“I fully support the need to eliminate the amount of gender inequality based on irrational prejudices that still exists in America and the world, but libertarian feminists don’t talk like Dworkin does (like victimized collectivists as Aeon Skoble points out). Nor do they call for government intervention.”

I don’t think that the charge that Dworkin is operating on collectivist premises in the passages cited is a just one, but I say more on that in my reply to Aeon above.

As for government intervention: I’m not sure what your target is here. It’s true that Dworkin’s applause for government intervention against, e.g., lap-dancing, or her advocacy for government intervention against pornography, cannot be endorsed on libertarian principles. (That does NOT mean, however, that her writings on the subjects of lap-dancing or prostitution are therefore without value for libertarian feminists; whether she’s right or wrong about government intervention in response to a purported problem is a question distinct from whether she’s right or wrong about the nature of the problem.)

But Dworkin doesn’t just write on lap-dancing or pornography, and it’s not her writings on lap-dancing or pornography that have, in the main, been cited in this discussion. A substantial portion of her work is on male violence against women, particularly in the form of rape and battery. And there’s no demand, from libertarian principles, that libertarian feminists abstain from calling for government action against rapists or batterers. Now, it might not be strategically wise to put too much trust in government law enforcement as a solution to pervasive criminal violence; as an individualist I’d certainly agree. But that’s a separate issue which can’t be resolved apriori by reference to libertarian first principles. And in fact it’s an issue where Dworkin is in agreement, not in opposition, to the libertarian argument:

“There is not a feminist alive who could possibly look to the male legal system for real protection from the systemized sadism of men. Women fight to reform male law, in the areas of rape and battery for instance, because something is better than nothing. In general, we fight to force the law to recognize us as the victims of the crimes committed against us, but the results so far have been paltry and pathetic.” — from Letters from a War Zone

“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?

Thanks, Robert, for raising the issue. A full reply to some of all the points is way beyond what I can do in the scope of a comment, but that’s no excuse not to get started with the space you’ve got.

“It would appear, then, that Andrea Dworkin is one leftist whom Roderick and Charles consider a potential ally.”

I can speak only for myself and not for Roderick, of course.

I don’t, actually, consider Andrea Dworkin a Leftist at all, exactly; in any case my recollection is that she rejects the term for herself. She’s a radical feminist, and there are a lot of complicated historical and theoretical issues involved in positioning feminism vis-a-vis the traditional (male-dominated) Left, which may not be worth digging too deeply into just now. This is worth noting mainly because it may or may not be the case, in particular cases, that the reasons for urging an alliance with the (traditional) Left are the same as those for urging an alliance with feminists. What I have to say on behalf of SDS, for example, has some things importantly in common with and importantly different from what I have to say on behalf of Andrea Dworkin; Dworkin gets a lot of very important things that SDS misses, and SDS gets a few important things that Andrea Dworkin misses.

That said, what I think about Dworkin is that she is a very important, and very frustrating, figure. Important because of her contributions to radical feminist thought and activism, frustrating because of her failures to see the libertarian conclusions that her positions should ultimately lead her to. Broadly speaking, the purpose of taking a good look at the work of radical feminists such as Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, among others, is not because we consider them to be libertarian feminists (they aren’t), or because we agree with everything they say (I certainly don’t, and I take it that Roderick doesn’t either), but rather to suggest that some of what they’ve written offers an important correction for the mistakes that have been made, both by some libertarian critics of feminism, and by those attempting some form of libertarian feminist synthesis. This may be sailing towards Scylla in order to avoid Charibdys, but there’s a place for that in a fallen world, and I think that’s actually overstating the problems with radical feminism as a whole pretty substantially. (As I mentioned in replying to a question from Tibor, most of the points at which, say, Andrea Dworkin’s position is particularly problematic are points at which there are other well-established positions within the radical feminist traditions that are preferable.)

I guess part of all of this is a matter of emphasis, and of precisifying what we mean by quoting (e.g.) Dworkin or MacKinnon. It’s a question worth asking, but I don’t think that the answer really should be much of a head-scratcher once everything is said and done. Most libertarians wouldn’t hesitate to pull a juicy quote from Thomas Jefferson; many if not most wouldn’t hesitate to say that we can learn a lot from John C. Calhoun—even though both of them personally committed crimes against natural law far worse than anything Andrea Dworkin has ever done or countenanced, and even though Calhoun went so far as to defend holding other human beings in chattel slavery as a “positive good.” Citing Dworkin or MacKinnon as sources of important lessons for a libertarian feminism shouldn’t entail agreement with, or blindness towards, their real mistakes any more than citing Jefferson or Calhoun as sources of important lessons for natural rights and decentralist libertarianism should entail agreement with, or blindness towards, the monstrosity of American race slavery.

I think it’s quite right to urge radical feminists towards more libertarian positions; I think one of the major points in our essay is that there are important things that libertarians can learn from radical feminists, too.

‘Is Dworkin “solid on civil liberties”?’

Here I would say “No,” but other Leftists and feminists certainly are. Also, though, that her position—problematic though it is—has often been profoundly mischaracterized by opponents, including civil libertarian opponents (it’s bad, but it’s neither as bad as they claim it is nor bad for the reasons they claim it is), and that opposition to it has been package-dealed with uncritical attitudes towards (e.g.) pornography that aren’t actually justified by any argument from libertarian principles (or from any true principles, I think, but delving into that is something for another time).

‘Is she one of those “whose instincts are firmly anti-authoritarian?”’

I’d say that they very clearly are—based on her essays and her memoirs, among other things; this may serve to point out that anti-authoritarianism is important and valuable but not always sufficient. She doesn’t endorse government coercion, where she does, because she thinks a powerful government coercing people into a just cause is a great idea; she does it because she (rightly) thinks that the issue of violence against women and entrenched sexism is overwhelmingly large and urgent, and (wrongly) thinks that admittedly problematic and dangerous government interventions are justifiable in dealing with it, even though she is deeply and thoroughly suspicious of State power.

Is that a mistake? Yeah, it is, but I don’t think it’s a failure to be sufficiently anti-authoritarian. It has more to do with a failure to be sufficiently individualist. The two are related, but not the same thing at all.

‘Is she perhaps neither—but her analysis of power relations in society is valuable to libertarians anyway?’

This much I’d whole-heartedly endorse.

More to come, here and elsewhere, I’m sure.

If you’re gonna make an omelet, ya gotta break a couple eggs. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Cluster bombs don’t just leave a bit of a mess around the kitchen. This is not some limited set of easily fixable costs we are talking about. People are dying, needlessly; conservative estimates place the number around 10,000-15,000 Iraqi civilians and some peer-reviewed results place it around 100,000. If you want to say that these innocent people’s lives are worth whatever the hell it is you hoped to accomplish, then say so, but at least have enough respect for the dead not to pass off their deaths with facile proverbs.