Libertarians For Slavery

What's the best and quickest way to demonstrate the weakness—nay, the bankruptcy—of the libertarian critique? Francis Fukuyama thinks it's the slavery issue. Cite slavery, Fukuyama believes, and the libertarian façade is revealed in all its delusional falseness.

Think I'm kidding? Fukuyama has been engaged in a continuing debate with libertarians over cloning research, which he opposes. He offers his case against such research in his new book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. (Reason Online hosted a weeklong exchange on the issue between Fukuyama and Gregory Stock, author of Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future.) On May 2, he wrote a notorious Wall Street Journal piece asserting that libertarians were ideologically obsolete, and that their support for the expansion of knowledge that might alleviate much human misery was really an act of rear-guard desperation. There was a wave of online response by libertarians. In a Salon interview posted May 21, Fukuyama was asked about such criticism. Here's what he said:

Well, I've become their favorite whipping boy in the last few weeks. That's fine. I tend to think that this all shows weaknesses of the libertarian attitude toward this. They assume that the highest human good is that which an individual decides, and that nobody is in a position of moral authority to tell individuals that they shouldn't do things that they deem are right. And I just don't think that works.

A slave owner in the antebellum South thought that blacks were not human beings, and he resented like hell an abolitionist telling him that he had to treat a black like a human being, and it was his principled view that that wasn't the case. And you had to fight a civil war and basically use the state to enforce the notion that all men are created equal, and that blacks were as fully human beings as whites were. So there are times that that libertarian model just doesn't work very well.

These remarks were recognized for their odiousness, their unscrupulousness, and their cheapness almost as soon as they appeared (these links via Glenn Reynolds). I have one compliment to add.

Fukuyama's continuing argument with libertarians is a rhetorical disaster because it springs from ignorance and invites contempt. Compare this current argument, for example, to the one he marshaled in defending his major intellectual achievement, the famous 1989 essay, "The End of History." What made the earlier work so impressive was that he built his argument—which was about the resolution of a major chapter in the history of ideas, not about whether anything would ever happen again—entirely within the worldview he was critiquing. What infuriated his opponents on the left was that he effectively used their own ideas to demonstrate the intellectual obsolescence of their position. It was one of the great displays of rhetorical gymnastics in recent years, and Fukuyama deserved the fame that resulted.

Now he wants to argue that libertarians too are obsolete, and he seems to think he is using their own ideas against them. But arguing that support for biotech research is retrograde, and that individual sovereignty is a defense of slavery, doesn't demonstrate that libertarians are passe; it reveals that Fukuyama is embarrassingly ignorant about the ideas he is dismissing. This time his opponents are not seething in frustrated anger; they are staring in cold contempt, a contempt that Fukuyama has invited and is richly earning with each public volley.

His slavery remarks are especially idiotic. In fact, a brief examination of their underpinnings reveals why they are invalid. Slavery existed from time immemorial; it ended only with the rise of democratic capitalism and the liberal bourgeois revolution that it set in motion (which also led to the rise of feminism, the emancipation of Europe's Jews, the end of Russian serfdom, and so on). In other words, the rise of classical liberal ideas about individual sovereignty hardly resulted in a better case for slavery; it resulted in the definitive case against it.

The United States is one of the few places where slavery ended as a result of the force of arms. But the Civil War did not begin as a war between slaveholders and emancipators; four of the Union states were slave states—the Union's own capital city, Washington, was a slave jurisdiction—and remained so throughout the conflict. Lincoln introduced emancipation into the struggle well after it had begun, possibly to keep the South's trading partners—especially Great Britain—out of the war by elevating the North's cause into a moral crusade. But emancipation would have had no moral force anywhere had it not been for the classical-liberal revolution that had swept other capitalist nations.

This revolution in the concept of liberty was demanded by people who redefined the state as a guarantor of their rights. That, as Brink Lindsey notes, is an essential point about classical liberal ideas that Fukuyama entirely misses; he conflates libertarians with the anarcho-capitalist fringe, although all of his leading intellectual critics—Ron Bailey, Virginia Postrel, Gregory Stock, Lindsey, among many others—argue for maximum choice from the libertarian mainstream. But the greater point is a historic one: People did not use emerging concepts of liberty to claim greater personal rights at the expense of others; they used such ideas to expand the rights of ever-greater numbers of their fellow citizens as they were presented with their demands.

In brief, the history of the expanding freedom of choice is also the history of so-called "bourgeois empathy." That is, those who seek rights for themselves act so as to expand rights for others. It is the duty of those who oppose biotech research to demonstrate why this will not be true in a biotech-shaped future. Instead, when Fukuyama offers nightmare scenarios anticipating the horrific biotech future that will supposedly emerge from maximal choice, he defends it by distorting the past. The fact is, the moral order that biotech's opponents want to save has been shaped by the very freedoms these opponents seek to curtail.

There are times, says Fukuyama, that the "libertarian model just doesn't work very well," citing slavery as one. That's so only if you don't know much about how slavery ended, and you don't know much about how liberty flourished, either.