Individual freedom is the libertarian ideal, the abstract value which guides moral action. As a political idea, libertarianism emerged in the latter part of the 19th century from liberalism, the overarching political paradigm to come from the Enlightenment. Liberalism centred the individual, both as the architect of his own destiny through his faculty for reason and as the focal point for morality, leading to demands for political rights, such as equality before the law and consent of the governed, but also to a belief that rational government could be a force for good. It was in this that the libertarian belief in limited, or indeed no government is grounded; in the inviolability of property rights and adherence to the non-aggression principle, according to which we cannot initiate force against others. Individuals should be free to dispose over life and property, provided they do not violate the person or property of others.
It was, however, not everyone that agreed that individual rights should eclipse those of the collective. Some Enlightenment thinkers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were sceptical of property rights and inspired moral arguments against capitalism, laying grounds for not just the French Revolution but also early ideas of communism. But it was in the 19th century, with Karl Marx and his attempt at developing a scientific basis for communism, that things accelerated. Central to Marxism, and broadly in line with Rousseau, is the belief that human nature has been transformed by the oppression of capitalist society and that spiritual advancement is critical to return to a human nature that is defined by social relations and labour. It is only through this elevation of the human condition that authoritarian power, necessary after the revolution ushers in the dictatorship of the proletariat, can be abandoned and stateless communism, the inevitable endpoint of history, can be achieved. When the real-life application of Marx’s theory ended in catastrophe, as with most of his ideas, this turned out to be nonsense, of course, people did not become less individualistic by living in a socialist dictatorship. And when the ideological leaders then tried to impose their values on their unwilling populations it did not work out very well, but perhaps we should at least applaud Marx for recognising that a set of values and communal ideas, a common way to view the world, might be important.
The third major political ideology in the modern West was fascism, which is based in a belief that the state is an expression of the will of the people, to which the interest of the individual must be subordinated. Inspired by Georges Sorel, a Marxist who theorised that what he called myths, unifying stories that appeal to people’s existing inclinations, could be used to mobilise the masses, Benito Mussolini developed the myth of Italian nationalism, around which the people could rally. The Nazis added blood (race) to soil for their myth. So, just like the Marxists, the fascists relied on a shared understanding of the good, underpinning their authoritarian state with the people’s belief that greatness of the nation and its people was the historical imperative that must eclipse all other interests.
Liberalism, however, did no such thing. Originally, modernity had developed against a background of ethical beliefs that were grounded in virtues: Aristotelian ethics, which was hugely influential on European ideas, promotes purposeful virtuous living, and Christianity reveres virtues like faith and compassion, and holds saints as models for a virtuous life. And early liberals believed in such ideas. America was founded on them, most famously articulated by John Adams, who believed that a republic, where power is derived from the people, requires those people to act with a sense of virtue.
But the liberal ideal that was since to develop, especially in the wake of WW2, was very much dedicated to acceptance of different beliefs, lifestyles and opinions. Pluralism was seen as a strength and the very aim of liberal societies came to be understood as ensuring that people can believe what they want and live how they want and that the state’s role is to facilitate their freedom to do so. Modern liberalism posits that we can live harmoniously together, despite having totally different ideas of the good, as long as we commit to the ideal of tolerance and the primacy of democratic decision-making. Multiculturalism, then, is expected to lead to social cohesion by promoting a society where shared civic virtues coexist with cultural diversity, based in a common belief in tolerance and equality. Paradoxically, however, as cultural diversity has spread across the west, the commitment to tolerance has required a reinterpretation of the Marxist idea of cultivating a new man, able to live in a multicultural and equitable society by subverting any impulse to express bias or prejudice. Political correctness, identity politics, hate speech laws, DEI training has ensued.
The thinkers who came to believe that liberalism was not individualistic enough and that it was near-total freedom from the state, or even that the state must be abolished, that should be the ideal, did so under the devotion to one single value: freedom, as expressed through private property absolutism. The economic ideas that aligned with libertarianism, the Austrian School of Economics, carried these hyper-individualistic ideas along with them, focussing societal progress on creating optimal conditions for the realisation of subjective value preferences.
The fact that value is not intrinsic and relies instead on subjective preferences is of major consequence to economics, but how those subjective preferences arise is not. Libertarianism, then, became about absence of coercion and optimal conditions for economic advancement, but it was mostly silent on culture—deliberately so, as culture should be allowed to develop spontaneously. Hence, for a long time, libertarians all but ignored the question of whether order can thrive in an environment with pluralistic and fragmented values and virtues. But it is cultural structure that lends predictability to action and engenders order in society. It is one thing is to believe that we should not be prevented from pursuing our every base desire, quite another is to expect that an ordered and viable society can emerge without shared ideas and values. In other words, libertarianism concerned itself with the danger of unrestrained order, that is, tyrannical coercive power, and forgot about the danger of the absence of order. And it is not even enough to recognise the fact that cultural homogeneity is necessary, because that still leaves room for cultural relativism, that is, the necessity of a system for societal ideas does not preclude any particulars of that system.
It fell to the paleo-libertarians to address all this. Initially associated with Murray Rothbard in the 1990s and since then above all with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, paleo-libertarianism insists that far from being able to exist simply one the basis of non-aggression and property rights, a functional society must coalesce around cultural and social norms that act in support of these principles: conservative values, traditional family structures, scepticism towards social change. Multiculturalism’s moral relativism, thought Rothbard, was leading to societal decay, which in turn lead people to look to the state for solutions. And it is traditional conservatism, with its emphasis on moral absolutes, such as the respect for property rights that lies at the heart of libertarianism, which is the natural ally. If politics is the intervention in market outcomes to mitigate societal conflict, it follows that if cultural cohesion can lead to a more united society, it leaves less scope for the state to grow. But it is not a Marxist new man that engenders a voluntarily ordered society, it is free association and the right to exclude (the latter being a definition of what private property is) that is at the heart of it: a free society is not a tolerant society; it is one where we associate with our own and are intolerant of those who do not share our values. Libertarianism, with its laser-focus on freedom, undermined itself by insisting we could be both free and tolerant.
Today, right-wing populism and post-liberalism tap into this culture war, specifically around nativism and the preservation of national culture. They have resurrected the ideas of 20th century thinkers of the right, such as Carl Schmitt, who warned that liberal societies undermine themselves by fostering internal conflicts and weakening the cultural and political identity needed to resist external enemies, and Oswald Spengler, who believed Western civilisation was facing inevitable cultural decline and downfall and criticised reverence for materialism and technology. But some are also inspired by highly anti-individualist ideas, such as those of the radical traditionalist Julius Evola and the French New Right.
These new movements on the right are opposed to egalitarianism but also believe the fundamental problem with liberalism is the primacy it has given to the individual at the expense of collective identity and the “common good”. They are sceptical of democracy, in line with Hoppe, but also of capitalism and while they believe government has grown too big in many respects, they nevertheless see a clear role for the state, not just to intervene in markets but also to reinforce values and ensure communal cohesion, because while the paleo-libertarians see shared values as a cultural means in aide of liberty and economic progress, to the post-liberals, traditionalism and virtue ethics are ends in themselves. Hence, they would not rely on voluntary association and the right to exclude as the tools to engender cultural homogeneity, but champion the state’s right to shape cultural ideas through policy.
For individualists grounded in liberalism these are not comfortable allies. Despite this, it nevertheless seems that the paleo-libertarians, which we can call the libertarian right, at this moment in time have a more obvious kinship with this “new right” than with the, perhaps still dominant, strain of libertarianism that regards liberal social views as fundamental to belief in personal liberty. Aligning themselves with the liberal/progressive left (and in aide of postmodern reversal of power structures), they believe that a good society is open to all lifestyles and ideas, without considering if that makes for stability and order. They also tend to align themselves with “open border” policies, seeing borders as state-imposed restrictions on the right of free people to move as they like, without concern for societal consequences of cultural fragmentation. This branch of libertarianism may still be sceptical of war, be for low taxes and against the omnipresent, paternalistic, administrative state. But with their embrace of multicultural tolerance, they undermine freedom. We must not embrace our enemies. A free society is not a tolerant society.