1/6/2024 0 Comments Missile commander capxSome examples: last year Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a victim of female genital mutilation, outspoken advocate of Muslim women’s rights and a terrorist target for Islamists, was disinvited as a commencement speaker at Brandeis university after a campaign by feminists. In some ways we seem to be living through the dimming of the enlightenment, with free markets and free trade out of favour in much of the western world, free democracy increasingly questioned by activists, for example in the climate policy debate, and free speech increasingly under assault on campuses from a strange alliance of Islamists and feminists. In truth, the libertarian creed is needed more than ever. Why are we so reluctant as a species to embrace freedom, so keen to (in the words of the poet Hilaire Belloc): “always keep a hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse”? Far too many people on the left want to put government in charge of everything, and far too many people on the right want to put God in charge. But libertarians have just as much antipathy to right wing authoritarianism as they do the left-wing variety.Īs I argue in my new book The Evolution of Everything, it is the authoritarians we should treat with suspicion. Only after Marx convinced the left that the state was the means through which the interests of the working class should be pursued did freedom come to be associated with the right. Richard Cobden, the great champion of free trade responsible more than anybody else for that extraordinary spell between 18 when Britain set the world an example and unilaterally dismantled the tariffs that entangled the globe, was a passionate pacifist, deeply committed to the cause of the poor, who was heckled as a dangerous radical when he first spoke in the House of Commons and who refused a title from a monarch he disapproved of. In what sense is any of that either conservative or reactionary? In the nineteenth-century, support for free trade, small government and individual autonomy went together almost automatically with opposition to slavery, colonialism, political patronage, and an established Church.įrom the Levellers of the 1650s to the Chartists of the 1830s, via the Boston tea party, the radicals on the “left” of British and American politics consistently demanded free trade and free markets as well as free speech and political reform. They believe in small government because they trust people, distrust elites, are suspicious of Leviathan and value freedom. I have never quite understood why libertarians are considered right wing. We need to rediscover radical libertarianism, and to learn to distrust authoritarianism.The libertarian creed is needed more than ever.What happened to left-wing libertarianism?.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |