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Title: Libertarianism: Bogus Anarchy
Author: Peter Sabatini
Date: 1994–1995
Language: en
Topics: individualist, right libertarian
Source: Retrieved on December 3, 2009 from http://www.spunk.org/library/otherpol/critique/sp000713.txt
Notes: This article appears in issue #41 (Fall/Winter 1994–95) of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed available for 3.50 postpaid from B.A.L. Press, P.O. Box 2647, New York, NY 10009.

Peter Sabatini

Libertarianism: Bogus Anarchy

A distinct mainstream movement specific to the United States,

Libertarianism had its inception during the 1960s. In 1971 it formed

into a political party and went on to make a strong showing in several

elections.[1]

Libertarianism is at times referred to as “anarchism,” and certain of

its adherents call themselves “anarchists,” e.g., the economist James

Buchanan.[2] More significant, the work of US individualist anarchists

(Benjamin Tucker et al.) is cited by some Libertarians.[3] Accordingly,

it may rightly be asked whether Libertarianism is in fact anarchism.

Exactly what is the relationship between the two? To properly decide the

question requires a synopsis of anarchist history.

The chronology of anarchism within the United States corresponds to what

transpired in Europe and other locations. An organized anarchist

movement imbued with a revolutionary collectivist, then communist,

orientation came to fruition in the late 1870s. At that time, Chicago

was a primary center of anarchist activity within the USA, due in part

to its large immigrant population.[4] (Chicago was also where the

Haymarket affair occurred in 1886. An unknown assailant threw a bomb as

police broke up a public protest demonstration. Many radicals were

arrested, and several hanged on the flimsiest of evidence.) Despite off

and on political repression, the US anarchist movement continued in an

expansive mode until the mid-1890s, when it then began to flounder. By

1900, anarchy was visibly in decline.[5]

But like its counterpart in Europe, anarchism’s marginalization in the

United States was temporarily slowed by the arrival of syndicalism.

North American syndicalism appeared 1904–1905 in the form of a militant

unionism known as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Anarchists

entered the IWW along with revolutionary socialists. The alliance did

not last long. [6] Internal squabbles soon split the IWW, and for a time

there existed anarchist and socialist versions. Finally, with

involvement of the US in WWI, the anarchist IWW, and anarchism in

general, dropped from the public domain.[7]

Anarchy in the USA consisted not only of the

Bakunin-collectivist/syndicalist and Kropotkin-communist strains, but

also the Proudhon-mutualist/individualist variant associated most

closely with Benjamin Tucker. Individualist anarchy actually had a

longer history of duration within the United States than the other two,

but not only because Proudhon preceded Bakunin and Kropotkin. There were

other individualist anarchists before Tucker who had ties to various

radical movements which predate Proudhon. Within the United States of

early to mid-19^(th) century, there appeared an array of communal and

“utopian” counterculture groups (including the so-called free love

movement). William Godwin’s anarchism exerted an ideological influence

on some of this, but more so the socialism of Robert Owen and Charles

Fourier. [8] After success of his British venture, Owen himself

established a cooperative community within the United States at New

Harmony, Indiana during 1825. One member of this commune was Josiah

Warren (1798–1874), considered to be the first individualist

anarchist.[9] After New Harmony failed Warren shifted his ideological

loyalties from socialism to anarchism (which was no great leap, given

that Owen’s socialism had been predicated on Godwin’s anarchism).[10]

Then he founded his own commune (“Modern Times”) and propounded an

individualist doctrine which nicely dovetailed with Proudhon’s mutualism

arriving from abroad.[11] Warren’s activities attracted a number of

converts, some of whom helped to further develop American mutualism. The

most important of these were Ezra Heywood (1829–1893), William B. Greene

(1819–1878), and Lysander Spooner (1808–1887). The advent of the Civil

War put an end to much of the utopian movement and its communal living

experiments. Individualist anarchism was itself reduced to an agitprop

journalistic enterprise of some measurable popularity.[12]

And in this form it found its most eloquent voice with Benjamin Tucker

and his magazine Liberty. Tucker had been acquainted with Heywood and

other individualist anarchists, and he subsequently converted to

mutualism.[13] Thereafter he served as the movement’s chief polemist and

guiding hand.

The Proudhonist anarchy that Tucker represented was largely superseded

in Europe by revolutionary collectivism and anarcho-communism. The same

changeover occurred in the US, although mainly among subgroups of

working class immigrants who were settling in urban areas. For these

recent immigrants caught up in tenuous circumstances within the vortex

of emerging corporate capitalism, a revolutionary anarchy had greater

relevancy than go slow mutualism. On the other hand, individualist

anarchism also persisted within the United States because it had the

support of a different (more established, middle class, and formally

educated) audience that represented the earlier stream of indigenous

North American radicalism reflecting this region’s unique, and rapidly

fading, decentralized economic development. Although individualist and

communist anarchy are fundamentally one and the same doctrine, their

respective supporters still ended up at loggerheads over tactical

differences.[14] But in any event, the clash between the two variants

was ultimately resolved by factors beyond their control. Just as

anarcho-communism entered a political twilight zone in the 1890s,

American mutualism did likewise. Tucker’s bookstore operation burned

down in 1908, and this not only terminated publication of Liberty, but

also what remained of the individualist anarchism “movement.” The

aggregate of support upon which this thread of thought had depended was

already in dissipation.[15] Individualist anarchy after 1900 receded

rapidly to the radical outback.

What then does any of this have to do with Libertarianism? In effect,

nothing, aside from a few unsupported claims. Libertarianism is not

anarchism, but actually a form of liberalism. It does, however, have a

point of origin that is traceable to the same juncture as anarchism’s

marginalization. So in this limited sense there is a shared commonality.

To be more precise, the rapid industrialization that occurred within the

United States after the Civil War went hand in glove with a sizable

expansion of the American state.[16] At the turn of the century, local

entrepreneurial (proprietorship/partnership) business was overshadowed

in short order by transnational corporate capitalism.[17] The

catastrophic transformation of US society that followed in the wake of

corporate capitalism fueled not only left wing radicalism (anarchism and

socialism), but also some prominent right wing opposition from dissident

elements anchored within liberalism. The various stratum comprising the

capitalist class responded differentially to these transpiring events as

a function of their respective position of benefit. Small business that

remained as such came to greatly resent the economic advantage corporate

capitalism secured to itself, and the sweeping changes the latter

imposed on the presumed ground rules of bourgeois competition.[18]

Nevertheless, because capitalism is liberalism’s raison d’être, small

business operators had little choice but to blame the state for their

financial woes, otherwise they moved themselves to another ideological

camp (anti-capitalism). Hence, the enlarged state was imputed as the

primary cause for capitalism’s “aberration” into its monopoly form, and

thus it became the scapegoat for small business complaint. Such

sentiments are found vented within a small body of literature extending

from this time, e.g., Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, The State (1935);

what may now rightly be called proto-Libertarianism.[19]

As a self-identified ideological movement, however, Libertarianism took

more definite shape from the 1940s onward through the writings of

novelist Ayn Rand. The exaltation of liberal individualism and minimal

state laissez-faire capitalism that permeates Rand’s fictional work as a

chronic theme attracted a cult following within the United States. To

further accommodate supporters, Rand fashioned her own popular

philosophy (“Objectivism”) and a membership organization. Many of those

who would later form the nucleus of Libertarianism came out of

Objectivism, including two of its chief theoreticians, John Hospers and

Murray Rothbard.[20] Another conduit into Libertarianism carried a

breakaway faction from William F. Buckley’s college youth club, the

Edmund Burke-style conservative Young Americans For Freedom.[21] More

academic input arrived from the Austrian school of neoclassical

economics promulgated by F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises (of which the

economist Rothbard subscribes).[22] All these marginal streams

intermingled during the mid to late 1960s, and finally settled out as

Libertarianism in the early 1970s.[23]

It is no coincidence that Libertarianism solidified and conspicuously

appeared on the scene just after the United States entered an economic

downturn (at the same time Keynesian economics was discredited and

neoclassical theory staged a comeback). The world-wide retrenchment of

capitalism that began in the late 1960s broke the ideological strangle

hold of a particular variant of (Locke-Rousseau) liberalism, thereby

allowing the public airing of other (Locke-Burke) strains representing

disaffected elements within the capitalist class, including small

business interests. Libertarianism was one aspect of this New Right

offensive. It appeared to be something sui generis. Libertarianism

provided a simplistic status quo explanation to an anxious middle class

threatened by the unfathomed malaise of capitalism and growing societal

deterioration, i.e., blame the state. And this prevalent grasping at

straws attitude accounts for the success of Robert Nozick’s

popularization of Libertarianism, Anarchy, State, And Utopia (1974). It

rode the crest of this polemic rift within liberalism. The book was

deemed controversial, even extreme, by establishment liberals (and

social democrats long pacified by the welfare state), who, secure in

power for decades, were now under sustained attack by their own right

wing. Yet at bedrock, Nozick’s treatise was nothing more than old wine

in a new bottle, an updating of John Locke.[24]

Libertarianism is not anarchism. Some Libertarians readily admit this.

For example, Ayn Rand, the radical egoist, expressly disavows the

communal individuality of Stirner in favor of liberalism’s stark

individualism.[25] Plus Robert Nozick makes pointed reference to the US

individualist anarchists, and summarily dismisses them.[26] This

explicit rejection of anarchism is evidence of the basic liberalist

ideology that Libertarians hold dear. But more specifically, within the

movement itself there exist factional interests.[27] There are

Libertarians who emphasize lifestyle issues and civil liberties (an

amplification of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty). They want the state out

of their “private” lives, e.g., in drug use and sexual activity. Others

are chiefly concerned with economics. They champion laissez-faire

“free-market” neoclassical economics, and fault the state for corrupting

“natural” capitalism. Although both groups despise the state intensely,

neither wants to completely do away with it. This minimal state

position, sufficient by itself to debar Libertarianism from

classification as anarchism, is embraced by Rand, Buchanan, Hospers, and

Nozick.[28] More revealing, however, is why Libertarians retain the

state. What they always insist on maintaining are the state’s coercive

apparatuses of law, police, and military.[29] The reason flows directly

from their view of human nature, which is a hallmark of liberalism, not

anarchism. That is, Libertarianism ascribes social problems within

society (crime, poverty, etc.) to an inherent disposition of humans (re:

why Locke argues people leave the “state of nature”), hence the constant

need for “impartial” force supplied by the state. Human corruption and

degeneracy stemming from structural externalities as a function of power

is never admitted because Libertarianism, like liberalism, fully

supports capitalism. It does not object to its power, centralization,

economic inequality, hierarchy, and authority. The “liberty” to exploit

labor and amass property unencumbered by the state is the quintessence

of capitalism, and the credo of Libertarianism née liberalism, all of

which is the utter negation of anarchism.

Lastly to be addressed is the apparent anomaly of Murray Rothbard.

Within Libertarianism, Rothbard represents a minority perspective that

actually argues for the total elimination of the state. However

Rothbard’s claim as an anarchist is quickly voided when it is shown that

he only wants an end to the public state. In its place he allows

countless private states, with each person supplying their own police

force, army, and law, or else purchasing these services from capitalist

venders.[30] Rothbard has no problem whatsoever with the amassing of

wealth, therefore those with more capital will inevitably have greater

coercive force at their disposal, just as they do now. Additionally, in

those rare moments when Rothbard (or any other Libertarian) does draw

upon individualist anarchism, he is always highly selective about what

he pulls out. Most of the doctrine’s core principles, being decidedly

anti-Libertarianism, are conveniently ignored, and so what remains is

shrill anti-statism conjoined to a vacuous freedom in hackneyed defense

of capitalism. In sum, the “anarchy” of Libertarianism reduces to a

liberal fraud. David Wieck’s critique of Rothbard, applicable to

Libertarianism in general, will close this discussion.

“Out of the history of anarchist thought and action Rothbard has pulled

forth a single thread, the thread of individualism, and defines that

individualism in a way alien even to the spirit of a Max Stirner or a

Benjamin Tucker, whose heritage I presume he would claim — to say

nothing of how alien is his way to the spirit of Godwin, Proudhon,

Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, and the historically anonymous persons

who through their thoughts and action have tried to give anarchism a

living meaning. Out of this thread Rothbard manufactures one more

bourgeois ideology.”[31]

[1] David DeLeon, The American As Anarchist: Reflections On Indigenous

Radicalism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1978), p. 147; Jay

Kinney;

“What’s Left? Revisiting The Revolution”, in Stewart Brand, ed., The

Next Whole Earth Catalog (Sausalito, CA: Point, 1980), p. 393;

David Miller, Anarchism (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1984), p. 4. By

itself, the fact that Libertarianism formed a political party and has

attempted to attain power through the electoral system seriously

undermines its claim to be anarchism.

[2] James M. Buchanan, “A Contractarian Perspective On Anarchy”, in J.

Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds., Anarchism: NOMOS XIX (New

York: New York University, 1978), p. 29. Libertarianism is also referred

to as “anarcho-capitalism” and “philosophical anarchism.” The word

“libertarian” was used by French anarchists in the 1890s as a synonym

for “anarchist.” Consequently, some contemporary anarchists refer to

themselves and/or anarchy as “libertarian.” But here there is no implied

connection to Libertarianism. Michael P. Smith, The Libertarians And

Education (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 2, 3.

[3] David Friedman, The Machinery Of Freedom: Guide To Radical

Capitalism, Second Edition (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), pp. 37,

113; Murray Rothbard, For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1978), pp. 51–52.

[4] Bruce Nelson, Beyond The Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago’s

Anarchists, 1870–1900 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1988), pp.

4, 15, 25; Laurence Veysey,

The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter-Cultures in

America (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 35.

[5] Ibid., p. 35.

[6] Sima Lieberman, Labor Movements And Labor Thought: Spain, France,

Germany, and the United States (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1986), p.

247.

Dorothy Gallagher, All The Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo

Tresca (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1988), pp. 60–61.

[7] James Joll, The Anarchists. Second Edition (London: Metheun, 1979),

pp. 201–203; Miller, pp. 134–135;

Terry M. Perlin, Anarchist-Communism In America, 1890–1914 (Ph.D.

dissertation, Brandeis University, 1970), p. 294.

[8] John C. Spurlock, Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in

America, 1825–1860 (New York: New York University, 1988), pp. 28, 62.

[9] James J. Martin, Men Against The State: The Expositors of

Individualist Anarchism in America 1827–1908 (New York: Libertarian Book

Club, 1957), pp. 14, 17;

William O. Reichert, Partisans Of Freedom: A Study in American Anarchism

(Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University, 1976), p. 66.

[10] G.D.H. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789–1859 (London:

Macmillan, 1953), pp. 87–88.

[11] Martin, p. 97.

[12] Veysey, pp. 35, 36.

[13] Edward K. Spann, Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for a Cooperative

Society in America 1820–1920 (New York: Columbia University, 1989), p.

146.

[14] For example, see the vitriolic exchange between Kropotkin and

Tucker. Peter Kropotkin, Modern Science And Anarchism, Second Edition

(London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 70–71. Benjamin R. Tucker, Instead Of

A Book, By A Man Too Busy To Write One (New York: Haskell House, 1969),

pp. 388–389.

[15] Martin, pp. 258–259.

[16] See, Stephen Skowronek, Building A New American State: The

Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University, 1982).

[17] See, Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate 1870–1920 (Chicago:

University of Chicago, 1990).

[18] David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards and Michael Reich, Segmented Work,

Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United

States (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1982), pp. 109, 110.

[19] Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, The State (Caldwell, ID: Caxton

Printers, 1935).

Peter Marshall, Demanding The Impossible: A History of Anarchism

(London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 560.

Veysey, p. 36.

[20] John Hospers, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow

(Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1971), p. 466.

Ted Goertzel, Turncoats And True Believers: The Dynamics of Political

Belief and Disillusionment (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992), pp.

141, 263.

[21] DeLeon, pp. 119–123; Micheal G. Newbrough, Individualist Anarchism

In American Political Thought (Ph.D. dissertation, University of

California, Santa Barbara, 1975), p. 216.

[22] Murray Rothbard is the “academic vice president” of the Ludwig von

Mises Institute at Auburn, Alabama, and contributing editor to its

publication, The Free Market. Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., ed., The Free

Market 11(7–8), July-August 1993, 1–8.

[23] Newbrough, p. 217.

[24] John Gray, Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986),

pp. xi, 41; J.G. Merquior, Liberalism: Old and New (Boston: Twayne

Publishers, 1991), p. 138.

[25] Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New

Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet Books, 1964), p. 135.

[26] Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, And Utopia (New York: Basic Books,

1974), p. 276.

Also see, Tibor Machan, “Libertarianism: The Principle of Liberty”, in

George W. Carey, ed., Freedom And Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian

Debate (Lanham, MD: University Press of America and The Intercollegiate

Studies Institute, 1984), pp. 40–41.

[27] Goertzel, p. 262.

[28] Gray, p. 42; Hospers, p. 417; Nozick, p. 276; Rand and Branden, pp.

112, 113.

[29] Hospers, p. 419; Nozick, p. ix; Rand and Branden, p. 112.

[30] Murray N. Rothbard, “Society Without A State”, in Pennock and

Chapman, eds., p. 192.

[31] David Wieck, “Anarchist Justice”, in Pennock and Chapman, eds., pp.

227–228.