‘The Individualists’ Review: The Philosophy of Freedom
Photo: Alamy Stock Photo By Barton Swaim June 28, 2023 5:51 pm ET Most politically attuned Americans will have some idea of what libertarianism is. Some think of it as an embrace of “business” or “capitalism” in all its forms; others as the anything-goes morality of 1960s radicalism. Still others, coming nearer the truth, will know libertarians as the people who want government “out of the bedroom and the boardroom,” as the slogan has it. In fact, as we are reminded by John Tomasi and Matt Zwolinski in “The Individualists,” libertarianism is a bit of all these things. It is a wildly diverse and inveterately fractious political tradition whose adherents have taken opposite sides on nearly every important political question. The book documents libertarian thought, from its origins in the sec
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Most politically attuned Americans will have some idea of what libertarianism is. Some think of it as an embrace of “business” or “capitalism” in all its forms; others as the anything-goes morality of 1960s radicalism. Still others, coming nearer the truth, will know libertarians as the people who want government “out of the bedroom and the boardroom,” as the slogan has it. In fact, as we are reminded by John Tomasi and Matt Zwolinski in “The Individualists,” libertarianism is a bit of all these things. It is a wildly diverse and inveterately fractious political tradition whose adherents have taken opposite sides on nearly every important political question.
The book documents libertarian thought, from its origins in the second half of the 19th century until now, on an assortment of topics, including markets, poverty, racial justice and the international order. The authors themselves claim the libertarian label and write clearly and charitably about all factions of the philosophy.
The Individualists
By Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi
(Princeton, 416 pages, $35)
What is libertarianism, anyway? The easy answer: an approach to politics that seeks to minimize state coercion and maximize individual liberty. That generalization, though, covers a multitude of disputes. Most libertarians support legal abortion, for example, and some oppose it, in both cases for reasons of individual sanctity. In the absence of any easy formulation for what all libertarians think, Messrs. Tomasi and Zwolinski propose six “markers”: property rights, individualism, free markets, skepticism of authority, negative liberties, and a belief that people are best left to order themselves spontaneously. Libertarians, the authors contend, keep all six principles in view at the same time.
They divide libertarianism into three historical eras, each responding to particular threats to liberty. The “primordial”-era libertarians—Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) in France, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) in Britain—formed their ideas in opposition to socialism. In 19th-century America, the great threat to liberty wasn’t socialism but slavery. Early American libertarians like the journalist Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) saw slavery “primarily through the lenses of authority and property rather than of race,” the authors write. “Libertarians condemned slavery as an unjust usurpation of individual sovereignty and a denial of the individual’s rightful entitlement to the fruits of their labor.” There was wisdom in understanding chattel slavery as theft—a definable crime—rather than as a form of the more nebulous sin of racism.
During the Cold War—the authors’ second era—libertarians tended to align with conservatives in opposition to central planning and devoted their attention mostly to economic subjects. It was an uneasy alliance. Libertarians and conservatives were both anticommunist on questions of personal liberty and economics, but the right favored military buildup and libertarians hated militarism. The two camps clashed on crime, drug legalization, abortion, obscenity on the airwaves and more. Already in 1969 the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) urged his readers “to go, to split, to leave the conservative movement where it belongs.”
The alliance largely dissolved in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Libertarians, quite as much as conservatives and liberals, experienced a crisis of identity. With socialism discredited everywhere, what held libertarianism together? In the 21st century, the movement in the U.S. has consisted in an assortment of competing, often disputatious intellectual cadres: anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, paleo-libertarians (right-wing), “liberaltarians” (left-wing) and many others.
“The Individualists” is a superb work of intellectual history. Anyone wishing to understand a modern political denomination encompassing such diverse creatures as the anarchist Albert Jay Nock, the priestess of capitalism Ayn Rand, the politician Rand Paul and the billionaire philanthropist Charles Koch ought to have a copy on his shelf. The book confirmed my belief, though, that modern libertarianism suffers from two intrinsic deficiencies.
The first: Libertarians’ unswerving concern for individual rights and loathing of coercion cause them to ignore the rights of communities to govern themselves. “They care about the freedom of individual human beings, not of collective entities,” as Messrs. Tomasi and Zwolinski plainly put it. But a world in which groups of people—neighborhoods, cities, states—can’t set their own rules without one or two individuals crying foul and denying them that authority is not a world defined by liberty.
The second is an outgrowth of the first. A polity, if it’s to function and endure, must offer its members a reason to remain attached, in their loyalties and affections, to the collective. That requires some engagement with ultimate questions—questions about the good life, morality, religious meaning, human purpose and so on. Modern libertarians are allergic to all such topics. Almost the only figures who mention such things in “The Individualists”—Adam Smith, William Lloyd Garrison—lived and died in the 18th or 19th century.
These two deficiencies have led, in my view, to a kind of exhaustion in libertarian thought. Messrs. Tomasi and Zwolinski proclaim their affiliation with something called Bleeding Heart Libertarianism. BHL, as it’s termed, favors a reconciliation of the philosophy of Friedrich Hayek, who advocated for property rights and free markets, with the left-liberalism of John Rawls, who prescribed vast state power to achieve the ends of social justice. The Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C., with which the authors are loosely associated, is dedicated to squaring this circle.
I find the attempted Rawls-Hayek synthesis totally unconvincing, but the more pertinent point is that it’s an attempt to smuggle big questions of justice and morality into the studiously amoral philosophy of libertarianism. “The Individualists” explains and defends the libertarian impulse with scholarly rigor. The book also works as an obituary.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial-page writer for the Journal.
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