Progress pill
Towards a new divide: freedom-coercion

Are you a libertarian or a libertaire/anarchist (in French libertaire)?

What's your Political Leaning?

Are you a libertarian or a libertaire/anarchist (in French libertaire)?

  • A fundamental incompatibility
  • Socialist anarchism (the *libertaires*)
  • Libertarianism: property as the foundation of freedom
  • Strategies for abolishing the state
  • Anarcho-capitalism: historical roots
  • A note on libertines

A fundamental incompatibility

The two are not compatible. There is a major source of confusion between these terms, particularly in automatic translations where the Anglo-Saxon libertarian is often rendered as libertaire. Yet these political philosophies, despite some superficial similarities, present fundamental differences.

Socialist anarchism (the libertaires)

The French libertaires are the heirs of socialist anarchism, a branch of socialism historically linked to thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. Their fundamental principles are:
  • The state must be abolished, as it is an oppressive structure.
  • Private property and capitalism must also be abolished, because in anarchist doctrine, the state is the protector of private property and the rich. Hence Proudhon's famous formula: "Property is theft." (It should be noted that Proudhon himself evolved on this point: the early Proudhon was fiercely anti-capitalist, but the later Proudhon moved closer to classical liberalism and came to see private property as a guarantee of freedom.)
  • They favor a return to a barter economy and an egalitarian society where goods belong to all.
Anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin (who was a strict anarcho-communist, rejecting even wages as a return to capitalism) saw private property and the state as twin sources of oppression. They advocated self-managed communes, cooperatives, and anti-hierarchical movements. Their economic vision rests on the labor theory of value; they condemn the wage system, reject profit and interest rates, and wish for the radical disappearance of money and banks.

Libertarianism: property as the foundation of freedom

Libertarians diverge completely from the libertaires in that they defend private property as the very foundation of freedom. For them, private property is not a mere social convention protected by the state: it is a natural right that precedes the law and the state. If an individual owns their own body, they also own their labor and the fruits of their labor. Ownership of material goods is understood as an extension of self-ownership.
From this follows that taxation is understood as aggression akin to theft, since it forces an individual to cede part of their property for services they have not necessarily chosen. Voluntary consent constitutes the moral bedrock of libertarianism.
Regarding violence, libertarian doctrine rejects all forms of aggressive violence. However, it admits as legitimate defensive violence: self-defense and resistance to oppression.

Strategies for abolishing the state

Here lies another fundamental difference. The libertaires historically advocate the destruction of the state and capitalism through violence, whether collective or individual. This approach rests historically on terror and targeted (or untargeted) attacks, as seen in Russia and later in Spain during the civil war.
For libertarians, aggressive violence is not legitimate. The principal strategy rests on delegitimizing the state through the formation of collective beliefs: argumentation, debate, discussion, and education. Libertarians advocate civil disobedience or actions that consist of deliberately ignoring the state.

Anarcho-capitalism: historical roots

Anarcho-capitalism is not a recent doctrine. Its roots lie in the nineteenth century:
  • Gustave de Molinari, a Belgian economist who worked in Paris alongside Frédéric Bastiat, wrote in 1849 an article entitled "The Production of Security," in which he argued that no government should have the right to prevent another from competing with it, or to require consumers of security to come exclusively to it for this product.
  • Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker in the United States were individualist anarchists who argued forcefully that the free market was capable of assuming sovereign state functions, notably security and justice.
In the twentieth century, Murray Rothbard took up the torch and theorized anarcho-capitalism comprehensively, notably in Man, Economy, and State and For a New Liberty. His thought rests on two principles: the non-aggression principle (it is illegitimate to initiate physical force against another individual or their property, a philosophical translation of the golden rule: do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you) and the complete abolition of the state, understood as the principal aggressor.
Rothbard criticized the libertaires for adopting a naive and unrealistic vision of human nature, akin to Rousseau's "noble savage." For Rothbard, men are not naturally good, but they are guided by their interests. Society must therefore be organized so that good incentives guide behavior, which requires that private property be recognized and guaranteed. Abolishing the state does not mean abolishing the functions of the state: police and justice must not be eliminated, but managed by the free market on the basis of competition.

A note on libertines

One should not confuse libertarians with libertaires or with libertines. Libertines are advocates of sexual freedom. It is less a political philosophy than a personal way of life, founded on a morality without taboos opposed to bourgeois morality. Politically, libertines often gravitate toward left-wing anarchism, that is, toward the libertaires. Yet one can also be both a libertine and a libertarian, since for libertarians, each person has the right to live as they wish without aggressing against others. Conversely, a libertine who sought to impose his morality on others through law would, by that very act, cease to be a libertarian.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
How do libertarians view the relationship between private property and freedom?