favor of real freedom of expression. He had a hidden agenda; his hidden agenda was to destroy organized religion as it existed in his time and to replace it by Mill’s concept of the “religion of humanity” where everybody would somehow spontaneously work their whole lives through for the good of everyone else. […]

From Mill’s time on, liberalism in the minds of some of these commentators has become linked to an adversarial stance vis-a-vis religion, tradition, and social norms. Here’s an example by a well-known scholar, Owen Chadwick, who is Dixie Professor Emeritus of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge. Chadwick said, "A liberal was one who wanted more liberty: that is, freedom from restraint, whether the restraint was exercised by police, by law, or by social pressure, or by an orthodoxy of opinion, which men assailed at their peril. The liberal thought men needed far more room to act and think than they were allowed by established laws and convention in European society. That’s really more of a description of Greenwich Village bohemians than liberals. You can’t recognize Lord Acton, for instance, in something like that. John Donne, who is a very famous British political philosopher and historian of politics wrote, “If the central dispositional value of liberals is tolerance…”-- which, itself is absurd. Tolerance of what? The central dispositional characteristic of liberals is a belief in liberty, I think. "The central political value is a fundamental antipathy towards authority in any of its forms." That means that somebody, for instance, who is a practicing Roman Catholic submits himself to the authority of his church voluntarily-- we’re not talking about the Spanish Inquisition anymore-- somehow can’t be a liberal. […] Mill’s view seems to erase the critical distinction between incurring social disapproval and incurring imprisonment. It leads to pitting liberalism against innocent non-coercive traditional values and arrangements, especially religious ones. It also forges an offensive alliance between liberalism and the state, even if contrary to Mill’s intention, since it’s very hard to imagine how they can demolish everything Mill wants to demolish, without using political power.

I should stress that Raico never mentions left-libertarianism in his talk. But I can’t help but wonder if Roderick Long (who, I must say, I do admire in many ways) was in the audience squirming in his seat.

Here in John Stuart Mill, we have the left-libertarian’s preoccupation against tradition and norms (“tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling”), against organized religion, against “bossism” (“antipathy towards authority in any of its forms”), and even perhaps their predilection for systems like eudaimonism (“religion of humanity”).

The stress on “liberty of lifestyle” at the expense of focusing on the far more important issue of economic freedom is also shown to perhaps be a rather selfish emphasis promoted by intellectuals who would personally benefit more from the former freedom than the latter.

Worst of all, we see in Mill the left-libertarian’s insistence on injecting distracting and divisive culture wars into politics, which is really a matter of freedom and its enemy, the state. I should note that strident conservative libertarians are guilty of this last as well.

2

There are actual rational reasons for rejecting the conservative tendency to favor tradition for its own sake (the shocking notion that a foreward-looking perspective is more productive than a backward-looking or present-oriented one! one would think that this would catch on with those that like to talk about time preferance), there are rational reasons for being skeptical of organized religion (the shocking notion that truth value matters and that ideology has power!), and there are rational reasons for favoring independance and a more cooperative working environment (both with and without “bosses”). There is nothing particularly wrong with taking those kind of positions for independant, often epistemological, reasons.

Emphasis on a rejection of social conservatism is not inherently at the expense of economic freedom. The flaw in your reasoning is to view such concerns as inherently having to be weighed against eachother, but that isn’t that case. There is no reason why one cannot coherantly strongly advocate both economic freedom and opposition to social heirarchy and traditionalist mores. Furthermore, this seems to be based on a strawman of what left-libertarians are advocating, as if it reduces to nothing more than a question of “lifestyles”. It isn’t merely about “lifestyles”, it’s about economic and social goals in general: an actually flourishing society with positive consequences beyond negative liberty alone. Social context is not irrelevant to how society turns out.

There is no reason why one has to concentrate only on a narrow sense of anti-statism, and it does not follow from the fact that one emphasizes social goals in addition to anti-statism that one’s devotion to anti-statism is lessened. So let’s be clear here: there is a difference between advocating social goals at the expense of anti-statism and advocating social goals in addition to anti-statism. This is part of the confusion over “thick” left-libertarianism. It is a broadening of scope in which the already granted political premises constitute a part of a broader social philosophy, not an either/or antagonism with the already granted political premises. Adding things to oppose in addition to the state does not inherently water down anti-statism and adding goals to support in addition to political liberty does not inherently water down political liberty.

3

I didn’t write “at the expense of economic freedom”; I wrote “at the expense of focusing… on economic freedom.” The culture war crap is distracting to libertarianism, not necessarily antithetical to it. However, one must wonder what happens if the endeavor of stamping out social conservatism ever comes into conflict with the endeavor of protecting economic liberty. With the former being such a preoccupation of LLs, it’s not hard to imagine them favoring it over the latter when push comes to shove.

Not inherently, no. But it may very well do so in practice. Once you make societal pressure a political issue, it’s easy to start to characterize instances of non-physically-violent “bossism”, “traditionalism”, etc as crime.

4

Mill was more of a socialist than a libertarian. Your position Lilburne is basically a strawman.

Besides, Mill’s support for militarism would put him in the traditional/conservative camp.

Instead of creating a strawman you could check people like Herbert Spencer who rejected tradition and fully supported laissez-faire.

5

I think one has to clearly distinguish the social from the political. For example, I think that that one has a “right” to arbitrarily exclude people from a restraunt based on race, but I simultaneously think that this is an irrational thing to do with negative social consequences. Simply because I’m an anti-statist doesn’t mean that I’m going to take a neutral stance toward racial separatism: I reject racial separatism for reasons independant of anti-statism. I’m both an anti-statist and an anti-racist. But this doesn’t mean that I’m going to advocate for the police to throw you in jail for putting up a “no niggers” sign at your store. So no, I don’t believe that a social philosophy in opposition to authoritarianism and conservatism in a broad sense leads to criminalizing things one doesn’t like. I believe that’s a non-sequitor. I don’t think that being a libertarian means that one has to completely leave all of their other positions at the door simply in the name of a maintaining a “united front” against the state.

6

Juan, I’m not saying Mill was an LL; I’m saying he very likely influenced them. He was perhaps the most influential intellectual of the 19th century. His writings had an impact on a wide variety of schools of thought.

7

Except there is very little reasonable grounds for maintaining the claim that Mill is particularly an influence on left-libertarians. Left-libertarians tend to be influenced by some rather specific figures from the 19th century other than Mill, such as: Benjamin Tucker, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Henry George, William B. Greene, Josiah Warren and Voltairine DeCleyre. These are all figures straight out of an explicitly libertarian/anarchist historical context. Left-libertarianism is not some sort of phenomenon that comes from particularly “alien” influences, it actually traces its ideas back to early libertarian and anarchist traditions.

8

It is most excellent to hear you say that. Others here of the “thick libertarian” persuasion have insisted on conflating the two.

9

BP, Are you saying that all these parallels I point out are not really parallels or are merely coincidence?

10

I don’t think that “thick libertarianism” really is a conflation of the two. It’s more the position that both of them are relevant, viewed as a part of a broader social philosophy or bundle of values. As a “thick libertarian”, libertarianism is conceptualized as only one part of a broader worldview, rather than as a stand-alone philosophy in its own right that makes every other aspect of my worldview irrelevant. Because the fact of the matter is that I’m not just a libertarian, I’m also an atheist, a critical rationalist, an anti-racist, a cosmopolitan, a proponent of better conditions for people, a proponent of self-education, a proponent of individual authenticity, a musician, a dnd nerd, and so on. I don’t think the fact that I’m a libertarian means that these other things all become irrelevant. I don’t believe that libertarianism is such an important thing that even those most fundamental, epistemological things like truth value in general are superceded by it.

11

It’s not huge leap to understand politics happens in the barber shop, beauty salon, and grocery store, etc… - even currently. I remember Plauche pointed this out, but I also remember you disagreed. It’s what the concept means in and of itself. Aristotle associated how slavery is natural, but in and of itself natural doesn’t necessitate “slavery”. It’s accurate to define the natural order of things doesn’t entail “slavery” at all. Slavery is arbitrary.

by the way, just for the record, I’m a human being wishing not to be awash in labels, it’s unnecessary demarcation lines to focus on such “thick”, “thin”, and “bald”, etc… It’s the same as democrat and republican, what if I like some of the stances in both - I’ve thereby made the concepts of both parties irrelevant, same will happen with libertarianism down this path.

12

Also, LLs Peter Vallentyn and Hillel Steiner, in The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings, specifically cite J.S. Mill as an influence.

13

Well, Vellentyn and Steiner are not the same “left-libertarians” as the Long/Carson variety. If we want to be technical, there are at least three different groups that use the label “left-libertarianism”: Vellentyn and Steiner, Chomsky/Bookchin (basically, the term is used interchangably with “social anarchism” in this context), and left-wing individualist anarchists like Carson and Long. These are all different senses of “left-libertarianism”, and it is mostly the 3rd sense in which it is used by people associated with “The Allance of the Libertarian Left”. So we should be clear about the distinctions at play.

14

It is a huge leap. If a black barber refused to cut my hair, it would have everything to do with culture and the exercise of free will, and nothing to do with politics.

15

Lilburne,

I think that opposition to conservatism, both political and cultural, is quite in line with libertarianism. Mill was a libertarian as far as his opposition to tradition went, but he was not a libertarian in other aspects. Drawing more general conclusions from Mill’s lack of consistency doesn’t seem warranted to me.

16

When did I do that?

17

Not necessarily, but in some cases it is antithetical.

Much of the thickism comes from the culture wars, which are based in marxian and progressive (social democratic) views. And for the same reasons those ideas are flawed when the progressives try to promote them through the state, are still wrong when LLs try to promote them against free market voluntarism.

Indeed, but the roots of LL cultural ideology lie in collectivist thinking, not in individualism.

18

No. Politics is me discussing with you about how society can be - status quo or change, etc… And these two are examples of the political opinions people share with each other throughout society.

The politics is the opinion the person holds about society. If the barber doesn’t do it cause of how he desires society to be, then that’s his political outlook. That decision is the application of governance by the individual barber. To leave politics in the realm of the State is to hog-tie people from having discourse on which way they will spontaneously generate society.

19

As is an opposition to collectivism. That includes progressivism and Marxism.

20

Brainpolice:

I must respectfully disagree with the substance of your claim here.

First, the philosophical underpinnings of left-libertarianism as it is currently developing trace back to a philosophical method of “reflective equilibrium.” This method is described by Long as follows:

“What distinguishes reflective equilibrium from mere “intuition mongering” is that while it may start with intuitions, those intuitions are not accepted uncritically, but are instead tested against other intuitions; the cognitive value of intuitions lies not in the intuitions themselves but in the use that is made of them.”(Book review, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics Vol. 6. No.1, Spring 2003)

If we consider libertarianism, broadly conceived, as the “intuition” that political liberty is somehow consistent with man’s nature, while political bondage is somehow contrary to the nature of man, what left-libertarianism is suggesting is that this “primary” intuition be put on equal par with all other intuitions.

As Long hints in the same article: “…reflective equilibration throws them (all intuitions) on a level with everything else…”

This unquestionably constitutes a diminishment of “traditional” libertarianism. Because if the number of “intutitions” encompassed by libertarianism increases, while the time and effort libertarians have to devote to libertarianism remains constant, then a priori, there must be a diminished amount of time and effort expended on each of the (now) many intuitions constituting libertarianism, if the left-libertarian proposal is adopted.

So left-libertarianism in this sense, is a proposal to diminish the program of political liberty in in relation to other goals, as part of libertarianism.

I don’t think this fact can be overcome. Once other social goals besides political liberty become part of libertarianism, then the relative importance of political liberty must decline.

(This doesn’t even take into account the fact that left-libertarianism will push for exclusively leftist social concerns to be inserted into the libertarian program: anti-bossism, anti-hierarchy, anti-wealth discrepancy, anti-traditionalism, general aversion and animosity to commercial activity, animosity toward Western values, anti-religion, general hostility to specific forms of grooming, hygiene, dress, etc…)

It is possible to say that left-libertarianism has granted the political premises of libertarianism, but there is a dangerous gray area that needs to be addressed. Left-libertarianism agrees to some extent with the libertarian conception of government “coercion.” They will agree that coercive government means toward social ends is wrong or undesirable. But they envision substituting for government coercion a kind of “systematic intimidation” in place of “traditional” coercion. The “systematic intimidation” they envision is not government per se, but entails utilizing traditional leftist intimidation methods that are organized on a wide scale to bully those who may not accept leftist social values. Such methods are to include:

“targeted moral agitation, ridicule, social ostracism, targeted boycotts, general strikes, or other forms of solidarity and coordinated action, verbal harangues, social ostracism of unruly dissenters, social disapproval, ostracism, and verbal peer pressure.” (according to Charles Johnson, in his essay “Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin”)

This proposed substitution of leftist intimidation for traditional government coercion is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. Because many libertarians do not envision using “systematic intimidation” as a means to enforce their particular values. There are many tolerant and peaceful libertarians–and a growing number of them–who subscribe to a “live and let live” conception, whereby many different value systems might coexist. By contrast, left-libertarianism seems still to be aiming for universal acceptance of its traditional leftist values.

The proposal of left-libertarianism seems to be two things:

First, a diminishment in the libertarian emphasis on political liberty so that political liberty becomes a principle on equal footing with other social goals, as the libertarian program.

Second, the proposal that leftist social concerns become those other social goals of the libertarian program.

This necessarily means a diminishment of libertarianism as political liberty, and a relative enhancement of leftist social goals as part of libertarianism.

This is what left-libertarianism is!

By contrast, the libertarianism that most libertarians practice, is one whereby there is broad agreement on the systematic program of political liberty, but other social concerns are a matter of personal preference. This allows the widest latitude to the values of different people and groups, who each, individually and in their own way, may pursue the values they have adopted.

Left-libertarians realize that libertarianism is the future. They propose to harness the power of the idea of liberty by attaching leftist values to the libertarian program so that leftist values may be “systematically” asserted by means other than individual preference. Statism is discredited as a movement and idea. Libertarianism is ascendant. Left-libertarianism wants to take leftist values from dying state socialism and insert them as part of the new libertarian program.