Kinsella: “I made a comment that it’s not libertarian to endorse the actions of a student in effect using a mechanism to punish a professor in this way.”

Since when did Hoppe acquire a natural right to keep his job whatever the administration thinks of his performance?

There are lots of reasons to think that endorsing the disciplinary actions threatened against Hoppe would be foolish. There are none to think that it would be “not libertarian.”

Stephan,

I agree that getting a precise and theoretically useful concept is more important than the specific word you use to tag it; I’m perfectly willing to talk with people who use “socialism” in a Hoppean sense and I agree that questions of lexicography shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of analysis and discussion.

But, granted all that, I also think that it can be worthwhile to look at how the choice of a particular word for your stipulate definition eases or obscures communication with others about the content of the theory. I mean, I take it that Hoppe didn’t think of himself as offering a pure neologism—if he did, then he would have made up a word or phrase that doesn’t have a fixed meaning—but rather catching ahold of, and clearly setting out, what is essential to a historical common usage.

I think that’s a mistake, but you’re right that the mistake isn’t a serious mistake as far as the development of the theory is concerned. But there are questions as to what sort of problems in the gaps between the historical usage of “socialism” and Hoppe’s (and other 20th century libertarians’) stipulative definition of “socialism” might cause for the communication and application of the theory. (In particular, I’d argue that the use of the term in such a way that libertarians become by definition anti-“socialist” has encouraged libertarians to overestimate their proper distance from the Left and even more substantially underestimate their proper distance from the Right. If this can partly be traced to the Left and libertarians simply talking past each other when they use terms like “capitalism” and “socialism” (in ways that libertarians did NOT use them in, say, the 19th century), then that may be a reason to reconsider the words. Not necessarily a decisive reason, but at least a prima facie one.

As for what word to use… well, again, what’s wrong with “statism?” Doesn’t that already mean institutionalized aggression against private property, especially for a specifically anarcho-capitalist libertarian like Hoppe? Or if you think that runs the risk of making the account seem tautologous at first glance (“states are bad because they’re statist”), why not just use the term “institutionalized coercion” instead? Or “a racket,” if you want something a bit punchier. These are all terms that get the point across clearly and wouldn’t raise any objections from even the most ardent Tuckerite.

“If we had a fair conscription and the sons and daughters of congressmen and their contributors were being sent to Iraq do think they would be applauding Bush’s foreign policy so loudly?”

Who cares? The sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful are not pawns for your political purposes. Enslaving other people in order to shift policy is treating other people as if they were your property. They’re not.

(Of course, it’s also worth noting that even if moral side constraints were satisfied here—which they aren’t—the practical case would still be extraordinarily weak. There is no example in American history of any war that was prevented or shortened by a draft. Every single draft has prepared for or prolonged a war which could not be pursued by voluntary enlistment. And of course even if the draft were somehow passed (by whom?!) in such a way that the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful weren’t given easy outs, they would still—as they always have—exercise their influence to achieve safer officer and clerical positions. That’s exactly what happened in Vietnam once the lottery was instituted and student exemptions were undermined, just to pick a recent example. Conscription always and everywhere means more war for longer.

Kinsella: “I have always liked Hoppe’s definition of socialism as a system of institutionalized aggression against private property.”

Stephan, one of the problems with this definition is that there are many clear cases of people who called themselves socialists, and were recognized as such by other folks at the time, but did not accept any kind of aggression against private property, institutionalized or otherwise, especially Benjamin Tucker and the Liberty circle in the late 19th and early 20th century. Of course, they recognized at the time, and defined themselves in opposition to, statist socialists such as Marx. But they viewed this as an internecine struggle within “Modern Socialism” over a question of means (both constitute and instrumental, for what that’s worth), and identified the State-capital nexus, not statist socialists, as the primary target of their struggle. (Of course, the seizure of the state by the most monstrous forms of state socialism in the 20th century couldn’t help but change the rhetorical stance that libertarians would take. But while the change may have been understandable, there may be good reasons to think that it’s had plenty of unfortunate consequences.)

Of course, you might say, “Well, look, they may have called themselves socialists, but if they didn’t endorse institutionalized aggression against private property then they weren’t really socialists at all; they were libertarians.” I agree that they were libertarians, but I think that conceding the term “socialists” to the Marxists and the welfare statists gives the doctrinaire pronouncements of statist butchers entirely too much credence. Just because specifically Marxist socialism was clearly ascendent from ca. 1921 onwards doesn’t mean that the Marxists have any firmer claim to determining the content of the word “socialist” than the many other competing conceptions of socialism that were common in the 19th century. If Tucker used the word “socialist” in such a way that socialism was conceptually compatible with a thoroughgoing free market (as, in fact, he did), I don’t see any reason to take Marx’s word over his as to what “socialism” means.

Or, while we’re at it, to take Hoppe’s stipulative definition over either historical conception. It’s good to point out that welfare liberalism, fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, theocracy, “progressivism,” etc. all have something importantly in common with one another. But isn’t the best word for what they have in common just “statism,” or, if you prefer, “coercion?” Why not save socialism for what its practitioners actually took it to pick out—a tradition of thought and action with the aim of placing the means of production under workers’ control—rather than expanding it (so as to encompass all other forms of statism) and contracting it (so as to eliminate many forms of anarchist socialism) so as to make it fit a concept that we already have a perfectly good word for?

Mark Fulwiler:

“I’m afraid democracy doesn’t “work” well anyplace—-it always end up as “mob rule” to some degree.”

“Here’s the bottom line: Once the majority figures out that they can use the ballot box and democracy to loot and oppress other people, they always do it. Always. And a written Constitution doesn’t offer much of a defense. Constitutions can be ignored or amended.”

I agree with you, Mark, that a rights-violating government doesn’t magically become OK just because there is popular input into it, and that the idea that protection of individual rights appears magically through the hocus-pocus of a plebiscite is silly. But the direction of critique here is a bit odd. It’s true that democracies can end in corruption and majoritarian looting of the minority. But how does that make them any different from any other political constitution? Certainly monarchies and oligarchies pretty quickly figured out that they could use minority rule to loot from the majority—and that written Constitutions were never much of a defense against them.

In fact, it’s true of any conceivable constitutional form that it could be corrupted and those with control over the guns could turn them on others. It’s even true of idealized anarcho-capitalist enforcement agencies. The will is free and people may end up choosing to do evil. The question is which constitutions are comparatively better and more resistant to encroachments on rights, and which ones are comparatively worse.

Is there any reason to think that rule by the many is comparatively worse than rule by the few, and more prone to rights-violating “mob rule” than rule by the few is prone to rights-violating cabal rule?

Or is this just a general complaint against the State as such, being applied to the limitations of democracy in this particular case? In that case, it’s a fair enough complaint, but it would be odd to suggest the other plausible alternatives for Iraq’s near future (e.g. a military colony headed by a U.S. proconsul or a tyranny run by some suitable client such as Allawi) are better, or even that they aren’t any worse.

Aeon:

This is an issue that we touched on in earlier drafts but which got short shrift in later versions. So let me try to spell it out a bit more here. There’s nothing essentially wrong with trying to piece out which members of a group you find reasonable and which you do not, and making this a part of what you say. The worry with Radical Menace rhetoric here isn’t that it’s sectarian—sectarian debate is, if anything, how movements define themselves and their programme, and I, for one, happen to think that there’s a strong empirical case to be made that the most productive years of the feminist movement (as well as the abolitionist movement, incidentally) were those in which sectarian wrangling was the most pronounced.

Our worries about Radical Menace rhetoric come from different considerations. For example…

1. There is the degree to which it usually depends on problematic notions like “mainstream” and “extremist.” The problem here is that “mainstream” and “extremist” aren’t terms with any legitimate normative content, but they are typically treated as if they are. As folks like William Lloyd Garrison and Ayn Rand were fond of pointing out, if something is extremely wrong with the organization of society then an extreme response is morally in order, whether or not the “mainstream” of thought likes it. The worry here is that the frequent tendency of Radical Menace rhetoric to depend on charges of, e.g., “extremism” serves to subvert a feminist program whenever it happens to run up against “mainstream” opinion. (You might object: but look, mainstream opinion is closer to the truth than a radical feminist program on a number of issues. Okay, but that’s a disagreement with the empirical arguments that male supremacy exists more than it is to the analytical category of Radical Menace rhetorc. And I think that Ayn Rand was right to point out that the use of “extremism” as a term of criticism is philosophically objectionable even if the people so described do happen to be wrong.)

2. There is also the way in which such rhetoric typically attempts to polarize the feminist movement on terms imposed from the outside, rather than in terms of any particular tendency within feminism itself. Feminists have always recognized the distinction between liberal feminists and radical feminists, for example, but the terms on which this distinction is made are very different from the way that Radical Menace rhetoric typically construes it—not surprisingly, since the rhetoric is more or less invariably concerned with the baiting tactics of antifeminists. Because the terms being used to draw the line are so often alien to the distinctions drawn and traditions of thought developed within the feminist movement, they usually distort the positions of the group of feminists being critiqued and lump together feminists whose thought is really distinctly at odds. The issue here isn’t sectarian disagreement, but rather sectarianism in which the “sects” are divided up by alien criteria in ways that blur essential differences. (This is also why this tendency tends to invite the use of antifeminist caricatures, even by well-meaning feminists. It’s also even more clear when the categories—such as Christina Hoff Sommers’ “equity feminism” and “gender feminism”—are completely alien to the feminist tradition.)

3. There’s a general worry about rhetorical strategies that define a feminist political position mostly by opposition to other forms of feminism. Feminists may have conflicts with other feminists, but feminism is primarily defined by opposition to patriarchy. Minarchist libertarians think that individualist anarchists are mistaken, and may think that anarchists hold a position which will ultimately alienate people from libertarianism. Fine; it’s worth arguing about these things. But if a minarchist were investing substantial time and organizing effort to distance him/herself and his/her project from individualist anarchism—rather than from, say, statism—people might very well wonder whether pitching that much effort into the fight with people who are closer to your position than your critics, but have in some way or another gone further than you think they ought, is going to end up limiting your politics.

I’m sure there is still plenty to disagree about here, but I hope that I may have at least helped a bit in articulating where the disagreements may lie.

Kevin,

I agree with you that the argument given by Hoppe and other paleos is hardly dealt with in our essay in its full weight. I think this is a matter of what we had time and space to emphasize more than anything, but you are probably right that at least some clarificatory comments in a footnote would be worthwhile.

I agree with both you and Hoppe that there are historical cases in which father-right and State prerogatives come into conflict with one another, and with you that part of what needs to be said to Hoppe is that just because patriarchy in the family has, in some historical instances come into conflict with State power, does not mean that it is either a good state of affairs or conducive to liberty. (If you accept, as we do the essay, the radical feminist analysis of patriarchy as, among other things, a violent political order autonomous from the violent political order of statism, that makes for good reasons to say that it’s not even consistent with liberty.)

Fair enough; but I think it’s also important to mention (as we do, if with relatively little argument, in the essay) that there are good reasons to think that Hoppe et al. drastically overestimate the degree to which father-right and State prerogatives come into conflict with each other. It’s true that there are notable cases where they’ve come into conflict with one another in certain respects—e.g., revolutionary state socialist movements have typically included critiques of patriarchy in the family, and Bolshevik governments have made direct efforts of various sorts to undermine it. But that’s mostly a fairly new feature on the scene, and the vast bulk of lawmaking for the vast majority of recorded history, insofar as it touched on the matter, has been directed at recognizing, strengthening, and perpetuating men’s power over women through coverture, protection of marital rape and battery, power over children, “protective” legislation banning women from specific fields of work, etc. (Some of these are now—mainly thanks to concerted feminist activism—gone; others remain. And many things that are nominally illegal are still widely enforced de facto, more or less with impunity.)

(Similar remarks could be made in the opposite direction, i.e., the patriarchal family’s traditional wholesale allegiance to the state. It’s no accident that the most statist wings of the Right in the U.S. today are also the people most keen on a culture of strict discipline within the family, “traditional” father-dominated households, etc. Nor is it an accident that the Princes and potentates of history have so often adopted the language of fatherhood and family in order to explain the nature of their own authority over their victims.)

There are also some points I’d like to make about your comments on comparisons between statism and patriarchy as class systems, but I’ll leave those for another post after I’ve thought about it a bit more.

In any case, you’re definitely right that this material deserves more discussion. Possibly in a footnote, possibly in expansion within the text. How exactly to handle it depends in part on where we decide to take the material we have, in terms of expansion, re-arrangement, etc.

Jeanine—points well taken. (They apply elsewhere in public life, too; one of my favorite responses, when people started going on some aimless tear about, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s appearance, was to ask whether they could think of anyone uglier than Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond.)

On exceptions:

“Catherine MacKinnon, for instance, is a beautiful woman by conventional Western feminine standards.”

This is true—it’s also been said of, e.g., Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf. But if anything these are actually used as grounds to dismiss feminist conventionally attractive feminist thinkers—“Naomi Wolf wrote a book about the corrosive effects of gendered beauty standards, but she is herself conventionally beautiful!” If some man is supposed to find a particular feminist unattractive, then she’s attacked as ugly and resentful; if some man is supposed to find her attractive, then she’s dismissed as a bimbo and accused of exploiting the patriarchal standards she criticizes. As usual, it seems, the standards of criticism for feminist writers seem to be that if you want to be taken seriously by certain people, you had best not say anything about feminism at all.

Jeanine,

Well, since it’s a co-authored piece it’s up to Roderick as well as to me. For my part, I’d be glad for you to refer your salonistas to it—although, just given the length of the piece, it’d probably be best to forward a link with a paragraph or two of explanation, rather than reproducing the whole thing.

I don’t have much to add here; just that I agree with Roderick (fancy that!), and that the Dworkin quote in question is almost identical in content to Susan Brownmiller’s analysis of rape as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” in Against Our Will, which we explicitly discuss in section 2 of our essay, and which I’ve discussed elsewhere before.