Mark Olson has posted a reply to my commentary with regard to whether a state has a legitimate right to perpetuate itself at the expense of its citizens. There are a few bits I’d like to go over quickly.
First, Olson deserves congratulations for candidly acknowledging that his views are quite distant from the classical liberal values that underlie the American Constitution. He describes his own views as a combination of Bernard de Jouvenel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I know nothing about Jouvenel and only a bit about Solzhenitsyn, but I do know a lot about the classical liberalism of the American polity, so to a large degree we are probably going to keep talking past each other.
Second, Olson objects to my comment that the word “polis” can never be applied to the United States. But you’ll note that he actually proves my point. I was careful in my earlier post to say that the word “polis” cannot apply to any city in the United States—but Olson responds that “The early colonial period had a lot of instances...” and referring to David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed. Fine enough, but of course the “early colonial period” is not the United States, since the United States came into being in July of 1776. Moreover, it did so as a secular, social compact entity with written constitutions, overlaying a monotheistic, Enlightenment culture—just about as opposite from the polis as you could conceivably get! (Actually, I would dispute that even the British colonies were or had anything properly describable as poleis, but the point’s rather moot.)
Third, alongside his rejection of the political philosophy of the Declaration and Constitution, Olson rejects the very notion of rights. I think this is very instructive.
Fourth, and relatedly, Olson bases his rejection of rights on a confusion between descriptive and normative accounts of politics. He writes for example, that “there is no actual mechanism that can or does exist to limit the ‘rights’ that the government might not, if it chose, take [away].” In other words, there are no such things as rights because rights can be and often have been violated. By this logic, of course, there is no such thing as wealth, because there are such things as burglars; there is no such thing as peace, because there have been wars; there is no such thing as goodness, because people can and do act badly. (Amusingly, Olson accuses me of this same logical fallacy later on, when he claims that I am arguing that the fact that states can make mistakes when determining their interests proves there are no interests. I do not make this argument, but if I did, it would indeed be the fallacy that Olson actually does commit!)
Obviously no libertarian claims that rights are somehow a magic potion that keeps the individual safe from tyranny. Rights are instead a moral claim which draw a moral boundary: rights are something that no state may justly violate. Can Olson really not know this? The point was certainly made clear in the Declaration, which begins with individuals having rights and then says that government exists to secure (though obviously imperfectly) those rights.
As to Olson’s claim that I make a straw man argument about state’s interests, he is mischaracterizing my point. I do not say that the fact that states may find it difficult to identify their interests proves there are no such interests. I say instead that the very nature of “state interests” is too vague—because too multi-faceted—for there to be any coherent definition. A “state” is a group of individuals, whose interests are so multifaceted that it is simply not possible to identify something as being in the “interests” of the state except for those things that are in the interests of all of the people individually—which is to say, the protection of individual rights. Anything else is only in the interest of particular groups at the expense of other groups. The “state” in this respect is like “the economy” or “the internet”: you can speak of it as a single entity, but in fact it is a virtually infinite number of entities. Identifying “its” interests is therefore, as far as I can see, an impossible enterprise. States are just not the kinds of things that can have interests. Of course, I could be wrong—I would like to know what mechanism Olson would propose as a way of identifying the “interests” of the state, as opposed to the interests of particular people or groups within it.
Olson seems to slip into some hysterics over my reference to Paine’s distinction between government and society. Oh yeah? he cries, What if you were invaded by Nazis?! Well, of course, invasion and Nazi suggest the violation of individual rights, which would obviously be an appropriate point of government intervention. Far more relevant is something like illegal immigration in the Southwest—a peaceful influx of people whose culture is quite different and who, though violating no individual’s rights, are changing “society.” Should the state exclude them to protect “society”? Interestingly enough, I have actually argued that the answer is yes—while acknowledging that that answer sits uncomfortably with my libertarian views. (But really, Nazis? Knitting clubs? Is this the sort of argument social conservatives muster nowadays?)
Most interestingly of all, Olson evades my question about the objectivity of values. I asked whether on his premises he would hold that Middle Eastern states have the right to defend the practice of female circumcision against innovators within those states who would try to abolish the practice—let alone invaders from the West who want to put a stop to it. He does not answer the question. Instead, he says “By Western, and Christian, standards Sharia is reprehensible. Internally speaking, those in the state would like the state to have the right to encode laws that ensure it’s continuance. Externally, we in the West might hope that this is not the case. But … from a generic point of view, this is actually a point in favor of the idea that a state as a collective naturally includes a notion that it has internally as part of being a state the right to enact laws to ensure it’s continuance.”
I have no idea what that last sentence means. But it certainly sounds as though Olson is arguing that there is no universal right and wrong—that right and wrong are set at the level of “society” and therefore that each “society” can defend “its” view of right and wrong against other “societies” and individuals. There is no right and wrong to mediate between the two. This is the sort of cultural relativism one usually finds behind religious conservatism. I’ve often pointed to it in Bork, Kirk, and other conservatives—not to mention its most brazen form in the (non-conservative) views of Richard Posner. In Olson’s view, if a society “chooses” (i.e., the ruling faction in a society chooses) to oppress the minority, then “talk of rights is nonsensical,” and it is simply nobody else’s business. Exodus 23:2, then, would also appear to be nonsensical. And Olson stands convicted of Lincoln’s charge against Stephen Douglas: “Douglas popular sovereignty, as a matter of principle, simply is ‘If one man would enslave another, neither that other, nor any third man, has a right to object.”*
In Olson’s view, as in Bork’s and Kirk’s, the collective is the determiner of right and wrong, and just and unjust; justice is the will of the stronger faction. One might be surprised to find a Hobbesian argument coming from a man who distanced himself from Hobbes; it’s more surprising from a man who claims faith in an Almighty power Who would never have patience for such vulgar, pseudo-humanistic relativism.
Olson says that “the New England folkway’s notion of Liberty which Mr. Fischer terms ‘Publick Liberty’ is something...which is today rejected very much to our loss.” Of course, this “notion of Liberty” was in fact not liberty at all, but collectivism—a form of collective independence which, while it did have something in common with the Greek poleis, was very far from “a liberty to dispose and order freely as he lists his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.” This definition of liberty was understood contemporaneously with the “publick liberty” (the “k” makes all the difference, don’t it?) which refers to a community’s ability to enforce majority will on a dissenting individual. And it was the former, not the latter, that underlay the American revolution. As Jefferson said, “an elective despotism was not the government we fought for.” If Olson thinks the American Revolution was basically a bad thing, fair enough—it would certainly make him a particularly consistent theocratic anti-individualist—but it’s worth emphasizing how alienated that view is from the heart and soul of the American polity.
Finally, how is it that libertarianism is both “from the ivory tower” and “backwoods”? One amusing thing about logic-free arguments is the way their proponents will grasp even at contradictory justifications....
*-It is amusing that Olson repeatedly asks what I think of Lincoln, since I have made that clear many, many times. Here is just one example.
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