Right-Libertarianism

Right-libertarianism is the strand of libertarian thought that pairs self-ownership with strong private property rights in external things. Each person owns himself, and by mixing his labour with unowned resources, or by voluntary exchange with those who did, he acquires full title to them. The state’s legitimate business is confined to defending those titles: police, courts, contract enforcement, and in most versions national defence.

The qualifier “right” separates it from left-libertarianism, which accepts self-ownership but holds that natural resources belong to everyone in common, and so requires those who appropriate land or minerals to compensate the rest. The dispute is narrow in statement and enormous in consequence, because it decides whether redistribution is theft or rent.

Key Takeaways

• The core premises are self-ownership, original acquisition through labour, and free transfer; a distribution is just if it arose from just steps.
• Minarchists accept a state limited to defence and adjudication; anarcho-capitalists hold that even those services should be bought on the market.
• Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia of 1974 is the most rigorous academic statement of the position.
• American conservatism absorbed much of it through Frank Meyer’s fusionism, which paired free markets with traditional moral order.
• Traditionalist conservatives dispute the foundation, arguing that liberty is a product of inherited institutions rather than a premise standing outside them.

History And Context

The lineage runs through nineteenth-century classical liberalism, but the modern movement is a product of the middle of the twentieth century and of opposition to central planning.

Ludwig von Mises published Human Action in 1949, arguing that a socialist economy cannot calculate rationally because it has abolished the prices that carry information about scarcity. Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty appeared in 1960 with a postscript titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” in which he distinguished his position from a conservatism he described as lacking principles of its own and merely resisting the direction of change.¹ Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, supplied the movement with a moral vocabulary and a mass readership, though Rand rejected the libertarian label and its anarchist wing.

Murray Rothbard pushed the argument to its conclusion. For a New Liberty, published in 1973, held that taxation is expropriation and conscription is servitude, and that police, courts and defence could be supplied by competing private agencies, leaving no role for a state at all.² Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia the following year argued in the other direction: a minimal state would arise from a state of nature through the growth of protective associations without violating anyone’s rights, but nothing more extensive than that could be justified.³ Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice in holdings, and his Wilt Chamberlain example showing how voluntary transactions upset any patterned distribution, set the terms of academic debate for a generation.

The institutional history followed the books. The Libertarian Party was founded in Colorado in December 1971. The Cato Institute was established in 1977. Within American conservatism, Frank Meyer had already argued in In Defense of Freedom, published in 1962, that freedom is the political end of the state and virtue the moral end of the person, and that the two commitments were complementary rather than rival.⁴ That settlement, later called fusionism, held the American right together from the Goldwater campaign of 1964 to the end of the Cold War.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives who work in this tradition make three arguments.

The first is about knowledge. Central authorities cannot obtain the dispersed, local and largely tacit information that markets aggregate through prices. This is Hayek’s argument, and it applies to industrial planning, housing policy and school curricula alike. It is a case for markets that does not depend on greed being good.

The second is about power. Every transfer of a decision from the household to the state enlarges a body that no household controls. Right-libertarians therefore prefer voucher schemes to state provision, private charity to public welfare, and a tax system that finances a short list of functions.

The third is about desert and consent. If holdings were justly acquired, taking them by majority vote is not justice but numbers. Conservatives who are not libertarians grant the force of this while denying it is the whole story.

The fusionist synthesis is where most Anglo-American conservatives sit. It accepts the economic case in full and treats limited government as the precondition of a moral life, on the ground that virtue coerced is not virtue. Meyer’s claim was that the free market and the moral tradition need each other: markets require honest, thrifty and reliable people, and such people are formed by families, congregations and voluntary associations that flourish in the space the state leaves alone.

Differing Positions

The traditionalist objection came from within conservatism. Russell Kirk regarded doctrinaire libertarians as a sect rather than a political tendency, and argued that their picture of a self-sufficient rights-bearing individual is an abstraction with no counterpart in history. Men are born into families, faiths, tongues and obligations they did not consent to, and the liberty they enjoy is the inheritance of specific institutions rather than a deduction from a premise. Roger Scruton pressed the same point on culture: a market order cannot generate the trust and shared loyalties on which it runs, and consumes them if nothing replenishes them. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue of 1981 supplied the philosophical version of the charge against all rights-based individualism.

Left-libertarians attack the property premise directly. Hillel Steiner, Michael Otsuka and Peter Vallentyne accept self-ownership and deny that anyone can acquire unilateral title to land, air or minerals that no one made. Philippe Van Parijs argues in the same direction from a different premise, grounding real freedom for all in the distribution of external resources rather than in self-ownership. On their account an unconditional basic income funded from resource rents is not redistribution but the payment of what is owed to those excluded from the commons.

Egalitarian liberals make the older objection. John Rawls held that the distribution of talents is morally arbitrary and that institutions should be judged by how they affect the least advantaged. G. A. Cohen argued that Nozick’s self-ownership premise, taken seriously, licenses outcomes most people find intolerable, and that the premise itself is what should be abandoned.

The conservative reply to the traditionalists is that no one has yet designed an alternative to markets that does not require someone to be given the power to allocate. The reply to the left-libertarians is that a title system which can be reopened whenever the accounting looks unfair is not a title system at all.

References

1. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1960), postscript, “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”
2. Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (Macmillan, 1973).
3. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974).
4. Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (Henry Regnery, 1962).