Peter:

The “strategic-thickness,” “consequence-thickness,” “application-thickness,” and “grounds-thickness” arguments strike me as pretty insubstantial, to the extent I understand them. The grounds-thickness argument, for example — “Sure, private hierarchy is logically consistent with libertarianism, but it’s weird!” — seems like an assertion, not an argument.

Peter, are you referring here to the paragraph on authoritarianism in Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin, under the heading of “Thickness from grounds”, which begins “Consider the conceptual reasons that libertarians have to oppose authoritarianism, not only as enforced by governments but also as expressed in culture, business, the family, and civil society. …”?

If so, I’m not surprising you find the argument unsatisfying, because that’s an extremely elliptical capsule version of the argument. It’s intended to illustrate the kind of argument that you would make for a commitment from grounds, not to give a full-on account of the argument for libertarian concern with non-coercive authoritarianism. A fuller version, with the details tricked out, would require a lot more space than I had available in that part of that particular article (which was written for print in The Freeman, and hence subject to constraints of length, and which was primarily about the varieties of thickness, not primarily about making the case for all the details of my own particular thick conception of libertarianism).

There’s a bit longer discussion of the same topic in my “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity” essay in the Long/Machan Anarchism/Minarchism anthology (particularly if you include, as background, the section on equality), which you may or may not find more satisfying.

Whether or not you find it more satisfying, though, what I’m more interested in is whether or not you accept the form of argument discussed. Specifically, an argument in which the arguer demonstrates 1. that the best reason to be a libertarian is some foundational principle X (Aristotelian natural law, rational egoism, Jeffersonian political equality, whatever your view may be); 2. that principle X implies not only that libertarianism is true, but also some other consequent, Y; and, therefore, 3. a libertarian, qua libertarian, has reason to believe in Y as well as libertarianism, even though denying Y is not inconsistent with libertarianism per se, because denying Y would be inconsistent with the reasons that justify libertarianism. (Hence, as I say, libertarians can reject Y without being inconsistent but they can’t reject it without being unreasonable.)

So, do you accept that form of argument as a legitimate one? If so, then great; that was the main purpose of the discussion, and presumably also the main purpose of Roderick’s link to my essay. If not, then what’s the problem with it?

Well, I’m sure it depends on what you mean by “promote business investment.” If you spell out what you mean by that, then we may perhaps agree, but as it stands, that kind of terminology is often used to represent something which has proven wholly toxic throughout the formerly colonized world.

In the political context of international development politics, especially as it is typically applied to sub-Saharan Africa, there are lots and lots of active schemes to “promote business investment.” The problem is that these schemes are typically driven by large inter-state governmental agencies like the IMF and World Bank; in substance, they typically involved large tax-funded government-to-government loans, packaged with stipulations that the local government bring certain key legislation (notably, Intellectual Property monopolies) into line with the requirements of large business interests, that they implement bureaucratic professionalization of local government (in the name of “good government” and rooting out “corruption”), and that they channel the money into big government forced-modernization boondoggles (e.g. large-scale government infrastructure projects), incentives for large projects by a handful of large multinational corporations, and large-scale privateering commissions for government-backed monopolies on natural resource extraction, utilities, etc.

All of which is to say that these kind of schemes “promote business investment” by means of large-scale government privilege and government-to-government transfers — when what is really needed is not that kind of political scheming, but rather for international politicos to back off and leave Somalia the hell alone, so as to allow a genuine, spontaneous forms of development to emerge. These may well involve various sorts of domestic and foreign “business investment,” but if so, they ought to be attracted to the investments by the prospects for peaceful cooperation, not by the prospects for rent-seeking and the efforts of political bodies to “promote” them.

Me:

It doesn’t really explain the paucity of black or other non-white authors, either. I hear there’s a lot of black people in America.

Robert Paul:

But Charles, we’re talking about the West going back 3,000 years, not just America in the last few centuries.

Yeah, but in fact such lists, while containing a smattering of titles that go back that far, and that get as far out as the outer boundaries of “the West” (which apparently, given the ideological slight-of-hand that goes into defining that peripatetic bit of real estate, get out towards Iraq, except not when there are Muslims there). But in reality they tend to be slanted very heavily towards the last 400 or 500 years of literature (Great Books of the Western World samples heavily from the Hellenes, tosses in a couple of Helenistic writers and a couple of Roman writers for good measure, and then traverses almost 1,000 years of history between Volume 16 and Volume 19 with only four authors covered — Augustine, Aquinas, Dante and Chaucer — so that the next 40 volumes, out of a total of 60, can be spent on covering the most recent 500 years.) Given the typically expansive coverage of modern authors, and given the typical tilt of such lists (when prepared by English-speakers) towards works in English, I think the argument that black American, or other non-white authors, simply got crowded out by all the historical and geographical expanse is correspondingly a lot weaker. If you have 40 very large volumes’ worth of space to devote to the last 500 years, and more than half of that specifically devoted to English-speaking authors, I would be very surprised if a selection based on quality or influence, did not make at least some room for some of the excellent black American authors who have written in that stretch of time and space (or Latin American authors, for that matter, or any number of other Westerners who seem to be typically missing from this kind of list).

In this case, the alleged problem is the left-wing statist criticism that the lists are “mostly” DWEM. … My problem with the criticism (not the list) is that, instead of focusing on the quality of specific works as you are suggesting, the focus is on some sort of equitable proportional representation by race and sex.

Well, maybe; that’s one way of looking at it. But I think a more charitable way of understanding the criticism (and one which happens to line up better with what radical literary critics have usually said, when I’ve encountered them) is not that they’re after some kind of statistical proportion between the authors on the list and the demographics of the general populace, but rather that they have many specific very good authors in mind, who typically don’t show up, and who the critic thinks are being excluded, in spite of the quality of their work, because the compilers of the list are blanking out large demographic groups. (Presumably that’s usually because of ignorance or indifference on the part of the critics, rather than conspiratorial bigotry; they don’t include works that they aren’t aware of or don’t care about. But what the compilers of such lists tend to make themselves aware of, and to care about, is not innocent of American racial or sexual or national politics. It may well be true that Zora Neale Hurston hasn’t had much effect on Mortimer J. Adler’s life; but the question is whether that’s because of her qualities as an author, or because of the kind of life he has led.)

On this reading of the complaint, the idea is not to force some kind of purely demographic proportion, but rather to criticize the ignorance or willing blindness which the disproportions are a symptom of.

Of course, I’m talking about serious literary critics here, not necessarily about (for example) school curriculum committees. I’m sure there are lots of those that threw Chinua Achebe onto the reading list solely in order to avoid complaints from black or white Leftist parents, without the administrators having bothered to give much a damn about how good his books are.

Robert Paul:

I’m sure you’re right; not many people would explicitly state a number like some AA quota. But if anyone complains that a collection is “mostly” DWEM (as if that is a crime in and of itself), then of course the only way to immunize yourself against that would be to make the collection at least 50% non-DWEM. The problem is the focus on race, sex, etc. over quality.

Could you help me out with a concrete example here? I mean, some specific work that you think oughtn’t be included on such lists, that does get included (or suggested for inclusion by Leftist canon critics) because of a focus on race, sex, etc. over quality? Or a work that ought, on the basis of quality, to be included, that isn’t included because of a focus on race, sex, etc. over quality? I hear this kind of complaint all the time, but the complaint is usually pretty thin on concrete demonstrations of the alleged problem.

Because if the answer is going to be something like Their Eyes Were Watching God or Nervous Conditions or Things Fall Apart, then my reply would be simply be that, y’know, those are actually some pretty good books.

In any case, the western-ness of the list doesn’t explain the paucity of female authors.

It doesn’t really explain the paucity of black or other non-white authors, either. I hear there’s a lot of black people in America.

Brandon:

I can’t see much evidence of any exploitation of women by men.

Of course you can’t. Sex-class is so deep as to be invisible.

If you want to find evidence of systemic male oppression of women, there’s a lot of detailed discussion of it in those feminist books that you haven’t read. I can make some suggestions for places to start, if you’d like.

Brandon:

If there really is a male conspiracy against females …

There is as far as I know no serious feminist theorist in the world who believes, or who has ever claimed, that there is any kind of conscious global conspiracy by men against women. Feminist theory, especially radical feminist theory, makes frequent use of concepts like “patriarchy” and “rape culture,” but that’s not the same thing as a deliberate plan to keep women down. You don’t need a conscious global conspiracy in order for there to be large social structures with intense systemic effects that tend to benefit men as a class and hurt women as a class. The second article that Roderick refers you to, Women and the Invisible Fist, specifically discusses this point at some length.

Hope this helps.

Stephan,

Well, the term has broad and narrow usages. You’re right that the narrow usage (popularized by the Free Software Foundation) only applies to licenses — like the GNU GPL and FDL, or the Creative Commons ShareAlike licenses — that are viral, i.e., which not only free the work itself for redistribution and derivative works, but also require anyone who produces a derivative work to also free it under the same terms.

I don’t have any particular view on what license you ought to use on Libertarian Papers. But I think that the “Attribution-ShareAlike” license would only be “less libertarian” than a plain “Attribution” license if the powers restricted by “ShareAlike” were legitimate powers for an author to exercise. But all ShareAlike requires is that authors distributing a derivative work not try to enforce copyright restrictions with respect to their own derivative work. If enforcing copyright restrictions is illibertarian (as you and I agree), then I reckon that forbidding licensees from enforcing them, isn’t.

Bob,

Well, then you’ve clearly never had a discussion in the WikiPedia Talk page for all topics related to anarchism.

I can certainly think of some that are vastly better than the AFL-CIO establishmentarian unions. What about the IWW? The Coalition of Immokalee Workers?

For the record, some IWW locals make use of post-Wagner labor laws (most commonly in efforts to combat retaliatory firing of organizers for unionizing activities). I think that sucks, but the union as a whole is pretty minimally involved, and — importantly, unlike the AFL-CIO and Change to Win [sic] unions — they are largely opposed to State-mediated collective bargaining, and to the whole State regulatory apparatus, and they do have an organizing model which doesn’t depend on the use of federal labor bureaucracy.

The CIW is another can of worms. As far as I know they have never made any use whatsoever of any federal union law at all. If for no other reason than the fact that they couldn’t use it even if they wanted to. The Wagner Act explicitly excluded farmworkers’ unions (also domestic workers’ unions — the point was originally for St. Franklin to be able to count on the support of white-supremacy-forever Southern Democrats, so jobs black people took under Jim Crow weren’t included), and none of the post-Wagner amendments have changed that. Block and Huebert’s blanket assertion that all actually-existing unions either practice vigilante violence or solicit state violence or both is either breathtakingly ignorant or else dishonest. They seem to have no idea at all that several large unions have no access at all to the NLRB under existing federal labor laws, whether they want it or not.

(To be fair, I must note that the largest farmworkers’ union, the UFW, has no access to the federal NLRB, but does have access to a state government agency — the California ALRB, created in the 1970s through their lobbying efforts — in California, their main base of operations. I think this helps explains, actually, why the UFW, which was one of the most dynamic organizations in the labor movement for many years, has accomplished relatively little since the 1970s: they were bought off by the political patronage, and meanwhile the board was captured within a couple years by the big produce bosses, just like every other regulatory board in the history of the world. But as far as I know the CIW has access to nothing of the kind in Florida. Neither does FLOC in most of the states where it operates — mainly in the Southeast U.S., if I recall correctly. What they get done, they get done in spite of, or because of, the fact that they receive neither the legal benefits nor the regulatory burdens of the NLRB regime. And I think that’s a lot of the reason why farmworkers’ unions have accomplished so goddamned much in the past 40 years, while the establishmentarian labor movement has largely stagnated or collapsed.)

Keith,

You’re being an asshole, and you really ought to stop.

Whether or not you think that Anonymous is in fact Aster, and whether or not you think that Anonymous or Aster has treated you unfairly, in this discussion or in other discussions, that’s absolutely no reason to respond with polemical distortions of her views, or with down-and-dirty attacks of your own. You ought to be embarassed at having made such thuggish appeals to tooth-for-a-tooth rhetorical retribution (“like I told you before, if you want to throw rocks at me, I’m going to hit back and hit hard”). If you think that you’ve been strawmanned or unfairly attacked or otherwise wronged in this conversation, I can’t see why you think it’s a good idea to reply by getting just as nasty as you wanna be yourself — as, for example, with your (really vile) attempts to exploit common prejudice against transgender people in order to score some kind of rhetorical point (as if there were anything wrong with being trans or otherwise challenging patriarchally-correct notions of gender identity; as if there were anything wrong with sex reassignment surgery; as if any of this had a damned thing to do with anything in the discussion about libertarian alliances and strategy).

If you have something worth saying about libertarian alliances and strategy (and, for the record, I think what you have to say combines some genuine insights — e.g. about the importance of populism, the importance of secessionist decentralism as way to work across traditional Culture War front lines, the classism that goes into certain Progressive attitudes about poor, rural, Southern, or otherwise marginalized white folks, etc. — with a lot that is really wrongheaded), then you can say it without resorting to this kind of garbage.

And I will hopefully have more to say about your essay later, both on some substantive points and some terminological points. (I think that you have misunderstood the meaning of the term “thick libertarianism”; “thick libertarianism” is not identical with left-libertarianism, and you’ll find thick conceptions of libertarianism not only among left-libertarians, but also among paleolibertarians, orthodox Objectivists, and, while we’re at it, your own expressed views about pluralism, and Anonymous’s expressed views, too; what we differ over is not thickness, but rather on the particular commitments that are to be bundled together with non-aggression.) But I’ll probably come around to a real response in a venue other than this already-lengthy comments thread.

Nick Manley: Am I going to throw acid in the face of a woman who chooses to stay at home and raise her children? No.

Other Nick: What about “ridiculing” or “socially ostracizing” her “patriarchal” husband?

Well, what about it?

If her husband really is acting in a domineering or patriarchal way, then why shouldn’t he be ridiculed or socially ostracized for it? He’s an asshole. Those of us who think that domineering behavior and patriarchal attitudes are ridiculous, foolish, or vicious have every right, and every reason, to withdraw our social support from, or to make fun of, people who engage in them.

Of course, I also think it would be silly to presume that you can just look at the fact that a woman chooses to spend her time on caring for children in her home and somehow automatically infer from that that it’s the result of domineering behavior or patriarchal attitudes on the part of her husband. People make all kinds of choices and there’s nothing in feminism which requires you to rag on heterosexually married women who are, for reasons of their own, working at childcare rather than in a capitalist workplace. Or on their husbands.

Other Nick: My main beef with the kind of thick libertarianism Johnson is advocating is that it seems not to respect the right of a person to voluntarily enter an inegalitarian/hierarchical lifestyle.

How so? You have the right to do whatever you please, an it coerce none. And I have the right to criticize your choices, if I think they are ill-considered, foolish, vicious, or otherwise harmful.

There may be cases where it is rude to do so; there may also be cases where it is morally wrong. (There is such a thing as a virtue of tolerance, and of minding your own business. If you think that libertarians have good reasons, qua libertarians, to cultivate those virtues, even in cases where intolerance or busybodying would have been expressed through nonviolent means like ostracism or ridicule, well, then what you’re advocating is in fact a form of thick libertarianism. A thin conception of libertarianism would have nothing to say about whether people should be tolerant or intolerant, as long as they’re non-aggressive.) But be that as it may, I can’t see that you’ve made any case for saying that it is never the right thing to do. If a husband is (nonviolently) being an asshole to his wife, and she (consensually) stays in the marriage, because she thinks his assholish behavior is basically O.K., or even that it’s the right way for him to treat her, then I certainly see no reason why I have some kind of obligation to continue associating with that asshole or providing social support to him or to hold off on calling him an asshole in conversation.

Other Nick: I’m all for battling ideas with ideas but I draw the line at using means such as “ridicule” and “social ostracism” to win the battle. . . . I don’t think it is, but that’s beside the point. The behaviors I described are a form of coercion in my opinion and therefore shouldn’t be justified even if it can be argued or proven that they serve libertarian ends.

Nick, are you seriously suggesting that ridicule and social ostracism are “a form of coercion”? If so, when you say “coercion” do you mean what libertarians normally mean by it (i.e., an invasion of the target’s liberty rights), or do you mean something else?

If you seriously mean to suggest that making fun of somebody in words or pictures, or withdrawing your social support from them (by refusing to trade with them, refusing to talk to them at parties, whatever) is unjustified because it’s somehow a violation of the target’s liberty rights, then I think this is absurd, and that it’s not recognizable as any form of libertarianism that I’m aware of, since it would require a claim to the effect that nonviolent speech or expression is invading the target’s liberty rights, or that people have a positive obligation to provide social support to people who they do not want to associate with. (And I’m supposed to be the p.c. fascist here?)

I hope that I’ve misunderstood your view. But if I have, then I do need some help in figuring out what it is. Do you think that ridicule or ostracism are not literally violations of the targets rights, but that they are objectionable on some other grounds? If so, what are those grounds, and why do they rule out any and all use of ridicule or social ostracism, just as such, as legitimate nonviolent means for libertarians to achieve their social or cultural goals?

Nick: Such an alliance would, for example, criticize mainstream feminism (or more precisely what Christina Hoff Sommers calls “gender feminism”), male chauvinism, racial supremacists, race hustlers, etc. In contrast, it would support equity feminism, men’s rights groups, “equal opportunity” anti-racism, etc.

May I suggest that if your understanding of the different factions within the feminist movement depends significantly on Christina Hoff Sommers’s worthless, more or less purely polemical distinction between “gender feminism” and “equity feminism,” then you probably need to do some more work learning about the history, theory, and practice of the feminist movement before you try to figure out whether to support or to criticize it. (For a discussion of some of what’s wrong with Sommers’s discussion of “gender” and “equity” feminism, see for example my comments about this alleged distinction over at feministe.)

Nick Manley: The French Revolution and 1968 were both complicated affairs. I don’t think there were no positive aspects to them though.

Well. I don’t think Keith was claiming that there were no positive aspects to them. I think he was claiming that the criteria that are being used to criticize his strategic views are not being consistently applied.