Especially in the United States and Canada, libertarianism is often looked at as a right-wing philosophy, especially by non-libertarians, since in those two countries, libertarians tend to have more in common with traditional conservatives than liberals, especially with regards to economic and gun control policies. However, many often describe libertarians as being “conservative” on economic issues and “liberal” on social issues. Most libertarians also consider a “Constitutional Republic” (a Republic limited sharply by the United States’ Constitution) to be a better form of government than what is typically recognized as an “unrestricted” Democracy, which they see as “the tyranny of the majority”. (For example, as constitutionalist republicans, most libertarians view Texas congressman and former Libertarian U.S. Presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-14) to be a philosophical libertarian, even though he is technically affiliated with the “Republican” Party.)

But describing libertarians as right-wing (or left-wing for that matter) is misleading, since the philosophy really doesn’t fall strictly into a left-right designation. Libertarians reject the categorization of their political philosophy in term of right-wing and left-wing. For example, libertarians oppose the War on Drugs, conscription, any war that is not in self-defense or to aid another nation in their defense, while supporting the expansion of free trade, allowing free speech, and minimizing taxation, clearly sitting on both sides of the classic left-right political divide.

Another way to understand where libertarians fit into the political spectrum would be to contrast the view with both liberalism, which favors government action to promote equality, and conservativism, which favors government action to promote order. Libertarianism favors freedom and opposes government action to promote either equality or order, in the understanding that order is emergent from a state of justice. For example, conservatives are likely to support a ban on same-sex marriage, in the interests of preserving the traditional order, liberals are likely to favor allowing same-sex marriage, in the interest of guaranteeing equality under the law, and libertarians are likely to attack the notion of government-sanctioned marriage itself. In specific, they typically deny that the government deserves any role in marriage other than enforcing whatever legal contract people choose to bind themselves to, and to oppose the various additional rights currently granted to married people.

The related case of discrimination in the workplace is perhaps even more illuminating. Here, liberals would typically support laws to penalize employers for discrimination on a basis unrelated to the ability to do the job, conservatives would typically allow or even encourage such discrimination, but libertarians could be expected to oppose any laws on this matter because these would infringe on the property rights of both the business owner and the justly-hired employees. In other words, even if a particular libertarian feels strongly that various groups being discriminated against should have equality, he would say that intervening to establish this equality should not be the role of the government, but that of society. If a business discriminates against you, you are “free” to work elsewhere, or possibly start your own business which follows your personal belief structure. The libertarians ability to distinguish between equality and freedom in this instance demonstrates their belief that equality of position is not a necessary condition of freedom, especially the freedom to enter into agreements in an un-coerced manner. By endorsing such things as the freedom to discriminate, libertarianism supports freedom of association which is the foundation of human rights.

Instead of a “left-right” spectrum, some libertarians use a two-dimensional space, with “personal freedom” on one axis and “economic freedom” on the other, which is called the Nolan chart. Named after David Nolan, who designed the chart and also founded the United States Libertarian Party, the chart is similar to a socio-political test used to place individuals by the Advocates for Self Government. A first approximation of libertarian politics (derived from these charts) is that they agree with liberals on social issues and with conservatives on economic issues. Thus, the traditional linear scale of governmental philosophy could be represented inside the chart stretching from the upper left corner to the lower right, while the degree of state control is represented linearly from the lower left to the upper right.

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It was anarchist communist Joseph Déjacque who first coined the term libertarian in 1857. While many left-anarchists still use the term (e.g., libertarian is a synonym of anarchism in some non-English languages, like French, Italian and so on), its most common usage in the United States has nothing to do with socialism.

Instead, libertarianism as a political ideal is viewed as a form of classical liberalism, a modern term often used interchangeably with libertarianism. This concept, originally referred to simply as “liberalism,” arose from Enlightenment ideas in Europe and America, including the political philosophies of John Locke and the Baron de Montesquieu, and the moral and economic philosophy of Adam Smith. By the late 18th Century, these ideas quickly spread with the Industrial Revolution throughout the Western world.

Locke developed a version of the social contract as rule with “the consent of the governed” derived from natural rights. The role of the legislature was to protect natural rights in the legal form of civil rights. Locke built on the idea of natural rights to propose a labor theory of property; each individual in the state of nature “owns” himself and, by virtue of their labor, owns the fruits of his efforts. From this conception of natural rights, an economy emerges based on private property and trade, with money as the medium of exchange.

At around the same period, the French philosopher Montesquieu developed a distinction between sovereign and administrative powers, and proposed a separation of powers among the latter as a counterweight to the natural tendency of administrative power to grow at the expense of individual rights. He allowed as to how this separation of powers could work just as well in a republic as for a limited monarchy, though he personally preferred the latter. Nevertheless, his ideas fed the imaginations of America’s Founding Fathers, and would become the basis upon which political power would be exercised by most governments, both constitutional monarchies and republics, beginning with the United States.

Adam Smith’s moral philosophy stressed government non-intervention so that individuals could achieve whatever their “God-given talents” would allow without interference from arbitrary forces. His economic analysis suggested that anything interfering with the ability of individuals to contribute their best talents to any enterprise–a reference to mercantilist policies and monopolistic guilds–would lead to an inefficient division of labor, and hamstring progress generally. Smith stated that “a voluntary, informed transaction always benefits both parties,” such that “voluntary” and “informed” meant the absence of force or fraud.

During the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers of the United States enshrined the protection of liberty as the primary purpose of government. Thomas Jefferson said that “rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” He is also credited with the saying that “the government that governs best, governs least.”

The Marquis de La Fayette imported American ideas of liberty, although some might say re-imported, in drafting the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, which states:

“Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.”

John Stuart Mill, in a reformulation of Jeremy Bentham’s notion of utilitarianism, stated that, “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” Mill contrasts this with what he calls the “tyranny of the majority,” declaring that utilitarianism requires that political arrangements satisfy the “liberty principle”, whereby each person would be guaranteed the greatest possible liberty that would not interfere with the liberty of others, so that each person may maximize his or her happiness. This ideal would be echoed later by English philosopher Herbert Spencer when he espoused the “law of equal liberty,” stating that “every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.”

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon advocated an anarchist version of social contract which was not between individuals and the state, but rather “an agreement of man with man; an agreement from which must result what we call society”. One of his famous statements is that “anarchy is order.” In his formulation of mutualism, he asserted that labor is the only legitimate form of property, stating “property is freedom”, rejecting both private and collective ownership of property “property is theft!”. However, he later abandoned his rejection of property, and endorsed private property “as a counterweight to the power of the State, and by so doing to insure the liberty of the individual.”

By the early 20th Century, mainstream thought in many parts of the world began to diverge from an almost exclusive focus on negative liberty and free markets to a more positive assertion of rights promoted by the Progressive movement in the United States and the socialist movement in Europe. Rather than government existing merely to “secure the rights” of free people, many began to agitate for the use of government power to promote positive rights. This change is exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, two of which are negative, namely restricting governments from infringing “freedom of speech” and “freedom of worship,” and two of which were positive, declaring a “freedom from want”, i.e., government delivery of domestic and foreign aid, and a “freedom from fear”, i.e., an internationalist policy for imposing peace between nations.

As “liberal” came to be identified with Progressive policies in several English-speaking countries during the 1920s and 1930s, many of those who espoused the original, minimal-state philosophy began to distinguish their doctrine by calling themselves “classical liberals.”

In the early 20th Century, the rise of Nazism in Germany and communism in Russia were generally seen as distinct movements, with the latter bearing more resemblance to the Progressive movement in the West, and gaining much sympathy from many of its advocates. A group of central European economists called the Austrian school challenged that distinction between various brands of totalitarianism by identifying the common collectivist underpinning to their doctrines, and claiming that collectivism in all its forms is inherently antithetical to liberty as traditionally understood in the West. These thinkers included Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Walter Block, the latter describing the “non-aggression axiom as the linchpin” of libertarianism. The Austrian School had a powerful impact on both economic teaching and libertarian principles. In the latter half of the 20th century, the term “libertarian,” which had earlier been associated with anarchism, came to be adopted by those whose attitudes bore closer resemblance to “classical liberals.”

Libertarian philosophy in the academy

Seminars in libertarianism were being taught in the U.S. starting in the 1960’s, including a personal studies seminar at SUNY Geneseo starting in 1972. Philosophical libertarianism gained a significant measure of acceptance in the academy with the publication of Harvard professor Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974. Left-liberal philosopher Thomas Nagel famously argued that Nozick’s libertarianism was ‘without foundations’ because Nozick’s libertarianism proceeded from the assumption that individuals owned themselves without any further explanation.

Jan Narveson aimed to meet this challenge. Based on the work of David Gauthier, Narveson developed contractarian libertarianism, outlined in his 1988 work The Libertarian Idea, and then extended in his 2002 work Respecting Persons in Theory and Practice. In these works, Narveson agreed with Hobbes that individuals would lay down their ability to kill and steal from each other in order to leave the state of nature, but he broke with Hobbes in arguing that an absolute state was not necessary to enforce this agreement. Narveson argues that no state at all is required. Other advocates of contractarian libertarianism include the founder of the public choice school of economics and Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan, and Hungarian-French philosopher Anthony de Jasay.

Left-libertarians

There is also a camp of libertarians in Anglo-American Political Philosophy who hold egalitarian principles with the ideas of individual freedom and property rights. They call themselves “left-libertarians”. Left-libertarians believe that the initial distribution of property is naturally egalitarian in nature, such that either persons cannot legally appropriate property privately and exclusively or they must obtain permission of all within the political community to do so. Some left-libertarians even use the Lockean proviso in such a way as to promote redistributive types of justice in ways seemingly compatible with libertarian rights of self-ownership. Some left-libertarians in modern times include Peter Vallentyne, Hillel Steiner, Philippe Van Parijs, and Michael Otsuka, whose book Libertarianism Without Inequality is one of the most egalitarian leaning libertarian texts currently in publication.

Criticisms of left-libertarianism have come from both the right and left alike. Right-libertarians like Robert Nozick hold that self-ownership and property acquisition need not meet egalitarian standards, they must merely follow the Lockean idea of not worsening the situation of others. Gerald Cohen, an Analytical Marxist philosopher, has extensively criticized left-libertarianism’s virtues of self-ownership and equality. In his Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality, Cohen claims that any system that takes equality and its enforcement seriously is not consistent with the robust freedom and full self-ownership of libertarian thought. Tom G. Palmer of the Cato Institute has responded to Cohen’s critique in ‘Critical Review’ and has provided a guide to the literature criticizing libertarianism in his bibliographical review essay on “The Literature of Liberty” in The Libertarian Reader, ed. by David Boaz

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Libertarians strongly oppose infringement of civil liberties such as restrictions on free expression (e.g., speech, press, or religious practice), prohibitions on voluntary association, or encroachments on persons or property except as a result of due process to establish or punish criminal behavior. As such, libertarians oppose any type of censorship (i.e., claims of offensive speech), or pre-trial forfeiture of property. Furthermore, most libertarians reject the distinction between political and commercial speech or association, a legal distinction often used to protect one type of activity and not the other from government intervention.

Libertarians also frown on any laws restricting personal or consensual behavior, as well as laws on victimless crimes. As such, they believe that individual choices for products or services should not be limited by government licensing requirements or state-granted monopolies, or in the form of trade barriers that restrict choices for products and services from other nations (see Free Trade). They also tend to oppose legal prohibitions on recreational drug use, gambling, and prostitution. They believe that citizens should be free to take risks, even to the point of actual harm to themselves. For example, while most libertarians may personally agree with the majority who favor the use of seatbelts, libertarians reject mandating their use as paternalistic. Similarly, many believe that the Food and Drug Administration shouldn’t ban unproven medical treatments, that any decisions on treatment be left between patient and doctor, and that government should, at most, be limited to passing non-binding judgments about efficacy or safety.

Aside from their distaste of constraints on personal behavior, libertarians believe that government should refrain from imposing any positive moral obligations, such as religious practices, mandatory national service, or tax-financed welfare. In fact, most libertarians consider any forcible redistribution of wealth to be legitimized theft, whether done by private individuals or through state power in the form of taxation. As such, they generally oppose the tax-funded provision of public services such as postal service, transportation, social insurance, public education, and health care (though such services are greatly encouraged to be funded privately). Many libertarians also object to redistributionist policies as economically inefficient, the product of inherently politicized decision making that leads to lower quality, highers costs and other distortions relative to what would be realized in a free market. They also oppose all collusion between government and corporations, often termed crony capitalism and corporate welfare, which is seen as forcing individuals to subsidize unprofitable businesses through taxation.

Libertarians generally believe that such freedoms are a universal birthright, and they accept any material inequalities or wanton behavior, as long as it harms no one else, likely to result from such a policy of governmental non-intervention. They see economic inequality as an outcome of people’s freedom to choose their own actions, which may or may not be profitable.

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Libertarians generally define liberty as the freedom to do whatever one wishes up to the point that one’s behavior begins to interfere with or endanger another’s person or property. At the point of interference, each party would become subject to certain principled rules for adjudicating disputes, which might include community-imposed sanctions against one who has demonstrated a proven lack of respect for the rights of others. Most libertarians allow that such sanctions are properly imposed by the state in the form of criminal or civil penalties, though many dispute the degree to which such punishment is necessarily a state function.

Libertarians generally view constraints imposed by the state on persons or their property, beyond the need to penalize infringement of one’s rights by another, as a violation of liberty. Anarchism is an extreme version of libertarianism favoring no governmental constraints at all, based on the assumption that rulers and laws are unnecessary because in the absence of government individuals will form self-governing social bonds and rules.

Libertarians generally defend the ideal of freedom from the perspective of how little one is constrained by authority, that is, how much one is allowed to do, which is referred to as negative liberty. This ideal is distinguished from a view of freedom focused on how much one is able to do, which is termed positive liberty, a distinction first noted by John Stuart Mill, and later described in fuller detail by Isaiah Berlin.

Many libertarians view life, liberty, and property as the ultimate rights possessed by individuals, and that compromising one necessarily endangers the rest. In democracies, they consider compromise of these individual rights by political action to be “tyranny by the majority”, a term first coined by Alexis de Tocqueville, and made famous by John Stuart Mill, which emphasizes the threat of the majority to impose majority norms on minorities, and violating their rights in the process.

Many libertarians favor common law, which they see as less arbitrary and more adaptable than statutory laws. The relative benefits of common law evolving toward ever finer definitions of property rights were articulated by thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Richard Epstein, Robert Nozick, and Randy Barnett. Some libertarian thinkers believe that this evolution would eventually define away various “commons” such as pollution or other interactions now viewed as externalities. “A libertarian society would not allow anyone to injure others by pollution because it insists on individual responsibility.”

Rights and consequentialism

Some libertarians such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard view the rights to life, liberty, and property as natural rights, i.e., worthy of protection as an end in themselves. Their view of natural rights is derived, directly or indirectly, from the writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Ayn Rand, another powerful influence on libertarianism, despite rejecting the label, also viewed these rights as based on natural law.

Other libertarians such as Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek justified these rights on pragmatic or consequentialist, as well as moral grounds. They argued that libertarianism was consistent with economic efficiency and, thus, the most effective means of promoting or enhancing social welfare.

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Libertarianism is a political philosophy advocating that individuals should be free to do whatever they wish with their person or property, as long as they do not infringe on the same liberty of others. Libertarians hold as a fundamental maxim that all human interaction should be voluntary and consensual. They maintain that the initiation of physical force against another person or his property, the threat of initiating it, or the commission of fraud against any person, is a violation of that principle. Force used against others is considered by libertarians to be illegitimate except in retaliation for initiatory aggressions.

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