The error at the heart of all libertarian thought is that the individual is the smallest and primary unit of society. The libertarian consistently frames social and moral imperatives in terms of individual needs and desires and freedoms. He posits that society is the sum total of individuals pursuing self-interest.
This is not true. The smallest unit of society is the relationship between two individuals. One, two, or a thousand individuals do not comprise a society until there are relationships connecting them to each other–agreements, customs, laws, values. The connecting relationship, not the individual, is the atom of human society. It is impossible to have a society of one man.
A commenter supplied this quote, with vague attribution. If you put the whole thing into Google, it will provide a couple of forum posts by “Pleasureman.”
I believe that there is a weakness in libertarian thought, but I am not sure that methodological individualism is the culprit. Consider an analogy. Chemists want to talk about atoms as being fundamental. But in the spirit of the quote above, one could argue that we do not have a substance until we have many atoms bound together. The relationships binding the atoms are what is really fundamental in chemistry. It is impossible to have a substance with just one atom.
I would say that it is useful for chemists to think in terms of atoms, and by the same token it is useful for social theorists to think in terms of individuals. But it is important for chemists to understand the various bonding mechanisms among atoms, and it is important for social theorists to understand the various bonding mechanisms among humans.
I think that what makes conservative social theory of the Burke/Tocqueville/Yuval-Levin sort distinctive is its emphasis on multiple modes of human interaction and bonding mechanisms, including families, organized religion, civic associations, and business enterprises. Libertarians tend to focus almost entirely on free trade as a mode of interaction, and progressives tend to focus almost entirely on the central government as a bonding mechanism.
Excessive individualism certainly can be a libertarian vice, I would say. Focusing solely on the freedom to choose without regard to what is chosen and the consequence of those choices is, I think, a legitimate criticism. Just to take a hypothetical: abortion access might strike some libertarians as a fundamental part of a woman’s bodily autonomy, but if you wind up with heavily sex-selective abortions such as China and India have had recently, then the skewed gender ratios of subsequent generations are likely to prove destabilizing in any number of ways that no one finds agreeable.
That said, I still think individuals have to be considered as the fundamental unit when it comes to moral codes and the law. For it not to be so, I think the consequence would be a return to a sort of clannishness or sectarian power struggles that most everyone would find revolting. And from a purely moral standpoint, you’d have to start taking, say, Swiftian modest proposals as legitimate policy options. Again, not a pretty path to travel down.
On your metaphor, it is still useful for the chemist to think about atoms, even if all the interesting chemistry involves the relationships between atoms. And so, you infer, it is useful for social theorists to think about individuals, even if all the interesting social behaviors involve relationships between individuals.
The suppressed and profoundly mistaken assumption in this argument is that the “individual” is already a coherent object that we can identify independent of its various relationships. This is no more true in chemistry than it is in sociology.
Chemistry is the study of electrical bonds, not atoms. No chemist assumes the individuals will be atoms; in chemistry, the “individuals” are the units relevant for cataloging the bonding relationships. So, eg, a hydroxyl group might be a fundamental unit in chemistry, even though it is itself a composite object at the atomic level. In general, a chemist might treat an arbitrarily large molecule as an “individual” for some purposes, depending on whether its internal structure is relevant for their experiments.
Even more generally, the question of individuation cannot be settled a priori; being an “individual” is not an intrinsic fact about any system. Identities don’t self-individuate; this is a universal truth about identity that holds across all domains of science and philosophy, from quantum mechanics to queer theory.
For instance, in category theory (which is essentially metamathematics, and provides the resources for talking about how things hang together in their most general sense, to paraphrase Sellars) there are objects and morphisms, or (you might say) individuals and their relations.
But category theory is crystal clear that morphisms (relations) are fundamental, and objects (individuals) are secondary and can often be derived from the morphisms, so are technically superfluous. For me, this unambiguously settles the question of which has ontological primacy.
http://www.math.jhu.edu/~eriehl/727/context.pdf
> It is traditional to name a category after its objects; typically, the preferred choice of accompanying structure-preserving morphisms is clear. However, this practice is somewhat contrary to the basic philosophy of category theory: that mathematical objects should always be considered in tandem with the morphisms between them. By Remark 1.1.2, the algebra of morphisms determines the category so of the two, the objects and morphisms, the morphisms take primacy
Sorry, what? You don’t know where you, as an individual, begin and the rest of your society ends? That is very surprising, indeed.
I’m not saying “I don’t know” as an epistemological point. I’m saying there are no definite bounds on individuals as an ontological point. The boundaries of objects are not settled until we establish which interactions we’re interested in.
For instance, if we’re interested in the transmission of disease, then you, as an “individual”, stop several inches beyond your skin. https://peerj.com/articles/1258/
Every libertarian has gotten the old, “…but no man is an island!” response.
That’s just a straw man. Yes, one pillar of libertarianism is individual rights, but the structure that pillar helps support is voluntary relationships. It’s from these peaceful non-coercive relationships that we get the emergent order (dynamism) that libertarians truly prize.
I think that what makes conservative social theory of the Burke/Tocqueville/Yuval-Levin sort distinctive is its emphasis on multiple modes of human interaction and bonding mechanisms, including families, organized religion, civic associations, and business enterprises.
But if business enterprises are truly global and not bonded to families, organized religion & civic associations, then how do you strengthen the other institutions. Mr. Potter of the Its a Wonderful Life had to participate in the institutions, usually as a leader of the church and civic associations), to control the individual choices of other citizens. (Let say his factory hired young Johnny who did the right thing and married young Jill who is now three months pregnant.) Now the business leaders have almost no ties to the community of church and civic leaders, so isn’t it a wonder why these institutions are diminishing? Libertarian global economics have weaken these intermediary institutions and they are not coming back without changes.
“The error at the heart of all libertarian thought is that the individual is the smallest and primary unit of society… This is not true. The smallest unit of society is the relationship between two individuals.”
Relationships CANNOT exist without individuals, however individuals CAN exist without relationships, hence the smallest unit is an individual. That being said, it is true that relationships and common norms of interaction between one or more individuals is what makes a society, so they should not be discounted, however the start for understanding these relationships for social scientists should begin with the individual.
“the smallest unit is an individual”
This is poor metaphysics. Smallest by what measure? Individuals are literally composites of relationships at lower levels of analysis. In other words, individuals emerge from the development of relationships, and thus relationships take priority.
You assume that “relationships” means “relationships between individuals”. But relationships cross the sub- and super-individual boundaries. The transmission of disease is a good example.
You are a composite of many of these sub- and super-individual processes, and thus you are a composite of many relationships. You have relationships with your white blood cells, and with corporations, and they can both have relationships within and among each other. Any individual you carve from this collection will necessarily be a composite of such relationships, and thus the relationship always has methodological priority.
Libertarians should put a lot more emphasis on Leonard Reed and Jane Jacobs — thinkers who emphasized human interdependence and the unplanned beauty of what emerges from human cooperation.
But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem, too. Any outside-the-mainstream movement is likely going to consist of people who are higher than average in individualism and lower in ‘agreeableness’ (willing to go along to get along) simply because that’s what it takes to flout convention. Social liberalism is not weird, nor is economic conservatism. But combining the two IS weird — as is the willingness to hold onto principles despite the fact that it puts you on the outs with almost everybody.
I like your way of putting it – too much focus on too narrow a range of possibilities of human interactions.
But that is not the only culprit in the inadequacy of contemporary Libertarian thought. Four additional things immediately come to mind, and this is hardly an exhaustive list. (By the way, I’m not saying there are good or easy answers to these hard issues, quite the contrary.)
1. A steady slouching towards progressivism. (e.g. The Niskanen Center). Of course it is hardly alone in his regard, and one may just as easily point to trends in mainstream conservatism or Christianity.
2. An overoptimistic – to put it charitably – account of human nature, psychology, and the decision-making capacity of most adult human beings. Specifically, there are hard questions about the nature of utility or happiness and the origin of our wants that are often overlooked.
3. An continued obsession with explicit state / government action and insouciant attitude regarding social pressures, when, in the modern era, the latter may have emerged as an even worse threat to the exercise of traditional liberties.
4. The ‘local freedom to coerce’ problem. If we are trying to increase welfare by giving people what they desire, we have to recognize that one of the things people desire is ‘a community’ and for their communities to have particular characters and sets of norms. There are certain forms of social experience or community life which are impossible to coordinate if the overall enterprise is deprived of some of the core, and at least mildly coercive, attributes of sovereignty.
” The ‘local freedom to coerce’ problem.”
The Amish seem to have solved this problem without resort to any form of official sovereignty or resorting to men with guns and badges.
I don’t agree, but I’ll assume it’s true for the sake of argument. That still raises the question of whether one has to ‘go full Amish’ as practically the only permissible option, or give up trying to achieve these goals. If so, that’s no solution at all in terms of having any relevance for most members of modern society.
The biggest problem with Libertarianism is that to the degree that freedom has “worked”, it has done so with very little knowledge of how human beings actually operate, which really limits the downside risk of technology. The more we discover about ourselves and the more advanced technnology gets, the more apparent it becomes that individual freedom may no longer be in the interest of the survival of the species – looks at hyperaddictive food, drugs, video games, pornography, etc to see where the wheel can come off. We have no idea how ape brains designed to outwit large predators should function in a modern society, so “freedom is good” is a faulty assumption. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Not that I have a plan, but placing freedom on a pedestal is not rationally justified
By contrast, conservatism seems more about analyzing the past to figure out what has worked. It can do something like look toward the usefulness of families, then look at the destructiveness of something like pornography, and then offer a rational critique like “maybe all this porn isn’t such a good idea”. It is hard to come up with a compelling Libertarian critique of porn (or junk food, or video games, etc)
Thanks Arnold.
Houellebecq titled one of his books, “the extension of the domain of struggle.” His basic point was that extending competition between two cloth merchants in adjacent villages may well have had strong potential gains in terms of human welfare. However, extending the domain of struggle into areas sacred and foundational to western civilization, most especially the family, was bound to be of diminishing or even negative value. I would add the supporting bonds/institutions that help keep the nuclear family together and healthy as well.
People like Taleb would go further, noting that its impossible to understand the full effects of removing foundational pillars and replacing them with scaled up managerial rule making. In addition to often being less efficient, managerialism is very rigid. Rigid things don’t bend and when face with something that doesn’t fit into their model often break down in unpredictable ways. I won’t get bogged down in the details here though.
As someone has noted, its difficult to maintain these things in a globalized economy and culture. To me this is an argument against such a socio-economic environment. Far from it being inevitable, its a political decision that we can decide whether or not to make.
Appeals to the harm principle as a guide are foolhardy. Harm can easily be rationalized away (I’m sure we’ve all observed this up close) or rationalized in (micro-aggressions, etc). The human experience is far too complex and subtle to boil down to a single flimsy rule based principle like harm.
The idea of appealing to ones better nature is replaced simply with the a-priori notion that any “free” decision is the best possible decision there could have been.
Above someone points our that “no-man is an island” has been discussed before. And it will be discussed some more. It’s not a straw man, its a truth. Libertarians have assumed, but haven’t done the social science homework to prove, that man’s radically free choices always lead to the best possible emergent order.
At best they can point out that progs and their programs are dumb, but that isn’t much of an accomplishment, and not enough to build a robust society on. They are strangely un-curious about what man’s actual nature is. Probably because its very messy.
I think the commentator is basically right. Society does begin with relationships even when individuals are the elements those relationships are built on and between. Individuals matter as to whether those relationships are acceptable and operational, but none of it matters absent the relationships. Society and law are all about relationships. It is a mistake to speak of freedom without speaking of what, from what.
Progressives aren’t anti libertarians, it is just libertarians seeing only things along the axis of government, have only that way of seeing them. It is a product of the monochromatic world they live in.
Your “multiple modes of human interaction and bonding mechanisms, including families, organized religion, civic associations, and business enterprises,” are all voluntary associations. Libertarianism as a theory of *government* need not and should not mention them, except perhaps in passing. (The partial exception here is the family, since *children* may be involved. Libertarianism does tend to treat everyone as an adult: it has a *children problem*.)
Anyone familiar with the Milgram experiments has to consider it is the individual that is the fundamental unit, and to not do so fundamentally undermines basic law and order.