Hamburg Springer boss Mathias Döpfner, Tesla pioneer Elon Musk and tech investor Peter Thiel: three influential men who repeatedly attract attention with political statements that are disturbing by German standards. For example, when Döpfner compares the federal government’s corona measures with Hitler’s seizure of power in a private text message.
If Musk wants to blow up an alleged “left-wing opinion mainstream” with the takeover of Twitter. Or when Thiel states in an interview with the Handelsblatt that the Germans only have three options for the future: “Islamic theocracy”, “Chinese surveillance communism” or “Greta’s green future in which everyone rides a bicycle”.
In order to better understand the world views of Döpfner, Musk and Thiel, it is worth considering an ideology that has virtually no political home in Germany, but is part of the political mainstream in the USA: libertarianism.
The representatives of this school of thought are extremely skeptical about any kind of state intervention in people’s lives – be it corona rules, gun laws or even just state health insurance. Compared to true libertarians, the German FDP looks like a socialist club.
In the United States today, libertarianism appears primarily as a right-wing political movement. But that wasn’t always the case, as the two authors of The Individualists tell us. In it, John Tomasi and Matt Zwolinski tell the exciting story of libertarian thinking.
After reading it, you will understand what fascinates people about this ideology and why it is at odds with the conventional political left-right scheme. Zwolinski, professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego, and Tomasi, president of the think tank “The Hetorodox Academy” in New York, come out as libertarians right at the beginning of the book. But they have little in common with the gun enthusiasts in the American trailer parks, who are gearing up for the final battle against the alleged dictatorship in Washington.
Six characteristics of libertarian thinking
The two authors identify six typical characteristics of libertarian thinking: unconditional respect for private property, skepticism about any form of authority, belief in free markets and in the ability of people to organize their coexistence themselves and without government regulations, a deeply rooted individualism and finally what the authors call “negative freedoms”. So the “freedom from something”, for example state coercion, in contrast to a left-wing concept of freedom that focuses more on life chances, the “freedom to do something”.
In Europe, libertarianism emerged primarily as a countercurrent to the first socialist currents of the mid-19th century. Not so in the US, where the libertarians were closely associated with the anti-slavery abolitionists.
The right to one’s own body and the fruits of its labor was sacred to the early US libertarians. This created a proximity to the labor theory of value, which curiously in turn forms a basis of Marxism: the value of a product is derived from the value of the labor time that went into it.
Every human being, so the common belief of early American libertarians and Marxists alike, is entitled to the full value of the products created by his hands and mind. This made slavery as unacceptable to these libertarians as capitalist exploitation.
The left-wing roots of libertarianism in the US were pushed back in the 1930s. Libertarians now fought alongside the Republicans against the government investment programs of the “New Deal” as well as against Soviet-style communism.
Matt Zwolinski, John Tomasi: The Individualists
English version
Princeton University Press
Princeton 2023
422 pages
26.22 euros
Ayn Rand became the best-known libertarian author of those decades. As a child in Russia, she witnessed revolutionaries expropriating her father’s pharmacy. In 1926 Rand left the Soviet Union and initially worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. She became famous with her philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged, in which she advocates radical individualism and anti-communism.
After the end of Communism, the spiritual ties between US libertarians and conservatives became even closer. Many libertarians now saw in traditional Christian family values an example of the longed-for self-organization of society. The central government in Washington increasingly became the enemy.
With the “Tea Party” and its spiritual heirs, a right-wing libertarian movement finally hijacked the Republican Party and ultimately made Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy possible – who, of course, is anything but a libertarian himself.
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In places, it seems like an attempt to save the honor of an intellectual current that has drifted to the right when the two authors repeatedly emphasize the progressive tendencies in today’s libertarianism. In 2020, for example, libertarians could be found on both sides of the spectrum at the “Black Lives Matter” protests against racist police violence: the right-wing libertarians condemned the sometimes violent riots as an unforgivable attack on sacred private property.
The left-libertarians, on the other hand, could be found in the ranks of the protesters because police violence against black people represents an unacceptable violation of the right to one’s own body.
It may be, but the media image that stuck with the protests is more that of a white man in a Brooks Brothers polo shirt standing in front of his villa in St. Louis with an assault rifle at the ready and mobbing the passing peaceful demonstrators .
The Tesla boss is one of the libertarian thinkers – and divides opinions with his controversial statements.
(Photo: dpa)
Since then, many libertarians have also found a new field of activity in protesting against alleged “woke bans on thinking”, which is an example of a characteristic of this ideology: it demands that people are always seen first as individuals and not as white or black, men or Women. This rules out the possibility of giving special support to individual groups, for example when awarding study places or management positions, or through certain language rules.
And in Germany? Anyone who advocates a market economy and private property does not usually do so with reference to any natural rights, but because this form of economy works better than any other previously discovered.
German-style ordoliberalism even emphasizes the need for state intervention to keep the market process running – for example, with strong competition authorities that prevent monopolies and cartels. And no German liberal would deny that there are public goods that the state can provide better and more efficiently than the market.
The sun as unfair competition
Nevertheless, the reading of “The Individualists” is worthwhile for three reasons. Firstly, to better understand libertarian positions – not only in the case of Döpfner, Musk and Thiel, but also, for example, in the US election campaign that is ahead of us.
Secondly, because Tomasi and Zwolinski tell us the fascinating story of a great idea in a very entertaining way, with all its confusion and many exciting protagonists. For example, there is the French libertarian Claude Frédéric Bastiat, born in 1801, who clothed his criticism of state market interventions in a satire that has lost little of its topicality to this day: After a complaint from the candle makers’ association about the sun’s unfair foreign dumping competition, the government ordered the Blackout all windows across the country to protect threatened candlemaker jobs.
Which brings us to the third reason to read this book. You certainly don’t have to see a new 1933 in the corona measures. But especially in Germany it is good to remind oneself from time to time: Individual rights to freedom represent a value in itself that does not have to be subject to justification requirements or considerations of utility. On the contrary: those who want to limit the freedom of others should always be obliged to justify their actions.
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