For Old Authority and New Liberty

Why,In Spite of Certain Rhetorical Excesses, the Modern Libertarian Movement was not Born from the Spirit of Antinomianism

A while ago, in the comments to a blog that I read regularly, another reader suggested that the late Murray Rothbard was a “psychopath.”  This particular reader was evidently a sincere person, worried, as am I, about the decline of Western civil society.  Yet, somehow, I doubt that he knows a great deal about Rothbard, the most prominent property rights libertarian of the 20th century, or that his opinion merited any extended refutation.  None the less, it made me recollet that many years before, while I was studying political economy at George Mason University, persons less disinterested but more knowlegable, had made similar accusations.

My personal acquaintance with Rothbard was brief and unsatisfactory.  He was indeed your cranky kind of genius, quick to enthuse, but also quick to take offence…not so much personal offense as a protective mother-hen kind of offense towards any person or party threatening his own ideas and projects.  He was the most clear and consitant thinker that the American libertarian movment ever produced, yet he wound up alienating almost every faction of that movement, inside or outside of the Libertarian party.  The economic faculty at GMU fell largely into the category of the alienated, and during my time there I overheard a great deal of innuendo to the effect that he was a crank and increasingly off his rocker.

None the less, everybody in the Austrian program at GMU liberally used his works, especially his systematic exposition of political economy: Man, Economy, and State.    Over the long run I have come to the conclusion that the antagonism towards Rothbard among radical libertarians was largely oedipal, a breaking of the transference onto the father-figure once his precepts had been sufficiently internalized.  I was fighting my own demons at the time, and eventually dropped out of economics.  To put it in the dismissive tones of the Randians I “turned to mysticism.”  Yet I always hoped that some day I would be able to help forge a synthesis of faith and reason for our own times.  Oddly enough, at this juncture I find myself defending the sanity of an atheist to that end!

The Alchemical Wedding of Authoritarianism and Libertarianism

I doubt that the man I mentioned, who recently called Rothbard a “psychopath” is  a GMU educated Austrian economist.  Rather, I suspect he is a concerned conservative who thinks all professed libertarians are missing a critical number of their cognitive marbles.  In fact, there are certain well known pathologies rampant in libertarian circles.  Let me rattle off just a few.

There is the LP candidate who in his or her “heart of hearts” really thinks there is a chance of becoming a state Governor, a US Senator, and yes…some day, but inevitably the first Libertarian President of the United States of America.  All that, and on a small govenment platform none the less.

There is the doper libertarian, who rages against the state narcotics laws though active resistance.  While I agree that the “war on drugs” is madness…I am less convinced of the shamanic revelations of these theogenic practitioners.

There is also a special kind of madness, peculiar to property rights anarchist and virtually unknown in other circles.  This is a person who patents his or her ideology, and then allows other people to use their ideas for a price.  Rothbard was not one of these people, and we can therefore freely think, read, and write about his ideas without sending the royalties to his heirs.

Finally, and I think this is really what the concerned conservative was getting at, there is the libertarian who has migrated in from left-anarchism who really is an antinomian.  He or she will steal your loaf of bread, on the premise that the oil cartel has stolen the world’s petroleum reserves, and all is fair in love and war.  The nub of the problem here is that “libertarianism” is not a univocal term.  It means many things to many different people.

And here we finally get to the roots of Rothbard’s (and the libertarian movement’s) madness.  It was, and is, a rhetorical madness…a matter of overstating the case for economic and civil freedoms during the Cold War era, since such an overstatement  provided a convenient line of demarcation from the nationalists, centralizers, and militarists in the conservative camp.  For example, I once heard Rothbard, who was never hesitant to call himself an “anarchist” state plainly that he would be happy to go back to the Articles of Confederation.

The rhetorical problem for libertarians (and I am just using Rothbard as the prime example here) is that they cannot state the implicit premise in their argument, for if they did they would have to call themselves “authoritarians.”  Yes, libertarianism is ultimately dependent on the authority of law, natural law, and in the most profound and benevolent sense could be called authoritarianism.  The choice is not between liberty and authority, but rather “each together with the other.”  This is the secret of libertarianism, or at any rate the paleolibertarian tradition that characterizes Albert J. Nock, Garit Garrett, Isabel Patterson and, if you read him closely, Murray Rothbard.  Authority is the stable solution into which the elixir of liberty is poured, thus producing a free society.

The Old and the New vs. The New and the Old

At this point any reader with a healthy sense of skepticism will suspect me of introducing Hegelian sophisms into the otherwise straighforward arguements of the Austrian economists and other libertarian thinkers.  Do we combine one part authoritarianism, and one part libertarianism into the pot and then, perhaps using that magic Hegelian word “aufheben” derive a dialectical synthesis called the free society?  Doesn’t this sound like a obscuring cover for the well despised tactic of compromising principles for immediate advantage?

A few things need to be taken into consideration.  First of all, the historicist dialectic of Hegel involved more than the combination of opposites, it required an infallible melioration in the direction of the future.  In other words, it was modernist rather than conservative.  If we have arrived at such and such a point in history, then we are “the crown of creation” because we stand higher on the strata of previous thought epochs.

What I am saying is that the thought of classical (Nock etc.) libertarianism is in some way an inverted figure of Hegelian logic.  The authority of reason, natural law, and Christian revelation was never abrogated by historical evolution, rather it must be retained as the bedrock of future developments in freedom.  What is new in every epoch is a liberal movement for the restoration of natural rights.  To quote Rothbard’s most popular title, we are always striving for, intending “a new freedom” but such movements are only sucessful when they reinstate conditions of natural law.

To put this in a more concrete context, lets consider the constitution, or rather constitutions, of the United States of America.  Depending on the depth of our time horizon, America may be said to have several constitutions, of  various depths, operating simultaniously.  At the its most shallow, what we could call the “short constitution” is what is vugarly called the “living constitution” i.e., the decision of the most recent Supreme Court Case on any particular matter.  But of course there is also the constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights of 1791, which some would prefer to interpret in terms of the intentions of the framers.  Yet this itself is nothing more than a kind of “middle length” constitution.  The real “long constitution” of the United States (possibly excepting the state of Louisiana) is the tradition of common law and rights theorists going back to the Magna Carta.

But when we go back into the depths of history, we get to a point in natural law theory (whether we take the “northern route” of Grotius or the “southern route” of Suarez) where rights and duties merge into a single authoritative oracle.  It is grounded, not in the social statics of Herbert Spencer (as certain left libertarians would wish) but in the primal theories of Christian anthropology, these themselves resulting from a rigorous operation of reason on the data of experience combined with the premises provided by revelation.  How could it be otherwise?  A theory of rights based on further rights is like a cosmology based on the backs of decending turtles, and in the case of liberal theory the last turtle would be suspended precariously sometime during the generation of John Stuart Mill!

I don’t think Murray Rothbard ever put it in such definitive terms…but then how could he?  He would have lost all his rhetorical clout if he had simply said “individual and property rights are ultimately based on an authoritarianism based on tradition and revelation.”  None the less, for all his vaunted “atheism” Rothbard unerringly came down on the side of the conservatives in the culture wars.  For that reason he left much of what I have said here as a tacit understanding, the necessary authoritarian cultural background against which the gestalt of personal freedom could form.

To reiterate, this is precisely the opposite of the proceedure of post-Hegelian (or rather post-Rousseuvian, and perhaps even post-Hobbsian) thinking.  In these theories freedom is primal, and the accomplishment of culture is precisely the construction of larger and better systems of order.  In natural rights theories a divinely mandated order is primal, and movements for “new freedom” are required whenever, on top of the natural order, a userping cultural order has been imposed.

I submit that this is the logic that motivated the “Old Right” which, for better or worse, became known as the “libertarian movement” towards the middle of the 20th century.  It needed terms to differentiate itself from both the right-nationalists and the “liberals”…i.e., the social democrats, who have once again reclaimed power in the most recent elections.

Of course there will be left-libertairians who deny that there was any connection between the movement of the latter 20th century and the Old Right.  I leave them as they are, standing on a rather short stack of ideological turtles.  For the present I assume that I  have shown that “libertarianism” as defined above is not antinomian…or even crazy.

Could Albert J. Nock stomach contemporary American Libertarianism?

Short answer…NO

This isn’t a rant against the recently defeated Bob Barr, not that Barr doesn’t deserve a stern recapitulation of his errors.  Even if Barr had been a “good libertarian” would that have been enough?  Methinks not!  The idea that there is such a thing as a pure libertarianism which somehow provides an axiom for all moral inquests is itself a delusion.  Yes, the state, and specifically the unrestrained modern state, is at the root of much of  our discontent but simply to describe one’s world view as “anti-statist” is no more adequate a philosophy than any other sort of “anti-” ism.  The case against the “anti-” mentality, namely that one is ruled by a passion which depends on the existence of an adversary, and which assures one’s obsession with that adversary, is prima facie.  In this case it is easily substantiated by the fact that most libertarians are political junkies 24/7. Indeed, just to take one alleged progenitor, if they resemble Thoreau in any of his phases, it is not the anarchistic Thoreau but the manic-depressive Thoreau who found renewed reason to live in the outbreak of the Civil War.  Surely a more expensive remedy than retirement to Walden Pond!

Libertarianism has a more imitable progenitor in Albert J. Nock.  I am not sure to what extent he used the title “libertarian” at all, but I am sure that if he did it was probably towards the latter part of his life, when others like Isabel Patterson and Rose Wilder Lane were already being described as such.  His self description was originally “radical” but like many another advocate of liberty he found to his bemusement that the New Deal turned him into a conservative.  None the less he would not have considered himself to have been exhausted by the phrase “radical” even more than “conservative” or “libertarian.”  He was a man who insisted on being sui generis, deeper than the party to which he affiliated, even if that party was not a real organization but a mere school of thought.  His politics followed from his being…not vice versa.

Yet it would be nice, for our purposes, to give his general turn of mind…inclusive of but not exhausted by political ideology, a kind of name.  Somehow I doubt that Nock would have objected to the name “Christian Humanist.”  But what does that really mean?  Putting aside the shallow opinions of fundamentalists who would consider it an oxymoron, there are a great many Christian Humanisms to choose from.  This blog’s patron, Pico della Mirandola, was one of the more famous of them, and term itself seems irrevocably stuck in the time somewhere between Petrarch and Galileo.  After a great meditation on the subject I have come up with a succinct definition of Humanism, at least as it was understood in the Renaissance.  A “humanist” was a scholar, invariably male, who preferred Cicero speaking in good Latin to Aristotle speaking in bad Latin.

I can hardly think of a definition less adaptable to our time, or even the relatively proximate time of Nock.  Yet Nock was in some sense precisely that kind of Humanist.  I’m not claiming this because Nock happened to make a study of Rabellais.  Anybody could, and anybody has, been a Rabellais scholar…and that would not necessarily a humanist make.  Nock was a kindred soul to Ciceronian rhetoric, and scorned the kind of dialectic which is the only thing that students pick out of the Aristotelian corpus.  Thus when Nock argued for freedom he didn’t start out a priori in the manner of Mises, Rothbard, or Rand.  He started out more like Hayek, with an examination of history and institutions, but his American wit kept him from the kind of ponderous system-building which confounded Hayek’s radicalism and made his thought fodder for  political obscurantism.

The problem with contemporary libertarianism is its obsession with axiomatic systems and intellectual purity.  This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be grateful for a priori reasoners like Mises, Rothbard, and Rand.  Rather, it is their numerous intellectual progeny who have lost the thread of discourse in the maze of intellectual dialectic.  Few of them would see themselves as dialecticians of course, knowing the term only  under its Marxian variant…and perhaps only refering to themselves as “thinkers” or “intellectuals.”  But it is the narrow and uncongenial ambiance of these “thinkers” and “intellectuals” which drives otherwise sane people into the hands of outright opportunists like Barr.

Nock talked around problems rather than dogmatizing.  None the less his talk always had a direction which led deeper into freedom.  It was, as it were, a libertarianism of the will rather than a libertarianism of the concept.  We already have libertarian utopias of the mind…what we need is a libertarian topos, a free country…or even a free world.  We will never get there by the deductions of “thinkers” and “intellectuals” and we will never get there by selling out to opportunists.  We might, I don’t know for sure, but we might, get there through the efforts of those who are broad enough in their minds to use persuasion, rather than coercion, in argument as in life.

Something like that, I submit, would be the recommendation of Albert J. Nock.