[Peace-discuss] On the meaning of 'libertarian'

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Tuesday, December 15, 2009
	A Real "Libertarian" Bozo
	by Dan Clore

In the Dallas Libertarian Examiner, writer Garry Reed responded to the news of 
the recent founding of a Danish group calling itself Libertaere Socialister, or 
Libertarian Socialists, with a column entitled "Calling all 
Stalinist-Jeffersonian-Bozoian Libertarians", claiming that the Danes had stolen 
the term "libertarian" from the Libertarian Right in America, and that combining 
libertarianism with socialism made as much sense as combining the politics of 
Joseph Stalin, Thomas Jefferson, and Bozo the Clown. Several libertarian 
socialists responded, pointing out (sometimes somewhat rudely) that traditional 
anarchists, on the Libertarian Left, had used the label "libertarian" for over a 
century before the Libertarian Right adopted it.

Thus beleagured, Reed wrote another column, this time entitled "Calling all 
laissez-faire sovereign individual Libertarians". There, instead of facing the 
facts, Reed accuses his critics of ignorance of the history of the Libertarian 
Right, and briefly rehearses its roots in classical liberalism. This is, of 
course, irrelevant, since no one denied that there were precursors to the modern 
Libertarian Right; the point at issue was the history of the term "libertarian". 
None of the forerunners that Reed mentions used the label  "libertarian" (though 
one of them, John Stuart Mill, was in fact a libertarian socialist). Thus 
besieged by evil liberals/progressives/socialists, Reed called on 
right-libertarians to come to his aid.

Instead, I posted a comment politely pointing out that the libertarian 
socialists who responded to him were correct on the historical issue of the use 
of the term "libertarian", and  noting the irrelevance of the classical liberals 
and other forerunners of the Libertarian Right to the matter at hand. This 
response was deleted for some reason, so I decided to address the issue here.

The use of the term "libertarian" to refer to the extreme anti-authoritarian 
left (in the traditional sense) wing of the socialist movement dates back to at 
least the 1850s. One should cite in particular Joseph Déjacque, who published a 
newspaper titled Le Libertaire, journal du mouvement social (The Libertarian: A 
Journal of the Social Movement) in New York from 1858-61. I could inundate the 
reader with data demonstrating the continuous use of the term "libertarian" in 
this sense down to the present day, but simply noting the fact should suffice.

In contrast, no one seems to have even suggested applying the term "libertarian" 
to the Libertarian Right before the 1950s, while it was only in the 1960s that 
the use became common in America, leading to events such as the founding of the 
Libertarian Party in 1972 and the publication of anarcho-capitalist Murray 
Rothbard's For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto in 1973. The Danes who 
founded the new Libertarian Socialist group may not even be aware of this 
development

As a final irony, one should note that it isn't the Libertarian Left that has 
been appropriating the term "libertarian" from the Libertarian Right, but the 
Authoritarian Right. Conservatives from William F. Buckley to Glenn Beck have 
adopted the label. A term that once indicated an individual who opposed 
capitalism and the state has been adopted by capitalist statists.

But the fact is, both the Libertarian Left and Libertarian Right could learn a 
lot from each other, if they could get past certain biases. Those on the 
Libertarian Left might try reading Jerome Tuccille's very amusing book It 
Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, or Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism: A 
Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. In turn, those 
on the Libertarian Right might try reading George Woodcock's Anarchism: A 
History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements and Ken Knabb's Public Secrets...

http://www.nolanchart.com/article7119.html