There Are No Libertarians in an Epidemic,” The Atlantic proudly declared in March. The message, echoed often since then, has been the same: classical liberals (henceforth in this essay simply referred to as “liberals”) have no place in this world. A global pandemic must be met with global action, which can only be coordinated by governments. Individualism and liberalism are unable to solve the problem because of externalities or just plain selfishness.
So writes George Mason University economist Jon Murphy in “Liberalism Was Born and Grew During Centuries of Pandemics,” American Institute for Economic Research, May 26.
Murphy, who often comments on this blog, goes on to document the fact that classical liberalism actually earned its wings during pandemics.
He writes:
Liberalism, as we know it today, was formed not in recent times of peace and prosperity, but in the crucible of the 1600s and 1700s. Indeed, some authors trace liberalism’s roots all the way back to the fall of the Roman Empire (see Inventing the Individualby Larry Siedentop). The 1600s witnessed some of the most horrific religious wars the world has ever seen; it was a dangerous time, far in contrast to the relatively peaceful world we have now: the Thirty-Years War, repeated invasions by the Ottoman Empire, the Defenestration of Prague, the Bohemian Revolt, the English Civil War and English Restoration, just to name a few. Not to mention disasters like the Plague of Seville (about 25% of the population died) or the Great London Fire.
During these momentous events, Hugo Grotius was writing his treatise The Rights of War and Peace, one of the first great liberal works of political philosophy. John Locke was writing his Treatises. Samuel Pufendorf was working on his various jurisprudence treatises. The foundations and arguments for liberalism were being laid in response to the turbulent times as a means of considering peaceful coexistence.
The whole thing is worth reading.
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
May 27 2020 at 5:24pm
Thank you for sharing and for your kind words
Rob Rawlings
May 27 2020 at 6:53pm
Great article, Jon – just the kind of thing we need right now.
(Just to prove I was reading it carefully – I think you may have a typo with Abba Lerner’s name)
Jon Murphy
May 27 2020 at 7:15pm
Probably lol
David Seltzer
May 28 2020 at 5:02pm
Good stuff Jon. Thanks for your hard work on this.
Jon Murphy
May 28 2020 at 5:48pm
Thank you for your kind words
Phil H
May 27 2020 at 9:27pm
I really liked that article, too. In fact, it left me wanting more! If you have more on what the classical writers’ reactions to epidemic disease was, I’d like to read it. Either directly, as in how they thought individualism/liberalism was the best response to disease; or indirectly, as in how the effects of disease informed the way they think about individualism/liberalism.
Jon Murphy
May 28 2020 at 7:05am
There isn’t much explicitly along the lines you discuss for the reason disease and endemics were quite common. It was just an ever-present fact of life.
Vinny
May 27 2020 at 10:36pm
The article left me a bit wanting in terms of the depth of argumentation — so how and why did liberalism thrive during times of pandemic?
Jon Murphy
May 28 2020 at 1:39pm
The article was meant to be broad, not an in-depth exploration. For more in-depth, I recommend the book I mentioned in the article, Inventing the Individual by Larry Sedientop and Harold Bremen’s Law and Revolution.
Greg G
May 28 2020 at 9:19am
Superb essay on the history of liberalism Jon and thanks for the pointer David.
—“The great Socialist Calculation Debate (as it was known) was won so strongly by the liberals that socialists had to change the definition of the word.”
I wish I had written that sentence and I am definitely going to steal the concept. Even so, I don’t think the Atlantic article was as bad as you make it out to be. It did have an unfortunate title. I wonder if that title was even written by the author of the piece. Its subtitle was much more on target. The deeper point was that the pandemic response “demonstrates the emptiness of ideological labels” of all types.
That is certainly true. It’s not always obvious what the most libertarian response to the pandemic is. Very few actions in a pandemic have zero risk and most have inflict some level of additional risk on others who may not have consented to assuming that risk.
Self identified libertarians have a bewildering variety of conflicting policy beliefs and behaviors. In some cases this includes refusing to wear masks and observe social distancing in privately owned establishments that require that. I rarely hear a debate on such issues that wouldn’t be more productive if it was limited to the merits of the proposals in the absence of ideological labels. I think it is also worth remembering that the largest part of the fine history of liberalism you have given here preceded the Germ Theory of Disease which does have important implications for what the right public policy is.
Jon Murphy
May 28 2020 at 10:00am
Some responses in no particular order:
Yes, that is true. I am actually working on a paper looking at the Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1854 (which was the beginnings of germ theory). One of the arguments I am making is that the liberal idea of the diffusion of knowledge is partly what allowed the Outbreak to be overcome and future outbreaks prevented. Whether it is Miasma Theory or Germ Theory, the general nature of liberalism allows it to fit into both methods.
True, but that’s because there isn’t necessarily a single libertarian response. There’s foolishness and there’s reasonableness, just like anything.
The Atlantic was not the most unreasonable, but the message of the title is quite common.
Mark Z
May 28 2020 at 10:12am
I think it can safely be said that anyone who refuses to abide by private business’s mask-wearing policies ought to turn in their libertarian card. However, I think it’s true that ”It’s not always obvious what the most libertarian response to the pandemic is,” since there’s no clear liability allocation for disease transmission, and pigouvian taxation is difficult to apply to infectious diseases. Perhaps it’s like monetary policy, in that the ‘ideal’ policy (free banking) isn’t necessarily very informative on what the best policy at the margin would be, assuming the ideal is off the table.
David Henderson
May 28 2020 at 11:09am
Well said.
One nitpick. You write:
I think you mean implicitly “refuses to abide by private businesses’ mask-wearing policies and won’t leave the premises.” I know a libertarian who, when told that she must wear a mask, refuses to enter the premises. There’s nothing anti-libertarian about her actions. Contrary to common sense, maybe. But contrary to libertarianism, no.
Greg G
May 28 2020 at 12:19pm
I agree there is nothing anti-libertarian about her refusing to enter the premises. That’s an easy one.
But if she crossed a public space getting to the outside of those premises it gets more complicated quickly if she came within six feet of somebody else without wearing a mask and they didn’t consent to that. In that case, the best science available so far says that she imposed a real risk on them that they didn’t consent to.
And, of course, it’s possible there may be more people misusing these metaphorical libertarian cards than using them “correctly” whatever that means. “Socialism” and “liberalism” are not the only political terms whose meaning seems to be shifting in popular usage. Ironically, language is the most libertarian of all human institutions. Everyone gets to decide for themselves what the words they use and hear mean to them. We don’t really have anything more objective than the conventions around these voluntary decisions to appeal to for correct usage which is constantly changing.
Dylan
May 29 2020 at 8:02am
Is that really true? If I’m outdoors, and walk within a few feet of them as I’m going by, while not sneezing, coughing, talking, or even breathing very hard…is that really much of a transmission vector? I’m sure that the risk isn’t completely zero, as nothing is, but wearing a cloth face covering probably only mitigates that risk by a small amount. The limited evidence that I’ve seen doesn’t seem to support the effectiveness of cloth masks, which is still all I have available, since my Amazon order placed last month has still not shown up.
Mark Z
May 28 2020 at 4:11pm
Thanks, and yes that’s what I meant.
David Henderson
May 28 2020 at 4:12pm
Good. Thanks for clarifying.
Mark Brady
May 30 2020 at 3:55pm
Jon writes, “There hasn’t been a major war since the 1940s and the last threat of a major war was in the 1950s.”
So the Korean and Vietnam wars were not major wars?
Jon Murphy
May 30 2020 at 4:07pm
Not really, no. Compared to World War 2 and World War 1, they were quite small scale.
Korea had some 5 million deaths. World War 2 was 75 million.
Korea was confined to Korea. World War 2 raged across the world.
In neither Vietnam nor Korea was there the massive mobilization of forces and resources there was in World War 2.
Korea was bad, make no mistake. But it wasn’t major in the same way World Wars 1 and 2 or even the Napoleonic Wars were.
Mark Brady
May 30 2020 at 5:12pm
Well, of course, it all depends on what the writer means by “major war.”
I’d say that both the Korean War and the Vietnam War were major wars. I agree that the first one was confined to the Korean peninsula and the second one to Vietnam and neighboring countries in south-east Asia, BUT both involved world powers–the United States, an ocean away, and the Soviet Union and China, and many other nation states, which supported one or other side. The Vietnam War required a major mobilization of human and material resources among the protagonists, not least North and South Vietnam, and the United States. And with regard to the U.S., it had a huge impact on society, including the lives of young men who were drafted, killed, and injured, and on the course of politics.
Jon Murphy
May 30 2020 at 5:25pm
ok
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