Of course I agree with you that left-libertarianism (of the sort defended in those essays) is not the only possible thick conception of libertarianism.(*) I think that it is the correct thick conception to adopt, and that the others generally are not, and I have my arguments for that conclusion, but I think that in order for the arguments to be properly understood, the underlying conceptual issue (about what having a “thick” conception does, or does not, mean) has to be brought out.

(* The first article I linked actually nods towards this at the end, and it has a longer “director’s cut” that discusses the issue in more depth; the second article is an explicit play on the point, in making use of some of Rothbard’s socially conservative writing in order to make a point on behalf of left-libertarianism. Some of the most notable advocates of thick conceptions of libertarianism in clude radical libertarian feminists, traditionalist paleolibertarians, and orthodox Objectivists, a strange set of bedfellows if ever there was one.)

Micha,

Point taken; but I’d say that the issue here really just turns on what verb “thin conception of libertarianism” is supposed to be the object of. You can follow a thin conception of libertarianism without ever promoting libertarianism (of any kind), but you can’t advocate or promote a thin conception of libertarianism. But presumably someone who follows a thin conception may want to promote it, too, for reasons which they may think of as having to do with libertarianism (in which case I guess we’re talking about some slight thickening, at least in the strategic dimension, away from the degenerate case of thinness), or which may not have anything to do with libertarianism, but rather be for the sake of other reasons (which puts us back in the degenerate case, and may seem quite weird, but is in the end a conceivable option).

Of course, the real upshot here may be that it may be somewhat misleading to speak of “thick” and “thin” conceptions as if they involved a distinction of kind. Really the debate is between thickerer conceptions, with variations in degree along several different axes. Certainly, you could characterize my own position, in part, by saying that it’s much thinner than that of, say, orthodox Objectivsts — in the sense that my ideas about what would constitute the proper context and preconditions for a flourishing free society are much broader and less detailed — but much thicker than that of, say, Walter Block.