Interesting comments from Will Wilkinson on whether libertarians are liberals. He’s referring to an article which defines libertarian as “natural rights anarchists and minimal statists such as [Robert] Nozick, [Murray] Rothbard, and [Ayn] Rand,” but describes liberals as “[Friedrich] Hayek, [James] Buchanan, and [Milton] Friedman,” the difference being that “natural rights anarchists and minarchists have no room for an account of legislative authority or political legitimacy...necessary conditions of liberalism.”
I can’t pretend to represent the views of Hayek, Nozick, et al., but as an Objectivist, I think I can say that this isn’t really accurate in describing Ayn Rand. First, the definition of “liberal” here is said to include necessarily five tenets:
- Political power should be institutional and not personal
- Political power is continuous (institutions survive the demise of particular persons)
- Political power is held in trust, as a fiduciary power
- As a fiduciary, government has political power delegated to it by the body politic
- Those who have political power are recognized as having authority to rule, and their actions have legitimacy.
Ayn Rand agreed with all of these principles, although perhaps she would have clarified that the “legitimacy” of the “actions” of “those who have...authority to rule” extends only so far as the legitimacy of the original authority to rule—what I mean is, the “trust” by which political power is held is a specific, limited trust, for certain purposes, and that the rulers cannot abuse that “trust” on the grounds that once they’ve obtained the right to rule, they can do whatever the hell they please. (But I think most folks would agree that that is assumed by these tenets. Fair enough.)
Objectivist libertarianism certainly has “room to account” for “political legitimacy,” on the grounds of consent, in the plain manner that Thomas Jefferson’s classical liberalism, or John Locke’s classical liberalism does. Robert Merrill describes Rand’s politics as “plain vanilla natural rights theory,” which is not quite true, but is accurate enough for present purposes. Suffice to say that if these tenets are the definition of liberal, then Ayn Rand was a liberal.
I, however, would say that although these are features of liberalism, they are not a satisfactory definition of liberalism. I associate liberalism with “dynamism” as the term is used in The Future And Its Enemies, and I would define the term as referring to the political view that individuals should be liberated from the coercive restraints imposed by others, as I explained in an old post on “What is Libertarianism.”
But dividing libertarianism from liberalism is probably misleading and unhelpful, something like dividing Christians from Catholics. There are certainly non-Catholics who would regard Catholics as not real Christians, but the Catholics would hardly concur. But on the other hand, as a hardline “classical liberal,” I regard the paleoconservatives who masquerade as libertarians over at Lew Rockwell.com to be a bunch of frauds, and not real libertarians, on the grounds that a true libertarian should put individual liberty as the primary political goal, while they believe that if one person wishes to enslave another, no third man may interfere. The problem is not that they’re libertarians while we’re liberals or something like that. It’s that we libertarians are liberals, while they are really conservatives who don’t like the drug laws. (But, of course, if some foreign dictator wished to have drug laws, that would be fine with them.)
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