Comments Elsewhere

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.