Comments Elsewhere

“I have to say I don’t see this at all. Just look at the Dworkin remarks excerpted in Bob’s post: “You men” should stop raping — the underlying collectivist premise here ought to be a clear signal that there’s zero affinity for libertarian ideas here.”

Aeon, this is surely stronger than can be justified. Herbert Spencer, in his old age, came to endorse military conscription; Thomas Jefferson, throughout his life, kept other human beings in outright slavery and used his considerable political influence to protect the institution. Neither position could be endorsed without collectivism of a far worse variety than anything Dworkin has ever employed, but that hardly means that either Thomas Jefferson or Herbert Spencer could be said to have “zero affinity for libertarian ideas.”

As for whether she was right to address the men in the National Organization for Changing Men in the second-person plural about stopping rape, that depends on a further argument she makes. It is not that all men are collectively responsible for the fact that many men commit rape (although it is statistically extremely unlikely that, in an audience of several hundred men, she was not addressing, inter alia, some men who had committed rape). It is that she holds that men, as a class, participate in a system of male supremacy—an interlocking system of ideas, cultural practices, material conditions, government coercion, “private” coercion through violence, etc.—that, among other things, issues in the extraordinary prevalence of the rape of individual women by individual men. I think that there are similarly good grounds to say that there is a “political class” in the United States, and that not all the members of that class personally beat people up or throw them in jail for failing to live up to arbitrary government decrees; but they do participate in a system of oppression and exploitation that ultimately issues in, among other things, beating people up and throwing them in jail. And that it is worth while to point this out to them as one of the reasons why they should work to undermine the political class system that they participate in and benefit from.

Neither class analysis involves any attribution of collective guilt or collective responsibility; nor do they presuppose any kind of centralized command-and-control structure. (Lynch law in the post-Reconstruction South would be another excellent example). This is just class analysis. I think that the example of the 19th century individualist anarchists’ writings on, among other things, racism, sexism, the exploitation of workers, and war, should be a good enough grounds for seeing that individualism is not incompatible, as such, with class analysis. If 20th century individualists mostly passed by class analysis then so much the worse for them, and the sooner we learn to do it again the better.

“I found it irksome that Roderick and Johnson assume that libertarian detractors of radical feminism are unfamiliar with the actual writings of radical feminists.”

What we were trying to urge is not that all libertarian critics of feminism are unfamiliar with the actual writings of radical feminists, and if we suggested that I’m sorry for it. But let me try to make my presumptions and my aims a bit more clear indirectly with a couple of questions back to you. I agree with you that there are libertarians, yourself and Tibor among them, who have substantial experience directly with radical feminist writings; but do you think that there are any prevalent libertarian complaints against radical feminism that are based on misunderstandings (whether through ignorance or misreading) of what radical feminists have historically said and done? And if you do, how prevalent do you find them to be?