What We Mean by Individualism

A libertarian peace treaty with communitarians from the Mises Institute

Brad Stone recently delivered a lecture at the Mises Institute concerning the relevance of the work of Robert Nisbet to the libertarian movement. He argued that it is important for libertarians to also be “communitarians,” defending traditional social institutions from the state. He cautioned against the valorization of the individual and any position that acknowledges only individual rights as ideas that lend themselves to a growth in state power.

Overall, the presentation was insightful. The importance of families and other such small communities (“subsidiary institutions” in the language of Catholic social teaching) should be a topic of concern to libertarians, and precisely for some of the reasons that Dr. Stone identified, such as the provision of services often connected to the modern welfare state. The introduction to Nisbet was also welcome as a point of intellectual history in light of the connection between the Old Right and the modern Austro-libertarian movement.

However, I do have two bones to pick with Dr. Stone’s presentation. In raising them, I do not mean to single him out: these are pandemic confusions on the part of conservatives that have plagued their interpretations of the libertarian movement. The first is a minor quibble, in that it is not really a point of disagreement. I merely wish to point out that Austro-libertarians have, in fact, consistently defended the importance of subsidiary institutions. The second has to do with the conservative brouhaha over individualism.

The real root of many disagreements between libertarians and other conservative thinkers centers around the term “individualism,” which has become a four-letter word in the political mainstream from left to right. Those who identify themselves as individualists or focus on individuals are accused of denying man’s social nature (the right-wing criticism) or ignoring the vast, impersonal forces of society (the left-wing criticism). Since this piece is a plea to conservatives, it is only the first objection that I would like to concern myself with.

The canons of conservative orthodoxy overflow with aspersions cast on libertarians on the grounds that they are too individualistic. If they are in a particularly vilifying mood, the modifier “atomistic” is appended, by which the conservatives hope to establish that the individualist ethos posits an infinite gap between one man and another. Other invectives against libertarianism (accusations of libertinism, materialism, utopianism, egoism, etc.) are often rooted in the misunderstanding concerning the individual. Russell Kirk (an ardent conservative anti-libertarian) offers the following commentary on the relationship between the two groups:

The conservative regards the libertarian as impious, in the sense of the old Roman pietas: that is, the libertarian does not venerate ancient beliefs and customs, or the natural world, or his country, or the immortal spark in his fellow men. The cosmos of the libertarian is an arid loveless realm, a “round prison.” “I am, and none else beside me,” says the libertarian. “We are made for cooperation, like the hands, like the feet,” replies the conservative, in the phrases of Marcus Aurelius

There are two senses in which Austro-libertarians consider themselves individualists: metaphysically and morally, with the latter being drawn from the former. A proper understanding of these senses immediately dispels the conservative objections to libertarian points.

Metaphysical individualism means that man is metaphysically prior to any social network, be it a subsidiary institution such as the family or a whole nation. That is, social phenomena have no existence apart from the actions of the individuals who participate in them. Subsidiary institutions are real, but they are real in a derivative sense: it is only because the individual man has a social nature that the institutions have being at all.

This point is often confused for a historical one, especially in economic and political theorizing. It is an obvious myth that man’s “original condition” is isolation; the mere fact of his biological reproduction is enough to dispel this fantasy. The economic story of Robinson Crusoe, however, is not a story about historically isolated man, but rather one about metaphysically distinct man, who, because he has free will, must take the center stage in any social theorizing. This is the root cause of the Austrian adherence to methodological individualism, which recognizes man’s action as the cause of social institutions and thus relates all social phenomena back to the necessary formal structure of the choices of individuals.

The other sense in which Austro-libertarians are individualists is in the moral sense. It is man that has a nature, not mankind; thus, for any natural law ethic man must be the measuring stick. Institutions can be in accord or discord with this nature; the libertarian ethical claim is that any institution characterized by coercive action is unnatural with regards to man. In like manner, Austro-libertarians judge all institutions by way of individual man.

Put another way, only man is a moral agent. Only the individual can choose, and to that extent any coherent notion of moral evil must be traced back to the choice of an individual man. Since man is the morally relevant unit, all legitimate moral claims, including those about the value of subsidiary institutions, must be phrased so as to be individually meaningful. If not by looking to the individual, how does one determine in the first place that home and hearth is superior to hammer and sickle?

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Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, July 20, 2005 at 06:51 PM in Libertarianism
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Comments:

Posted by ben tillman on July 20, 2005, 08:56 PM | #

You have posted once before on Nisbet. I infer that you are sympathetic to his perspective. Nisbet’s book “The Quest for Community” was excellent, and it led me to Otto von Gierke, which has proven enlightening.

From the link: Put another way, only man is a moral agent. Only the individual can choose, and to that extent any coherent notion of moral evil must be traced back to the choice of an individual man. Since man is the morally relevant unit, all legitimate moral claims, including those about the value of subsidiary institutions, must be phrased so as to be individually meaningful.

This is where Martin goes astray. He could use a dose of David Sloan Wilson.

Posted by Geoff Beck on July 20, 2005, 09:43 PM | #

I’m a big fan of the Mises institute, if we regain our inheritance as Westerners, we ought to pay attention to the work of Mises and other economists of the Austrian school and implement their practical observations on the study of man.

BTW, here is a list a media available for viewing and listening:

http://www.mises.org/media.aspx

I’ve found the Hoppe, Livingston, and Woods archives very interesting.

Posted by john rackell on July 21, 2005, 02:10 AM | #

I read LewRockwell pretty religiously which I think of as Libertarianism for Dummies - good enough for me. I see the Libertarians discuss individualism as a core issue but I think the Libertarians (well, Austrians)have only one thing they really hold dear and that is the idea of “division of labor”, even their defense of individualism takes a back seat.

Take a company like General Electric, with gross revenue similar to the GDP of a small country like New Zealand (95 billion). How much respect for rights does GE have. There’s no freedom of speech at GE, GE is for all intents and purpose a dictatorship, much more authoritarian and bureacratic than even a socialist country like NZ; there’s no democracy. The nature of modern capitalism makes shareholder (and even institutional) control a quaint fiction. Any complaints against corporations like GE? Never!! But lots on how evil the state is - especially when it tries to muzzle the rapaciousness of corporations. Yet GE is a state! So what’s GE got going right for Libertarians: Division of Labor.

Libertarian individualism is the individualism of the beehive or the ant colony. Brad Stone - social phenomena have no existence apart from the actions of the individuals who participate in them.
You can’t tell from this he isn’t in fact talking about an ant colony.

On a different note. The Libertarians are similar to even the left liberals. Anything that interferes with their right of self-determination as self-defining sovereign individuals (and really anything that might be an impediment to their beloved division of labor) - like Peak Oil - is completely denigrated. LewRockwell’s only interest in Peak Oil is championing the cockamamie ideas of the discredited Thomas Gold hypothesis by one George Crispin whose expertise is what? a geologist? No! he’s a retired businessman who heads a Catholic homeschooling cooperative.

The libertarians know for sure that their global division of labor schemes would be up the creek if peak oil is real - peak oil would not affect individualism accept as it would affect the division of labor. Which is the only thing Libertarians care about.

Hilaire Belloc had it right that individualism truly flourished in the Middle Ages under feudalism.

Posted by Mark Richardson on July 21, 2005, 07:43 AM | #

Adam Martin is very slippery in his arguments. My reading of his defence of libertarianism is as follows.

He wants our starting point to be with individual man, rather than with social forms like family or nation.

He objects to the idea that we might look at family and nation and see something of inherent worth - there is only worth in the individuals whose social nature may produce families or nations.

Therefore, we may not fight for family or nation, but only for individuals we know within the family or nation.

Social forms like family and nation are created by the free choice of individuals, and anything interfering with such individual choice is unnatural and immoral.

Therefore, even the family may only be considered as a “voluntary association”.

This framework of politics is not helpful to us. It establishes the wrong foundation - the wrong set of assumptions about politics.

It leads us to focus on what individuals can choose for themselves as the basis of political morality. We are left with the “freely contracting individual” as the image of man.

Individuals do not freely contract to form ethnies or families. They do so to form Rotary clubs, or progress associations or business federations.

Is it really by a “formal structure of choice” that my own core identity is as a man, a husband and father, an Anglo-Saxon and an Australian? You cannot separate me as an individual from the forms of society I belong to and which form my sense of who I am.

Nor can you make me believe that there is no worth inherent in my tradition separate from myself as an individual or from other particular individuals within the ethny.

The individual and the social form go together - it is artificial to declare one to be prior to the other, just as it is artificial to reduce human nature to the process of individual choice and consent.

Posted by Geoff Beck on July 21, 2005, 09:04 AM | #

> . Any complaints against corporations like GE? Never!!

Agreed. Also, who can forget the behaviour of GE, Microsoft, and others in defending Affirmative Action before the US Supreme Court, in the Grutter decision.

In their defense, I think Rockwell would argue, that if the state were nullified the corporations would have no power to legislate against us. That would certainly be a Hoppean response.

Posted by jonjayray on July 21, 2005, 04:13 PM | #

Ben Tillman: In answer to your enquiry about my view of Nisbet:

I think it is sheer romanticism to say that the loss of local communities could all have been avoided. I think the whole trend of history is towards de-localization of almost everything. Globalization of world trade is the clearest case in point. Division and specialization of labour has become more and more pronounced as time goes by and is part of the essence of modernity. And division of labour means ever larger and more complex organizations (businesses and factories) to make that specialization work. And, after that, large and complex networks of people to distribute the fruits of that specialized labour are needed. Doing everything locally is as obsolete as the spinning wheel. So big, complex organizations have inevitably replaced small, local organizations. So the State was just one of the things that destroyed localism and community.

I cannot see that we will ever get the same sort of community back under any circumstances but we are also forming new communities all the time. We may no longer live in villages but, for many people, those they work with are an important community and most of us are part of various communities connected with our leisure activities. So I think we will always have about as much community as we want.

Large, complex organizations do not have to be part of the State, however. And the State is in fact very bad at running large, complex organizations. So modernity may have destroyed the old communities and replaced them with new ones but the role of the State in that process was certainly unnecessary and will hopefully yet be at least in part ridiculed out of existence.

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