Libertarian Thinkers Quotes

Art was the first casualty of the Socialist and Communist revolutions of the 20th Century. Socialists killed the independent thinkers first.

Sadly enough, individual liberty remains the ideal of revolutionary thinkers even in the 21st Century.

Many thinkers have tried to “naturalize” consumerism in that way, including most social Darwinists, Austrian School economists (Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard), Chicago School economists (George Stigler, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker), Darwinian libertarians, globalization advocates, management gurus, and marketers. Their model (which I call the Wrong Conservative Model, because I think it’s wrong, and because it’s usually advocated by political conservatives) is: human nature + free markets = consumerist capitalism

Hayek later decided that what really separated him from his friend Keynes was that the latter always believed that certain advanced thinkers (Keynes among them, of course) could skillfully and accurately manipulate the social order to their own ends, without ill effects.

People continue to deploy the same justification of market society—that it would secure the personal independence of workers from arbitrary authority—long after it failed to deliver on its original aspiration. The result is a kind of political hemiagnosia: like those patients who cannot perceive one-half of their bodies, a large class of libertarian-leaning thinkers and politicians, with considerable public following, cannot perceive half of the economy: they cannot perceive the half that takes place beyond the market, after the employment contract is accepted.

Before the mid-20th century, when American libertarians entangled themselves in conservative coalitions against the New Deal and Soviet Communism, "free market" thinkers largely saw themselves as liberals or radicals, not as conservatives. Libertarian writers, from Smith to Bastiat to Spencer, had little interest in tailoring their politics to conservative or "pro-business" measurements. They frequently identified capitalists, and their protectionist policies, as among the most dangerous enemies of free exchange and property rights.

This left, which strangely echoes a libertarian and even neoliberal ethic of ant-statism, is nurtured intellectually by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and all those who have reassembled postmodern fragmentations under the banner of a largely incomprehensible post-structuralism that favours identity politicsand eschews class analysis. Autonomist, anarchist, and localist perspectives and actions are everywhere in evidence. But to the degree that this left seeks to change the world without taking power, so an increasingly consolidated plutocratic capitalist class remains unchallenged in its ability to dominate the world without constraint. This new ruling class is aided by a security and surveillance state that is by no means loath to use its police powers to quell all forms of dissent in the name of anti-terrorism.

Traditionally, thinkers in the market-liberal tradition have interpreted this to mean that economic liberties should be treated on a par with the civil and political liberties of citizens. Economic rights, like civil and political ones, are basic rights. Recently, though, some thinkers in this tradition have adopted a stronger thesis. They interpret the intrinsic value of capitalistic rights to mean that economic rights are more basic than other rights. At the limit, civil and political rights are not merely less weighty than property rights: such rights are themselves types of property rights.10 Property rights, on this view, are moral absolutes. The stronger interpretation would require the enforcement of almost any contract citizens enter into—for example, contracts for voluntary slavery or the transfer of vital bodily organs. The weaker interpretation of economic liberties would not: it affirms the inalienability of certain basic rights and liberties, including those protecting bodily integrity, and asserts that private economic rights must be protected along with the other basic rights and liberties. This is a significant dispute within the free market tradition. Indeed, within the technical literature, the term “libertarian” is sometimes reserved to mark the position of those who take the stronger/absolutist interpretation, with all others then being cast as (mere) “classical liberals.

Many of those now calling themselves “conservatives” owe more to Ayn Rand than to traditional conservative thinkers. Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan admit to having been significantly influenced by Rand. Glenn Beck and other so-called Christian conservatives sound more like Ayn Rand when it comes to the poor and unfortunate than anything written in the Gospels.

In the modern period, similar ideas are reiterated, for example, by an important political thinker who described what he called “a definite trend in the historic development of mankind,” which strives for “the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life.” The author was Rudolf Rocker, a leading twentieth-century anarchist thinker and activist.3 He was outlining an anarchist tradition culminating in his view in anarcho-syndicalism—in European terms, a variety of “libertarian socialism.” These

Many years ago I confronted a political activist whose inordinate desire for power was suddenly exposed. Instead of covering up and denying, he said to me: “I do not want to be an insect, like my father.” This shocking admission is something that Nietzsche, as the psychologist of the “will to power,” addressed with the following lines: What the father has hid comes out in the son; and oft have I found in the son the father’s revealed secret. Inspired ones they resemble; but it is not the heart that inspires them — but vengeance. And when they become subtle and cold, it is not spirit, but envy, that makes them so. Their jealously leads them also into thinker’s paths; and this is the sign of their jealousy — they always go too far: so that their fatigue has at last to go to sleep on the snow. In all their lamentations sounds vengeance, in all their eulogies is maleficence; and being judge seems to them bliss.

Question: It's a great book and its obvious that Guerin was very keen to blend what he felt were the best aspects of anarchism and the best aspects of socialism into this Libertarian Socialism. Do you think that those two terms Libertarian Socialism and Anarchism—are synonymous or do you think there are real differences between the two? Well, I don't think we can really say, because the terms of political discourse aren't well defined. Capitalism, trade, the state, pick any one... they are pretty loose terms. Which is okay, but it doesn't make sense to try to define these terms carefully when you don't have an explanatory theory to embed them in. But the fact is we can't really answer the question, anarchism covers too many things, libertarian socialism covers too many things. But I sympathize with what he's trying to do. I think it's the right thing. If you look carefully they are really close, there are similarities and relationships. The more anti-statist, antivanguardist left elements of the socialist movement, Marxist movement in fact—folks like Anton Pannekoek and others—there are close similarities between them and some of the wings of the anarchist movement, like the anarcho-syndicalists. It's pretty hard to make much of a distinction between, say, Pannekoek's workers' councils and anarcho-syndicalist conceptions of how to organize society. There are some differences, but they are the kind of differences that ought to exist when people are working together in comradely relationships. So, yes, that's a sensible blend in my view. The much sharper distinction is between all these movements and the various forms of totalitarianism like Bolshevism, corporate capitalism and so on. There you have a real break. Totalitarian structures on the one hand and free societies on the other. In fact, 1 think there are significant similarities between libertarian socialism and anarchism, this blend, and even very mainstream thinkers like John Dewey—there are striking similarities.