The problem of collective liberty as opposed to individual liberty can be illustrated with a parable from Robert Nozick, a Harvard philosopher whose 1974 book Anarchy, State and Utopia has had much influence on libertarian thought.
You are a slave at the mercy of a brutal master. At some point, the master becomes nicer toward you, stops beating you for no reason, and even gives you some free time. He also has 10,000 other slaves and nicely takes their needs, merit, and other such factors into account when assigning their tasks. He reduces their workweek to three days. He later allows them to go and work on the open market provided they give him three-sevenths of their wages. However, he keeps the power to call them back to the plantation in case of emergency and to restrict their rights to engage in certain personal activities (mountain climbing or cigarette smoking, for example) that could reduce their productive capacities.
The next step is that he allows his 10,000 other slaves to discuss among themselves and vote on all the decisions he previously made, including what proportion of all slaves’ earnings, including yours, will go in a common fund and how the money will be used. The 10,000 then benevolently decide that you can vote, but only in case their votes are tied 5,000 to 5,000 (which never happens). Finally, the 10,000 decide to let you throw your ballot with theirs before they count them (which will of course produces the same outcome as the previous procedure). Thus, all the 10,001 democratically make all the decisions they want regarding the lives of everybody including you. Nozick’s question: Where in that sequence did you stop being a slave? (See pp. 290-292 of Anarchy, State and Utopia for the more detailed story.)
For a libertarian or a classical liberal, the answer is “nowhere.” Your master has become kinder and more understanding; and, from being one person, became a group of 10,000 persons. You and your 10,000 colleagues have collective liberty, compared to when you all had one individual master, but none of you has individual liberty. If your collective master becomes nasty toward you, you may try to persuade him to be nicer just like you could do with your individual master before, but you have no more control on your life.
There are a few objections to this conclusion, but none is valid if the majority is omnipotent (“sovereign”). As long as that is the case, you are still a slave, albeit an equal slave. Numerical democracy is incompatible with the idea of individual liberty. (Some months ago, I had a “conversation” with ChatGPT, in which the poor thing tried to “argue” both for individual rights and for the obligation to submit to the majority!)
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Hutcheson
Sep 25 2023 at 1:43pm
OK. At all stages you remain a “slave.”
What are the policy implications?
Big: Who get to vote? How are sub-groups ordered?
Small: What the best tax rate on net CO2 emissions? Should guns be registered and traceable?
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 25 2023 at 1:57pm
Thomas: I think that, after your first sentence, you put your finger on the difference between your approach and that of theorists such as Buchanan and Hayek (and Adam Smith and, I would think, most classical liberals, at least in the Anglo-Saxon tradition). Long before “policy implications” (like, say, is the treatment of acne to be subsidized?) is the double question: (1) Are there some coercive rules indispensable for maintaining a peaceful, prosperous, and free society? (2) If so, what are they?
Mactoul
Sep 26 2023 at 5:46am
Classical liberals give unambiguous answer to your question. They were not for anarchism, philosophical or otherwise. Buchanan, in Limits of Liberty:
Jon Murphy
Sep 26 2023 at 9:32am
Yes, many classical liberals are not anarchists, but that’s irrelevant. There are many who are.
By the way, you are wrong to cite Buchanan as not a philosophical anarchist. For one, he explicitly labels himself so multiple times. In the entire section you quote from, he discusses the problem with anarchy is that it is fragile; you only need one person who believes it is ok to impose their will on someone else for it to collapse. Thus, while anarchy may be an ideal to strive for, one must understand its limits and have a theory of government (and good government).
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 26 2023 at 2:38pm
Mactoul: Another point to keep in mind is that Anthony de Jasay defined himself as both a liberal and an anarchist. One year after the publication of de Jasay’s The State, Buchanan reviewed the book in Public Choice. He understood the challenge that de Jasay’s attack on the state represented for his own theory, and wrote in his review:
What Buchanan says here is that a reform to constrain the state is necessary so that it does not progress toward the Plantation State.
Another of my EconLog posts explores the continuum between liberalism and anarchism.
Mactoul
Sep 27 2023 at 2:25am
Buchanan’s ordered anarchy may mean everything or nothing. It seems, like Hayek, Buchanan admits of an indefinite extent of government. Who or what is to supply the politico-legal order which Buchanan calls a public good?
Indeed, in my definition, existence of a politico-legal order is equivalent to existence of a state of laws. No formal government is essential, informal laws and customs of primitive man will do.
Anarchy, if it means anything, should mean an absence of this politico-legal order. And it cannot be shown plausible merely by showing superiority of market provision of economic goods. You need to show how the politico-legal order can be generated in situ.
In the alternative theory, the politico-legal order is not generated. It always exists. There are no bare, solitary men, innocent of the law. Men are born in a politico-legal order, and in families that are embedded in particular communities, each with its own version of the order.
Jon Murphy
Sep 27 2023 at 9:15am
Why? I’ve never heard any anarchist use that definition, not even the most extreme anarcho-primitivist.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Sep 26 2023 at 6:21pm
I assume there are.
That is my question.
Philo
Sep 30 2023 at 10:27pm
“(1) Are there some coercive rules indispensable for maintaining a peaceful, prosperous, and free society? (2) If so, what are they?” The answers will depend on material and social conditions; there are no *a priori* answers, good for all times/places/situations, that can be discovered by “political philosophers.”
Jon Murphy
Sep 25 2023 at 5:16pm
I think, to answer your question on policy, Adam Smith is very good here. His Wealth of Nations tackles exactly that problem. In it (as well as in Theory of Moral Sentiments), we establishes a presumption of liberty and uses that to test various policies. For example, he notes (on Book IV) that tariffs could possibly be used to offset some negative consequences of trade. But he states (in Book V) that even if it were the case that costs are less than benefits, such tariffs would be improper and they violate various norms and jurisprudential considerations about natural liberty.
In other words, costs and benefits are not the only judge of a policy. Benefits exceeding costs tell us nothing about whether a policy should occur. Rather, jurisprudental concerns about liberty, security, and the like are prior to concerns about benefits and costs.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 25 2023 at 5:23pm
Very good points, Jon. It’s astonishing how much we have to learn from Smith, isn’t it?
nobody.really
Sep 26 2023 at 3:02pm
And in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part III, Chap. 3, Smith says:
So–not a big fan of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, eh?
Andrea Mays
Sep 25 2023 at 3:09pm
In answer to your question about non-coercive rules, Pierre—would you consider “you are free to do as you wish so long as you do not do harm to others in the process” coercive? (Am I overthinking or underthinking this?)
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 25 2023 at 5:17pm
Andrea: The definition you suggest is that of John Stuart Mill and many classical liberals. It encapsulates much of what we think is individual liberty. We still have to define what “harm” is, which probably requires some traditional (Hayek), conventional (de Jasay), or unanimously agreed (Buchanan) rules. Is that the way you would see this?
nobody.really
Sep 25 2023 at 7:36pm
I can imagine a process for submitting rules for agreement, and identifying the ones that receive unanimous consent. But how would I distinguish between Hayek’s “traditional” rules and de Jasay’s “conventional” rules?
Also, in The Final Conceit, Hayek states a couple of times that his embrace of traditional rules does not extend to rules about sexuality and the family–although he never explains why he makes exceptions for these categories. As far as I can tell, his philosophy implies that humans lack sufficient perspective to judge traditional rules, and therefore lack a sufficient basis to modify them. It’s like G.K. Chesterton’s fence–except that you could skip the process about analyzing the possible reasons for the fence crossing the road because you should have the humility to acknowledge that you’ll never be able to understand the fence’s purpose; you should just maintain the fence.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 26 2023 at 11:22am
Nobody: Your questions are good and profound. Note that what Hayek says in The Fatal Conceit (and elsewhere) is that evolved rules can be changed when they are found to be detrimental to the free society or when, like in the case of sexual rules, they have outlived their utility (because of contraception, say). The family, as distinct from society, is a different matter. How to know which rules to change and how, given our ignorance of their function in the spontaneous order, is not an easy question.
As for Hayek’s rules (which I refer to as “traditional”) and de Jasay’s rules (which I refer to as “conventional”), one difference is that there is, for the former, a state to enforce the essential ones, but no state for the latter. Some methodological differences also exist: de Jasay uses game theory as a framework to study conventions (in the sense of David Hume and of Robert Sugden’s The Economics of Rights, Cooperation, and Welfare).
Kevin Corcoran
Sep 26 2023 at 11:41am
This isn’t really the case. In fact, Hayek explicitly argues that there are times we both can and should “remove the fence,” so to speak. He outlines when he thinks we would have “sufficient basis to modify” traditional rules in Rules and Order, the first volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, in chapter four, in the section with the rather on-the-note title “Why grown law requires correction by legislation.” There, he makes an argument for why and when it’s sometimes it’s both justified and necessary to modify or remove the Chesterton fence of traditional rules (or grown law). So it’s not true that “his philosophy implies that humans lack sufficient perspective to judge traditional rules, and therefore lack a sufficient basis to modify them” – his philosophy not only merely doesn’t imply that, he explicitly argues otherwise in the course of describing his philosophy.
nobody.really
Sep 26 2023 at 2:26pm
Ah, but some students of Hayek observe a crucial distinction between Laws, Legislation, and Liberty and The Fatal Conceit–specifically, the former books are not yet available on Audible.
In short, I haven’t read the former, so score one for Kevin Corcoran. (I am also grateful to Pierre Lemieux for striving to summarize these volumes. Perhaps I have failed to fully digest his efforts.)
Is it possible to summarize Hayek’s argument about when to amend “grown law”? And is it obvious why his general admonition about preserving “grown law” would not apply to matters concerning sex and family?
Kevin Corcoran
Sep 26 2023 at 5:07pm
Only very poorly, but I’ll take a poor stab at it, mostly by just letting Hayek do the talking. In that particular section of Rules and Order, he describes a few different scenarios, such as when for “a variety of reasons the spontaneous process of growth may lead to an impasse from which in cannot extricate itself by its own forces or which it will at least not correct quickly enough…The fact that law that has evolved in this way has certain desirable properties does not prove that it will always be good law or even that some of its rules may not be very bad. It therefore does not mean that we can altogether dispense with legislation.”
Additionally, Hayek notes that the “necessity of such radical changes of particular rules may be due to various causes. It may be due simply to the recognition that some past development was based on error or that it produced consequences later recognized as unjust.” But the main case is “when it is recognized that some hereto accepted rules are unjust in light of more general principle of justice,” which in turn “may well require the revision not only of single rules but of whole sections of the established system” of evolved rules.
I haven’t given this much thought, but the first thing that comes to mind is Yoram Hazony’s take on Hayek in his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery (on which I may or may not do a deep-dive later for this blog). To very briefly summarize, Hazony argues that while Hayek provided “the most sophisticated defense of inherited tradition to appear during the twentieth century” in a way that made “the Enlightenment liberal rejection of inherited tradition look amateurish and ill-considered”, nonetheless, Hayek is not a true conservative by Hazony’s lights, but a liberal. And what made Hayek a liberal rather than a true conservative was, as Hazony puts it, “Hayek’s dogmatic insistence on individual liberty as the ‘supreme principle’ in political life.” In Hazony’s understanding of conservatism, individual liberty is a good, important, and valuable thing, but it’s a means to an end – individual liberty is good because it’s empirically demonstrated to be useful to maintaining the evolved and established order of society. By contrast, for Hayek, individual liberty was the end, not the means, and use of grown and established order is good because it helps uphold and maintain the highest principle of freedom and liberty for the individual. Thus, rules regarding sex and the family could be instances where Hayek would say “some hereto accepted rules are unjust in light of more general principle of justice,” and the more general principle of justice in this case is, in fact, the highest principle of individual freedom.
But like I said, I haven’t given that specific point a huge amount of thought before, so that’s just a “first draft” answer, and one I’d put a lowish level of confidence in, at least until I give it more thought.
nobody.really
Sep 27 2023 at 7:59am
Wow—thanks for sending this. Surely every social reformer—the French Revolutionists, the Nazis, the Communists—would defend their reforms on the basis of these exceptions. I appreciate that this is a summary of a larger argument, but I’m left to ponder if Hayek’s exceptions risk swallowing Hayek’s rules.
Interesting distinction. So, when faced with an imminent military invasion, a conservative might compromise and embrace compulsory military conscription in the interest of maintaining the evolved and established order of society—whereas a liberal would reject compulsory conscription even if it would result in the destruction of that society?
Here I’m reminded of Jefferson’s September 20, 1810 letter:
“A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means…. A ship at sea in distress for provisions, meets another having abundance, yet refusing a supply; the law of self-preservation authorizes the distressed to take a supply by force. In all these cases, the unwritten laws of necessity, of self-preservation, and of the public safety, control the written laws of meum and tuum….”
(Contra Adam Smith, apparently Jefferson DID embrace Kaldor-Hicks efficiency.) Please do review Hazony’s book when you get the chance!
Kevin Corcoran
Sep 27 2023 at 11:41am
This discussion triggered the little memory imp that lives in the back of my head, who reminded me that I had read an article from Jonathan Rauch in Reason magazine many years ago presenting what I found to be a powerful Hayekian argument in favor of gay marriage that seemed to be relevant to this discussion. Luckily, Google made it easy for me to dig up again, and it still holds up. Also, I could have saved myself a lot of time in my initial reply by just pointing you there, because it covers a lot of the same ground. In fact, I was delighted to see Rauch cites the very same section of Rules and Order I mentioned, including some of the same passages, along with additional citations to Hayek’s Why I Am Not a Conservative from his The Constitution of Liberty, which I had not thought to cite.
Rauch says “In its strong version, the Hayekian argument implies that no reforms of longstanding institutions or customs should ever be undertaken, because any legal or political meddling would interfere with the natural evolution of social mores,” which seemed to be what how you also understood the Hayekian argument. But the author goes on to argue “the extreme Hayekian position—never reform anything—is untenable. And that point was made resoundingly by no less an authority than F.A. Hayek himself.” He then applies the fuller, subtler analysis of Hayek’s argument about evolved rules and norms to make a Hayekian argument in favor of gay marriage – which was a much more controversial position when the article was written, in the ancient days of 2004. Seeing a proper scholar like Rauch make these same points raises my low level of confidence in my initial answer.
You also raise this concern:
The distinction here is that the movements you mention were not simple “reformers” aiming to merely adjust some “hereto accepted rule” in order to bring them into better alignment with “more general principle of justice” that had been established over time. These were revolutionaries who sought to fully overthrow the established order and rebuilt society anew according to abstract ideals. Once again, I was pleased to see Rauch made the same point that occurred to me:
Nonetheless, surely there are other, more mild reformers who would consider themselves to be proper applications of the kinds of exceptions Hayek describes – such as those who wanted to reform the institution of marriage to include same sex couples. And in how to evaluate those cases, I think Hayek’s advice holds up, as Rauch aptly argues.
There was one area where Hayek was particularly concerned about the exception swallowing the rule – and that was making exceptions to liberty and freedom. In Rules and Order, Hayek wrote:
This doesn’t commit someone to saying individual freedom always leads to the best results in every case for every topic. It’s better summarized as “If you operate by the rule ‘don’t violate individual liberty and freedom, unless you think you can get good results by doing so’, or ‘only allow individual freedom and liberty when you can positively show that doing so will provide the best results in a given instance’, you end up in a system where freedom and liberty utterly cease to exist. So the rule ‘uphold liberty and freedom, even in cases when the results of doing so seem bad’ is the best of all the imperfect options we have.”
nobody.really
Sep 27 2023 at 12:47pm
Well, that nails it. It’s flattering to imagine that my thinking is only 20 years behind the times. If only enough of you guys would stand athwart history shouting “Stop!,” I might get a chance to catch up.
This has been a most gratifying discussion. Gold stars all around, and ten points for Gryffindor.
Roger McKinney
Sep 25 2023 at 3:38pm
That’s why the founders of the US feared democracy as much as monarchy. Republicanism is a solution. It takes the most important decisions out of the hands of the majority as the Constitution does.
Problem is the majority must respect the Constitution because they can change it and get rid of its constraints on them. They can do that through ammendment or just by appointing judges who ignore it, which the US has done for the past century and a half.
That’s why Mises wrote that the only constitution that matters is the will of the majority.
MarkW
Sep 26 2023 at 11:10am
They can do that through amendment or just by appointing judges who ignore it, which the US has done for the past century and a half.
But not quickly, easily, or without restraint by either method. Which is why Mises was too pessimistic. There are a number freedoms in the bill of rights that might not pass today by majority vote, but nor have they been repealed or ignored.
vince
Sep 25 2023 at 6:28pm
You can have individual liberty, or you can live in a society and give up some of your individual liberty. What’s the fuss about?
Jon Murphy
Sep 25 2023 at 7:41pm
That’s not the relevant tradeoff. As many classical liberals argue (myself and Adam Smith included), living in a society can actually increase individual liberty under certain circumstances. If the tradeoff were as you propose, societies would not exist; there is no benefit to society in the tradeoff you posit, only costs.
So, what’s all the fuss about? The fuss is about understanding society, understanding how it emerges, how it flourishes, how individuals interact with each other. A key portion of that is understanding liberty and what makes liberty liberty.
nobody.really
Sep 25 2023 at 11:50pm
Maybe there is no trade-off. Maybe you’ve chosen to surrender some of your individual liberty to live in society–a society that organizes a state and takes some resources from its members and uses them to defend those members. And, while you acknowledge the legitimacy of the state and your responsibilities within the society, you may occasionally cheat for your own advantage–and may even get caught and punished.
Alternatively, maybe you retain your claim to absolute autonomy–but now find yourself under the thumb of a gang called “the state” and lack the power to maintain any significant resistance to its laws/norms. If you try, you know you may get caught and punished.
To the outside observer, the behavior of the society member might look a lot like the behavior of the autonomous individual.
nobody.really
Sep 26 2023 at 1:21am
The Nozick hypothetical seems like the inverse of the social contract story:
You start as an autonomous individual subject to various threats–especially threats from stronger autonomous individuals. So you agree to join with other individuals to form a mutual defense club, or “gang.” To ensure mutual aid, you and your fellow members make various rules–rules to which you assent. But as the rival gangs get larger, you have to make your own gang larger to provide adequate defense; perhaps your gang joins with other gangs. As the gang grows, making decisions unanimously becomes cumbersome; on the other hand, more members has the benefits of greater specialization–including specialization in administering gang rules. Confronted with a lack of better options, most gang members support creating a system of electing representatives and authorizing those representatives to make decisions on the gang’s behalf. People who disagree with this proposal are free to leave the gang. But since people who leave would find themselves at the mercy of the other large gangs, few people make that choice.
Query: At what point did gang members stop being autonomous individuals?
Jon Murphy
Sep 26 2023 at 9:23am
Precisely define “autonomous.” There is a simple, and obvious, answer to your question but it’ll depend on that your precise definition of “autonomous” is.
nobody.really
Sep 26 2023 at 2:09pm
A fair question, I guess. The definition would vary depending somewhat depending on which social contract theorist you use. Maybe a “free,” solitary man in a “state of nature” a la Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau?
I anticipate that you (like Hayek) might respond that I’m describing a myth, because the share of humans who have ever lived that way is vanishingly small. (Classical) liberalism emphasizes the primacy of the individual distinct from the group, but humans evolved from other primates and lived as they live–in groups. This complicates efforts to draw clear boundaries between the individual and the group. (And this complication reaches is apex when describing hyper-social animals such as bees.)
Jon Murphy
Sep 26 2023 at 5:01pm
In that case, the answer to your question is trivial: at that first step, he is no longer autonomous.
nobody.really
Sep 27 2023 at 7:27am
Fair enough. And perhaps there’s an analogous reply to Nozick: Depending on the definitions you use, perhaps the demands required to live in society means that we are all perpetually “slaves.”
Jon Murphy
Sep 27 2023 at 12:14pm
Yes. That is what Nozick is trying to tease out.
nobody.really
Sep 27 2023 at 12:37pm
Hayek might embrace this conclusion: In the third volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek emphasized that “Man has been civilized very much against his wishes.” The very act of being socialized in civilization constrains us, perhaps analogously to how a slave is constrained.
Yet I suspect that Nozick was making the opposite argument–that it is possible for people organize and live in society without being slaves, provided people organize a society that defends (some degree of) individual autonomy.
Mactoul
Sep 27 2023 at 2:31am
Arnold Kling has a interesting discussion of limitations of anarchy-capitalism at In My Tribe substack today. He is arriving towards the non-liberal understanding when he concludes with:
This particularity is necessarily missing from liberal theory, which has no principle of exclusion.
Jon Murphy
Sep 27 2023 at 9:16am
Uh…that’s been a major aspect of liberal thought for centuries. Adam Smith, for example, wrote two famous books on it.
Mactoul
Sep 27 2023 at 11:03pm
You keep saying it but never tell. I can’t figure out what Adam Smith had to do with it. He was no libertarian, he never denied legitimacy of existing states.
Question of particularity never arose for him consequently.
Mactoul
Sep 27 2023 at 5:17am
Insistence on simple solitary principle of private liberty is characteristic of WEIRD people who are along with their attitudes, products of contingent evolution through very illiberal means.
These means include direction through the Church of personal laws of medieval Europe and previous conquests of Roman Empire. Also, very important, weeding out of the violent and impulsive through capital punishment liberally applied.
Jon Murphy
Sep 27 2023 at 9:17am
What are you even talking about?
Comments are closed.