Epistles to the Heathen

Nick Gillespie from the March 1997 issue

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"When all the philosophizing is put aside," he writes, "what has made me a libertarian is a homely image and the answer to a simple question. The image is of an ordinary human being making an honest living and minding his own business--the kind of person who makes up the vast majority of adults around the world. The question is: What does this person owe the government, other than to keep on doing what he is doing?" While that is an interesting way of framing his investigation, it also begs the question of how Murray came to ask that question--and why it is an urgent one that readers should ask of themselves. As I worked through the book, the image I got was of a body-less intellectual, locked away in an ivory tower like some sort of supercomputer, generating theorems about a world experienced mostly on an abstract level.

This tendency is at its most damaging in Murray's appeals to history. Murray alludes to figures such as Jefferson and Madison as if they were totems whose mere invocation still had the power to cow fearful natives. He presents the American Founding's emphasis on limited government in an essentially ahistorical context that makes it seem particularly inconsequential to a late 20th-century audience that has known only a world split between competing models of the overreaching state. And he romanticizes the past in a way that also leaves it flat on the page: "For a hundred and fifty years, American government limited itself to a few things that everyone agreed government ought to do, and government did them pretty well. The Post Office delivered the mail. The Army won its wars. Police caught criminals. Judges put them in jail. Fire departments put out fires."

This sort of unnuanced nostalgia is less than compelling for at least a couple of reasons. First, it ignores the traditionally illiberal policies of federal, state, and local governments (slavery, always first and foremost, but also things like blue laws, restrictions on women's property rights, and morals laws affecting consenting adults). Second, and more important, it casts American history as a biblical fall from grace, with the unintended effect of making the past seem even more remote and irrelevant. Murray dates the fall variously, sometimes starting with the Progressive era, sometimes with the New Deal.

Such an Edenic view ignores the paradoxical and ongoing drama of American history that Arthur A. Ekirch details so forcefully in his great The Decline of American Liberalism (1955): that, from the very start, forces of centralized and decentralized power have been warring over the country; that, "despite the liberal hopes it inspired, [even] the American Revolution...was not without its dangers as far as liberalism was concerned." Besides allowing for a fuller, richer accounting of American history, a view like Ekirch's allows for a greater sense of continuity and relevance to contemporary events. This is a far from trivial point, especially when trying to convince non-believers: The realization that all historical moments are contested makes change more possible in the present.

Oddly enough, Murray's detachment may help woo conservative readers all the more. Suspicious of change by definition (unless that change recaptures their remembrance of things past), conservatives tend to sniff at human passions as destructive. In any case, Murray's implicit argument that libertarianism would help them realize their ideal world-- even as it does the same for others--should prove attractive.

If Murray's What It Means to Be a Libertarian is most likely to hit big with conservatives, David Boaz's Libertarianism may pull in a wider, more diverse audience. Boaz, executive vice president of the Washington, D.C. based Cato Institute, has written an eminently readable, virtually encyclopedic account of libertarian thought in all its generalities and specifics. If Murray tends to float above a world of lived experience, Boaz almost revels in it. His opening chapter, boosterishly titled "The Coming Libertarian Age," is chock full of recent poll numbers and the "sudden media interest in libertarianism." (Such relevance is not without risks, of course; the song lyric attributed to "Dana Rohrabacher, West Coast libertarian troubadour" that appears at the start of The Machinery of Freedom, originally published in 1973, hints at how quickly time fades away.)

Boaz's chapter on "The Roots of Libertarianism" is among the best historical summaries of the libertarian impulse I've seen. "In a sense," writes Boaz, "there have always been but two political philosophies: liberty and power. Either people should be free to live their lives as they see fit, as long as they respect the equal rights of others, or some people should be able to use force to make other people act in ways they wouldn't choose." With nods to individualist precursors in ancient China, Greece, and Rome, Boaz transforms what might have been familiar boilerplate material into a cogent, complex, and convincing narrative of the development of libertarianism in the West.

"Libertarianism is often seen as primarily a philosophy of economic freedom, but its real historical roots lie more in the struggle for religious toleration," he writes. By tracing that theme through the English revolutions of the 17th century and the eventual articulation of rights to life, liberty, and property, he makes the development of (classical) liberalism at once familiar and new. In so doing, Boaz reappropriates figures more or less kidnapped by the left, such as the 17th-century radical religious sect the Levellers and Thomas Paine. He also reinvigorates characters whose interest to readers may otherwise be minimal, such as the English poet John Milton, whose 1644 political treatise Aeropagitica argued for both freedom of religion and freedom of the press.

Boaz's summary, which includes comments on the "Modern Libertarian Movement," is particularly strong at underscoring the relationship between free minds and free markets-- a point which goes to the heart of libertarian consistency and its equal distance from both contemporary liberalism and conservatism. He quotes Voltaire's description of the London Stock Exchange to illustrate the point: "'There the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian deal with each other as if they were of the same religion....On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies, some go to the synagogue, others go to drink...others go to their church to wait the inspiration of God, their hats on their heads, and all are content.'"

This long view does more than provide a historical context and intellectual pedigree for a philosophy often derided as lacking either. By framing the issue as one of "liberty and power," Boaz has found a way of talking about limited government that doesn't rely in any way on a socialist enemy--a strategy that may pay off both with those inclined to socialism and those who find conservatoid threats of creeping communism unconvincing at this late date.

Boaz also brings a sense of wonder to the way market orders work to structure and meet the needs and desires of their participants. "Not long ago...in a small city in France," he writes, "I walked up to an automatic teller machine set into the massive stone wall of a bank that was closed for the weekend...and collected about $200, all without contact with any human being, much less anyone who knew me. I then took a taxi to the airport, where I approached a clerk at a rental-car counter, showed him a...piece of plastic, signed a form, and walked out with the keys to a $20,000 automobile, which I promised to return to someone else at a different location....Stop for a moment and reflect on the wonders of the modern world: A man I had never seen before, who would never see me again, with whom I could barely communicate, trusted me with a car. A bank set up an automatic system that would give me cash on request thousands of miles from my home....How did such a worldwide network of trust come about?" From such simple starting points, Boaz generates discussions of virtually everything under the libertarian sun, ranging from natural rights and utilitarianism, to the distinction between society and government, to the law of unintended consequences and the failure of centralized planning.

Libertarianism underscores the anti-utopianism implicit in liberalism properly understood (Murray also does this, if not quite as memorably)--a point one hopes is particularly salable at the end of a century still binding its wounds from great leaps forward, five-year plans, and other attempts to forcibly beat the world into some desired shape. "Karl Popper," notes Boaz, "once said that attempts to create heaven on earth invariably produce hell. Libertarianism holds out the goal not of a perfect society but of a better and freer one." Later, in a discussion of contemporary social issues, Boaz continues, "Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a complete moral code. It prescribes certain minimal rules for living together in a peaceful, productive society--property, contract, and freedom--and leaves further moral teaching to civil society."

This last point may well be the most important one in terms of reaching infidels, since it illustrates what is particular to libertarianism. To use a computer-age metaphor, libertarianism is best understood as an operating system that allows an infinite number of applications to be launched. In a truly libertarian society, we could rightly expect all sorts of communities, of every possible creed and philosophy. Libertarianism doesn't demand that converts forsake their old religions, so to speak. Rather, it replaces conversion by the sword with conversion by the word, by example, and by moral suasion. In doing so, libertarianism provides the necessary backdrop to letting all sorts of individuals and groups pursue the lives they want to live while minimizing the conflicts that true diversity brings to any human society.

What It Means to Be a Libertarian and Libertarianism get that message out in different but striking ways. If conversions really are accidents waiting to happen, these books should bring more than a few pagans into the fold.