Libertarianism
People own themselves and what they earn; the state should do almost nothing beyond preventing force and fraud.
What does this mean?
Libertarianism takes self-ownership as its foundation: each person belongs to themselves, and therefore to what they produce and freely exchange. Taxation beyond the minimum needed to prevent force and fraud is, on this view, a claim on someone’s labour that they did not consent to. The state is reduced to courts, police and defence, and everything else — schooling, insurance, roads, welfare — is provided by voluntary arrangement.
What distinguishes it from conservatism is that its suspicion of state power is symmetrical. Libertarians generally oppose drug prohibition, censorship, conscription, surveillance and immigration restriction as readily as they oppose taxation, because all of them involve directing people’s lives without consent. This makes it a consistently anti-authoritarian position that sits awkwardly on any left-to-right line.
Where did it come from?
Assembled in the mid-twentieth century United States from Austrian economics, natural-rights philosophy and older individualist currents, and given its sharpest philosophical statement by Robert Nozick in 1974 as a direct reply to Rawls. It has remained more an intellectual and activist current than an electoral one.
Major thinkers
- Robert Nozick
- Murray Rothbard
- Ludwig von Mises
- Friedrich Hayek
- Ayn Rand
Historical figures
- Ron Paul
- Barry Goldwater
What it looks like today
- The Libertarian Party in the United States and comparable small parties elsewhere
- Campaigns for drug decriminalisation, against mass surveillance and for occupational licensing reform
- Cryptocurrency and free-banking movements
Where it sits on each dimension
Wealth and inequality
The state in the economy
Personal liberty
Close to the maximum on this axis: personal conduct is the individual’s business, without exception for custom or majority disapproval.
Tradition and change
Nation and the world
Religion and the state
Power and its limits
Committed to limits on power, but not necessarily to majority rule — a majority has no more right to coerce than a king.
Environment and growth
Crime and punishment
Its strongest arguments
- It applies one principle consistently, and so avoids the common pattern of demanding freedom in the areas one cares about and control elsewhere.
- It takes the consent of the governed seriously as a constraint on what may be done to individuals, not merely as a story about elections.
- Its scepticism about state competence has been vindicated in a number of well-documented policy failures.
Its strongest criticisms
- Self-ownership does not obviously extend to natural resources and inherited wealth, which no one produced.
- Public goods, environmental damage and monopoly power are hard to handle through voluntary contract alone.
- Someone with no assets and no alternatives may face private coercion that a minimal state does nothing to prevent.
Common misconceptions
- That libertarians are simply very conservative. On drugs, censorship, surveillance, conscription and immigration they usually take the permissive side.
- That it means no rules. Libertarians want strong enforcement of property rights and contracts; the dispute is over what else the state may do.
- That all libertarians are anarchists. Most are minimal-statists who accept courts, police and defence as legitimate.
A caveat
A left-libertarian current shares the anti-authoritarianism but rejects the property conclusions. If you scored high on liberty and low on the economic axis, look at anarcho-socialism rather than this entry.
Sources
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia · Basic Books · 1974
- Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty · 1973
- Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty · 1960