Right-libertarianism

This article is about the type of libertarianism supporting capitalism and private ownership of natural resources. For the ideology combining conservatism with libertarianism, or representing the conservative wing of libertarianism, see Libertarian conservatism. For the type of libertarianism supporting conservative social policies, see Paleolibertarianism.

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Right-libertarianism,[1][2][3][4] also known as libertarian capitalism,[5] or right-wing libertarianism,[1][6] is a libertarian political philosophy that supports capitalist property rights and defends market distribution of natural resources and private property.[7] The term right-libertarianism is used to distinguish this class of views on the nature of property and capital[8] from left-libertarianism, a variant of libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an anti-authoritarian approach to property and income.[9] In contrast to socialist libertarianism,[3] right-libertarianism supports free-market capitalism.[1] Like most forms of libertarianism, it supports civil liberties,[1] especially natural law,[10] negative rights,[11] the non-aggression principle,[12] and a significant transformation of the modern welfare state.[13] Practitioners of right-libertarianism usually do not self-describe by that term and often object to it.

Right-libertarian political thought is characterized by the strict priority given to liberty, with the need to maximize the realm of individual freedom and minimize the scope of public authority.[14] Right-libertarians typically see the state as the principal threat to liberty. This anti-statism differs from anarchist doctrines in that it is based upon strong individualism that places less emphasis on human sociability or cooperation.[2][14][15] Right-libertarian philosophy is also rooted in the ideas of individual rights and laissez-faire economics. The right-libertarian theory of individual rights generally follows the homestead principle and the labor theory of property, stressing self-ownership and that people have an absolute right to the property that their labor produces.[14] Economically, right-libertarians make no distinction between capitalism and free markets and view any attempt to dictate the market process as counterproductive, emphasizing the mechanisms and self-regulating nature of the market whilst portraying government intervention and attempts to redistribute wealth as invariably unnecessary and counter-productive.[14] Although all right-libertarians oppose government intervention, there is a division between anarcho-capitalists, who view the state as an unnecessary evil and want property rights protected without statutory law through market-generated tort, contract and property law; and minarchists, who support the need for a minimal state, often referred to as a night-watchman state, to provide its citizens with courts, military, and police.[16]

Like libertarians of all varieties, right-libertarians refer to themselves simply as libertarians.[2][16][6] Being the most common type of libertarianism in the United States,[3] right-libertarianism has become the most common referent of libertarianism[17][18] there since the late 20th century while historically and elsewhere[19][20][21][22][23][24] it continues to be widely used to refer to anti-state forms of socialism such as anarchism[25][26][27][28] and more generally libertarian communism/libertarian Marxism and libertarian socialism.[19][29] Around the time of Murray Rothbard, who popularized the term libertarian in the United States during the 1960s, anarcho-capitalist movements started calling themselves libertarian, leading to the rise of the term right-libertarian to distinguish them. Rothbard himself acknowledged the co-opting of the term and boasted of its "capture [...] from the enemy".[19]

  1. ^ a b c d Rothbard, Murray (1 March 1971). "The Left and Right Within Libertarianism" Archived 1 November 2020 at the Wayback Machine. WIN: Peace and Freedom Through Nonviolent Action. 7 (4): 6–10. Retrieved 14 January 2020.
  2. ^ a b c Goodway, David (2006). Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. p. 4 Archived 7 February 2024 at the Wayback Machine. "The problem with the term 'libertarian' is that it is now also used by the Right. [...] In its moderate form, right libertarianism embraces laissez-faire liberals like Robert Nozick who call for a minimal State, and in its extreme form, anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and David Friedman who entirely repudiate the role of the State and look to the market as a means of ensuring social order".
  3. ^ a b c Carlson, Jennifer D. (2012). "Libertarianism". In Miller, Wilburn R., ed. The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America. London: Sage Publications. p. 1006 Archived 7 February 2024 at the Wayback Machine. ISBN 1412988764.
  4. ^ Wündisch 2014.
  5. ^ Reiman, Jeffrey H. (2005). "The Fallacy of Libertarian Capitalism". Ethics. 10 (1): 85–95. doi:10.1086/292300. JSTOR 2380706. S2CID 170927490.
  6. ^ a b Newman 2010, p. 53 "It is important to distinguish between anarchism and certain strands of right-wing libertarianism which at times go by the same name (for example, Murray Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism). There is a complex debate within this tradition between those like Robert Nozick, who advocate a 'minimal state', and those like Rothbard who want to do away with the state altogether and allow all transactions to be governed by the market alone. From an anarchist perspective, however, both positions—the minimal state (minarchist) and the no-state ('anarchist') positions—neglect the problem of economic domination; in other words, they neglect the hierarchies, oppressions, and forms of exploitation that would inevitably arise in laissez-faire 'free' market. [...] Anarchism, therefore, has no truck with this right-wing libertarianism, not only because it neglects economic inequality and domination, but also because in practice (and theory) it is highly inconsistent and contradictory. The individual freedom invoked by right-wing libertarians is only narrow economic freedom within the constraints of a capitalist market, which, as anarchists show, is no freedom at all.
  7. ^ Kymlicka 2005, p. 516: "Right-wing libertarians argue that the right of self-ownership entails the right to appropriate unequal parts of the external world, such as unequal amounts of land."
  8. ^ Francis, Mark (December 1983). "Human Rights and Libertarians". Australian Journal of Politics & History. 29 (3): 462–472. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.1983.tb00212.x. ISSN 0004-9522.
  9. ^ Vallentyne 2007, p. 6. "The best-known versions of libertarianism are right-libertarian theories, which hold that agents have a very strong moral power to acquire full private property rights in external things. Left-libertarians, by contrast, holds that natural resources (e.g., space, land, minerals, air, and water) belong to everyone in some egalitarian manner and thus cannot be appropriated without the consent of, or significant payment to, the members of society."
  10. ^ Miller, Fred (15 August 2008). "Natural Law". The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Archived from the original on 26 May 2020. Retrieved 31 July 2019.
  11. ^ Sterba, James P. (October 1994). "From Liberty to Welfare". Ethics. Cambridge: Blackwell. 105 (1): 237–241.
  12. ^ "What you should know about the Non-Aggression Principle". Learnliberty.org. 24 February 2017. Archived from the original on 7 December 2021. Retrieved 7 December 2021.
  13. ^ Baradat 2015, p. 31.
  14. ^ a b c d Heywood 2004, p. 337.
  15. ^ Newman 2010, p. 43: "It is important to distinguish between anarchism and certain strands of right-wing libertarianism which at times go by the same name (for example, Murray Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism). There is a complex debate within this tradition between those like Robert Nozick, who advocate a 'minimal state', and those like Rothbard who want to do away with the state altogether and allow all transactions to be governed by the market alone. From an anarchist perspective, however, both positions—the minimal state (minarchist) and the no-state ('anarchist') positions—neglect the problem of economic domination; in other words, they neglect the hierarchies, oppressions, and forms of exploitation that would inevitably arise in a laissez-faire 'free' market. [...] Anarchism, therefore, has no truck with this right-wing libertarianism, not only because it neglects economic inequality and domination, but also because in practice (and theory) it is highly inconsistent and contradictory. The individual freedom invoked by right-wing libertarians is only narrow economic freedom within the constraints of a capitalist market, which, as anarchists show, is no freedom at all."
  16. ^ a b Marshall, Peter (2008). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: Harper Perennial. p. 565. "The problem with the term 'libertarian' is that it is now also used by the Right. [...] In its moderate form, right libertarianism embraces laissez-faire liberals like Robert Nozick who call for a minimal State, and in its extreme form, anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and David Friedman who entirely repudiate the role of the State and look to the market as a means of ensuring social order".
  17. ^ Beltrán, Miquel (1989). "Libertarismo y deber. Una reflexión sobre la ética de Nozick" [Libertarianism and duty. A reflection on Nozick's ethics]. Revista de ciencias sociales (in Spanish). 91: 123–128. ISSN 0210-0223. Archived from the original on 23 March 2019. Retrieved 29 November 2018.
  18. ^ Cite error: The named reference Vallentyne 2010 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  19. ^ a b c Rothbard, Murray (2009) [2007]. The Betrayal of the American Right (PDF). Mises Institute. p. 83. ISBN 978-1610165013. Archived (PDF) from the original on 21 December 2019. Retrieved 15 November 2019. One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy. 'Libertarians' had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over.
  20. ^ Bookchin, Murray (January 1986). "The Greening of Politics: Toward a New Kind of Political Practice" Archived 1 October 2019 at the Wayback Machine. Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project (1). "We have permitted cynical political reactionaries and the spokesmen of large corporations to pre-empt these basic libertarian American ideals. We have permitted them not only to become the specious voice of these ideals such that individualism has been used to justify egotism; the pursuit of happiness to justify greed, and even our emphasis on local and regional autonomy has been used to justify parochialism, insularism, and exclusivity—often against ethnic minorities and so-called deviant individuals. We have even permitted these reactionaries to stake out a claim to the word libertarian, a word, in fact, that was literally devised in the 1890s in France by Elisée Reclus as a substitute for the word anarchist, which the government had rendered an illegal expression for identifying one's views. The propertarians, in effect—acolytes of Ayn Rand, the earth mother of greed, egotism, and the virtues of property—have appropriated expressions and traditions that should have been expressed by radicals but were willfully neglected because of the lure of European and Asian traditions of socialism, socialisms that are now entering into decline in the very countries in which they originated".
  21. ^ Nettlau, Max (1996). A Short History of Anarchism. London: Freedom Press. p. 162. ISBN 978-0900384899. OCLC 37529250.
  22. ^ Fernandez, Frank (2001). Cuban Anarchism. The History of a Movement[permanent dead link‍]. Sharp Press. p. 9. "Thus, in the United States, the once exceedingly useful term "libertarian" has been hijacked by egotists who are in fact enemies of liberty in the full sense of the word."
  23. ^ "The Week Online Interviews Chomsky". Z Magazine. 23 February 2002. "The term libertarian as used in the US means something quite different from what it meant historically and still means in the rest of the world. Historically, the libertarian movement has been the anti-statist wing of the socialist movement. In the US, which is a society much more dominated by business, the term has a different meaning. It means eliminating or reducing state controls, mainly controls over private tyrannies. Libertarians in the US don't say let's get rid of corporations. It is a sort of ultra-rightism."
  24. ^ Ward, Colin (2004). Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction Archived 7 February 2024 at the Wayback Machine. Oxford University Press. p. 62. "For a century, anarchists have used the word 'libertarian' as a synonym for 'anarchist', both as a noun and an adjective. The celebrated anarchist journal Le Libertaire was founded in 1896. However, much more recently the word has been appropriated by various American free-market philosophers."
  25. ^ Graham, Robert, ed. (2005). Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Vol. 1. Montreal: Black Rose Books. §17.
  26. ^ Marshall, Peter (2009). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. p. 641. "The word 'libertarian' has long been associated with anarchism and has been used repeatedly throughout this work. The term originally denoted a person who upheld the doctrine of the freedom of the will; in this sense, Godwin was not a 'libertarian', but a 'necessitarian'. It came however to be applied to anyone who approved of liberty in general. In anarchist circles, it was first used by Joseph Déjacque as the title of his anarchist journal Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social published in New York in 1858. At the end of the last century, the anarchist Sebastien Faure took up the word, to stress the difference between anarchists and authoritarian socialists".
  27. ^ The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective (11 December 2008). "150 years of Libertarian" Archived 17 October 2019 at the Wayback Machine. Anarchist Writers. The Anarchist Library. Retrieved 31 January 2020.
  28. ^ The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective (17 May 2017). "160 years of Libertarian" Archived 25 April 2020 at the Wayback Machine. Anarchist Writers. Anarchist FAQ. Retrieved 31 January 2020.
  29. ^ Marshall, Peter (2009). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. p. 641 Archived 30 September 2020 at the Wayback Machine. "For a long time, libertarian was interchangeable in France with anarchism but in recent years, its meaning has become more ambivalent. Some anarchists like Daniel Guérin will call themselves 'libertarian socialists', partly to avoid the negative overtones still associated with anarchism, and partly to stress the place of anarchism within the socialist tradition. Even Marxists of the New Left like E. P. Thompson call themselves 'libertarian' to distinguish themselves from those authoritarian socialists and communists who believe in revolutionary dictatorship and vanguard parties."