Just saw this article on Mises.org.
This part stands out:
Rothbard says a constitution is necessary to establish market Anarchism, that simply abolishing government would lead to chaos.
Exactly who would propose this constitution, how would it be ratified, and how would it be enforced?
Furthermore, if you establish a “market anarchist constitution” that’s backed with force, how exactly is that not Minarchism?
To me, this sounds like a false question. It confuses two questions:
1)the transition to a free society
and if you confuse them, you ask the question in political terms.
To me, 1) can best be understood as a spread from small societies to bigger ones–i.e., from individual to individual. The prob. is not exactly the same if you imagine a free condo, then another, then a free town, then a free county, etc.
Then, it appears that you never have to “settle” the basis of a free society once and for all, to write it down and have people vote, etc.
Jeremie, I’m not. What I’m suggesting is that Rothbard proposes #1, but his assumptions about #2 contradict #1.
If people have to have a “constitution” in order to prevent widespread chaos, that seems to imply Hobbes’ view about humanity and Rousseau’s theory about the social contract – both are positions Rothbard claimed to reject.
He agrees with right-wing Anarchists on #1, but disagrees with them on #2. In other words, he supports the existence of a fully free-market society, but acknowledges right-wing anarchists’ assumptions about crime are absurd,. His rejection of their assumptions about the firm existence of “spontaneous order” in the absence of a constitution make it difficult for him to claim to be an “Anarchist”.
The entire article is full of peculiarities as far as I’m concerned, but then again this is before he fully formulated his ideas on anarcho-capitalism.
Nathyn,
Rothbard was indeed an anarchist. His notion was, I believe, simply that private judges would have to take an oath to defend the non-aggression axiom, and that any judges who refused would have to be boycotted. I think he mentions this in For a New Liberty.
Rothbard’s problem is that he never understood his place in politics, and was always searching for a home for his libertarian views. Truth be told, his views were always left-wing, at least ever since he became an anarchist, and very likely long before that. (There is no such thing as “right anarchism” or “right libertarianism.” Likewise, there is nothing left-wing about Stalin, Castro, or Sen. Clinton.) He saw himself, correctly, as a leftist when he wrote “Left and Right: The Prospect for Liberty.” Unfortunately, by the early '90s, he was incorrectly calling himself a right-winger again.
Allix, first let me say that I agree the left\right distinction is silly, I agree. Ideologies are memetic,which means they extend in many countless directions, not just in one direction or even two as the “World’s Shortest Political Quiz” seems to suggest. People think about their ideologies in the way that they do, which may include rejecting the left\right dichotomy, the “social liberal” and “economic liberal” organization Libertarians use, or even both as I do.
The Reaganite claim “There is no left\right, only up or down – for freedom or against it” is particularly tenuous, considering the rich history of Social Liberalism and Socialism, and if you assume that at least some of them were being sincere about what they wrote.
If you read the actual writings of Social Liberals, like John Rawls, and Socialists like Marx, they don’t say, “God, we really hate freedom and love equality. We sure should find a way to destroy freedom.”
On the contrary, they regularly invoked the value of freedom – they just define it differently.
Your opinion relies on the assumption that every Social Liberal and Socialist who has ever lived has all engaged in an active conspiracy against Libertarianism. That’s just silly, although it appears to be a popular idea among Libertarians.
Libertarians charging Socialists with opposition to freedom is much the same as Conservatives accuse Liberals and Libertarians of opposing America.
The winter of 1949-50, in fact, witnessed the two most exciting and shattering intellectual events in my life: my discovery of “Austrian” economics, and my conversion to individualist anarchism
Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right. 1971
Since when? Do you wish to claim that I reject the claim of Brad Spangler that Rothbard was, in Spangler’s words, a “stigmergic socialist”? Do you wish to claim that I reject the claim of Roderick T. Long who says that the terms “socialist” and “capitalist” and anti-concepts, that they confuse the matter more than clarify it?
As far as I’m concerned, one can be a communist and just as left-wing as Rothbard, assuming said communist accepts the non-aggression axiom and believes his communism should be voluntaryist. Likewise, one can be an individualist and just as right-wing as Mussolini. An example that pops to mind is a fictional character named Jack, but who more often than not operated under the pseudonym Joker. Whereas I can’t really claim the Joker was a statist, I can certainly say his ethical nihilism propels him to the far-right.
I’d like to someday write up a little essay on my views on the political spectrum, but as of yet I’ve not found the time.
A right wing anarchist believes in property rights, a left wing anarchist believes in communism.
Left does not mean Liberal.
For what it’s worth, Rothbard also thought that it would be easy to form a proper libertarian legal framework. In light of that view, a constitution doesn’t seem particularly controversial.
From what I can tell, I hold a similar view of the political spectrum to yours. I agree with Roderick Long that socialism and capitalism have become anti-concepts. And I take what Rothbard said in “Left and Right: The Prospects For Liberty” very seriously. He completely tore down the fallacious view of the political spectrum that treated “right” as synanomous with less government and “left” as synanomous with more government, as well as the erroneous idea that things like the New Deal were inherently anti-buisiness.
Rothbard, at least since the 1960’s, was indeed an anarchist. The only significant difference between him and the individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker is a matter of economic theory and what they thought would happen in the absence of the state. Tucker thought that interest and profit would dissapear in the absence of the state. Murray, being better armed with economic thought with an education in Austrian economics under his belt, knew better.
Well I don’t consider myself “right-wing” at all. If anything, I’m a cultural “leftist” and I associate “the right” with economic fascism or corporatism rather then property rights and free markets. And so long as such communists are actually voluntarists, I have no objection in principle, only one of personal preferance.
Yes, you appear to support the ridiculous “Reagan” spectrum of “pro-freedom” and “anti-freedom.”
Like I said, ideologies are intricate webs of belief. This should seem obvious enough for Libertarians.
Let’s look at Market Anarchism, for instance. It draws influence from two main sources:
*Classical Anarchism (traditionally considered left wing because it’s Marxist)
*Economic Liberalism (traditionally considered right wing because it’s anti-Marxist)
So, is the ideology of Anarcho-Capitalism a left-wing or a right-wing phenomenon?
Now, even if we go by the Libertarian model of two-axis:
*Social freedom
*Economic freedom
This fails to make hardly any meaningful distinction between Minarchism and Market Anarchism. The goals of Minarchists and Market Anarchists are the same. They simply disagree on how they should be accomplished.
Now, if we judge ideologies based upon their intentions as you propose, then none of us are really any different, are we? Most people want live in a good world, where people are free.
You simply cannot judge ideologies based upon models which are skewed by your own ideology (Libertarian models focus on “freedom”, Marxist models focus on “Capitalism”). Ideologies can only be judged in relation to one another based upon ideas which are near-infinitely dimensional, not one dimensional or even two dimensional as some Libertarians propose.
This is why a one-dimensional up-down axis of MEANS is actually the correct spectrum. “Left” and “right” only represent preferances and culture. The means supported, political vs. voluntary means, is where the true political distinctions lie. You can take two people with widely different cultural views (say, Roderick Long and Hans Hoppe) and they are practically identical on a political axis of means. And you can take two people with very similar cultural views and they support opposite means towards those ends. Politics is about means. One can either support voluntary means or monocentric and coercive means. In theory, both “socialists” and “capitalists” can be voluntarists. They can also be statists if they persue political means.
“Ideologies are not primarily descriptions of things. They are wills to act.”
-Georges Sorel
When I wake up in the morning, I don’t tell myself, “God, I hate Libertarians and freedom. Boy, stealing from them through taxation is just great.”
In my mind, I have similar pictures of what a just society should look like: It should be mostly (if not completely) voluntary and it should be fair enough to the point that nobody can reasonably complain about unfairness. This shared similarity exists, partially because of the broad influence of Liberalism, but also because Humanism – the idea that humans are even valuable – underlies practically all human thought, nowadays.
What separates us, then, is that we both simply define ‘freedom’ and ‘theft’ differently.
Classifying ideologies under your model would involve either failing to make a distinction between ideologies by calling them all “left-wing” or it would involve tenuously classifying ideologies as right-wing, simply because you don’t agree with them.
Why should all ideologies be measured by the “axiom of non-aggression,” a proposal held only by Libertarians and no one else?
It’s silly and virtually no different than Marxists who divide all ideologies according to “capitalism.” I told them before I’m a Social Liberal at Revleft. Their label for me? Apparently, I’m a “bourgeoisie liberal” because I support capitalism.
In general, ideologues like to divide ideologies into the following grouping:
LEFT (good, free, fair, just)
RIGHT (evil, unfree, unfair, unjust)
But that proposal is just absurd, no matter what your ideology is and no matter what definitions of goodness, freedom, fairness, or justice you appeal to.
im sorry, this whole discussion has gone on and i havent seen the phrase ‘plumb line libertarian’
its relevant. you can get W Block on it. worth doing.
No. “Left-wing” and “right-wing” are not even a political axis (or any axis) in my spectrum. They are just culture. Classifying idelogies under my model does no such thing. Both “left-wing” and “right-wing” can be either libertarian or statist depending on what means are advocated towards those preferences.
For example, you can have libertarian racists who simply take a voluntarist approach. And you can have statist racists who do not. Even working under the assumption that racism is inherently “right-wing”, this “right-wing” tendency is not uniformly classified as one or the other. It can fall under either a libertarian or statist paradime depending on the means advocated.
If you were paying attention at all, this is not my proposal. Left and right are a completely different, if not irrelevant, axis. My proposal is that up/down is liberty vs. politics, and left and right are simply cultural preferences on the road between the two that can either be compatible or incompatible depending on what means one advocates or supports towards obtaining them. My spectrum does not even really grant that left/right is an axis, since it just consumer demand or personal preferance.
I wish I had a picture to paste illustrate what I mean. Imagine a verticle line with voluntarism and pluralism at the bottom, and force and monocentrism at the top. Then, without actually drawing a horizontal axis, simply place the words “cultural left” on the left end and “cultural right” on the right end. That’s my spectrum.
Feminists, anti-racists, anti-buisiness types, and so on, on the “cultural left” can theoretically fall anywhere on my axis depending on their actual politics (means). I do not consider those things to be actual political positions in themselves so much as personal preferences. Politics deals with the institutional framework and the means that such preferences are persued with.
Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism actually is influenced by three sources Classical Liberalism, Individualist Anarchism and Austrian Economics and it is very important to distinguish what kind of influences they provide to come to the solution on the left-right question. In reality the qualification of these three on left-right scale is completely irrelevant since with anarcho-capitalism you have something new. Rothbard himself actually rejected both, left and right, saying they were inconsistent within their ideologies. I think his association with both sides was only of practical nature within certain questions. As for anarcho-capitalism, it doesn’t fit into neither, left leaning towards socialism through big governments and right having problems with nationalism, facism and interventionist foreign policy.
Another influence was neo-aristotilean, Thomist natural law notions, unless you want to count that under “classical liberalism”. And while he had a fall-out with them early on, he definitely had a strain of Objectivist influence as well.
And where did Individualist Anarchists draw influence from?
*The egoist philosopher, Max Stirner
*The Marxist Anarchists
You seem to seriously abuse the term “classical liberalism,” because classical liberals were not all radical economic liberals. Take Paine, for existence, who advocated public education and healthcare.
Oh but he’s not a “true” classical liberal.
The identification of Libertarianism with Classical Liberalism is founded on nothing more than a true scotsman fallacy because a lot of Classical Liberals were economic liberals.