Hitchens, Left and Right

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Since Christopher Hitchens gave up socialism, I’ve ironically enough gone from disagreeing with him 40% of the time to disagreeing with him 80% of the time. I used to look forward to his mordant skewerings of the mighty, but lately he seems to have morphed into a mean-spirited shill for the establishment.

Christopher Hitchens But at last comes a Hitchens editorial I can happily endorse; despite his having fallen to the neocon/prowar dark side, he makes a good case against executing Saddam Hussein. (Conical hat tip to Christopher Morris.) I share Hitchens’ misgivings both about the death penalty in general, and about the legitimacy of the vanquished being tried by the victors rather than by a neutral court.

While I’m on the subject of Hitchens, though, I also want to comment on something he said about libertarianism in his Reason interview a few years back. While this was after the beginning of his rightward shift, it’s basically a left-wing criticism, and like most left-wing criticisms of libertarianism it’s partly right and partly wrong:

I threw in my lot with the left because on all manner of pressing topics – the Vietnam atrocity, nuclear weapons, racism, oligarchy – there didn’t seem to be any distinctive libertarian view. I must say that this still seems to me to be the case, at least where issues of internationalism are concerned. What is the libertarian take, for example, on Bosnia or Palestine?

There’s also something faintly ahistorical about the libertarian worldview. When I became a socialist it was largely the outcome of a study of history, taking sides, so to speak, in the battles over industrialism and war and empire. I can’t – and this may be a limit on my own imagination or education – picture a libertarian analysis of 1848 or 1914. I look forward to further discussions on this, but for the moment I guess I’d say that libertarianism often feels like an optional philosophy for citizens in societies or cultures that are already developed or prosperous or stable. I find libertarians more worried about the over-mighty state than the unaccountable corporation. The great thing about the present state of affairs is the way it combines the worst of bureaucracy with the worst of the insurance companies.

Part of being a left-libertarian is that on the one hand you’re constantly trying to prod fellow libertarians into moving farther left, while on the other hand you’re constantly trying to show fellow leftists that libertarianism is already farther left than they realise. This is certainly an occasion for both responses.

Hitchens is certainly right to say that libertarians have often been less concerned about issues like racism, oligarchy, and corporate power than they should be – that they have stressed the evils of state oppression but often turned a blind eye to nonstate forms of oppression. On this general topic see this recent post of mine and this recent post of Wally Conger’s.

But at the same time Hitchens is certainly mistaken in supposing that libertarians have neglected these issues entirely. I need hardly point out to the readers of this blog that there exists, for example, an enormous libertarian literature both on war and on corporate power, and indeed on issues of class generally; in fact libertarians pioneered modern class analysis. (One suspects Hitchens hasn’t spent much time poring through Left & Right, Libertarian Forum, New Libertarian, or the JLS.) And he is also right to worry that his inability to “picture a libertarian analysis of 1848 or 1914” or other such historical events may stem from “a limit on [his] own imagination or education,” since here too there is plenty of such analysis available.

Thus I close with the ringing slogan, proudly inscribed on the streaming banners of the left-libertarian vanguard: Libertarianism: Less Left Than It Should Be, But Lefter Than You Think.

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15 Responses to Hitchens, Left and Right

  1. Max November 8, 2006 at 7:45 pm #

    When exactly would a court be “neutral”? I mean, should the Chilean decided about the fate of Saddam Hussein, or should the country itself pass judgment on him.

    I don’t necessarily like the death sentence, but there are exceptions, where the guilt is proven and a death sentence is only a formality.
    You want famous examples? Here they are:
    Hitler, Stalin, Che, Castro, Mao etc.

    Nobody ever complained about killing high-level operatives of the Nazi-regime in germany after WWII. In fact, if Hitler had survived the war, he would have been killed by the allied courts (rightly so).
    This is also why I despice the French complains about “killing Saddam”, because they themselves were urgent about killing Germans, whent they had a chance…

  2. Administrator November 8, 2006 at 7:56 pm #

    When exactly would a court be “neutral”?

    Well, it should at least be a third party not affiliated with either of the other two. As indeed often happens in international law.

    I don’t necessarily like the death sentence, but there are exceptions, where the guilt is proven and a death sentence is only a formality.
    You want famous examples? Here they are:
    Hitler, Stalin, Che, Castro, Mao etc.

    For me uncertainty about guilt is not the main reason (though it’s often an additional reason) for opposing the death penalty. The main reason is that the death penalty constitutes a use of force greater than is needed to restrain the aggressor, and so violates the spirit of the non-aggression principle.

    Nobody ever complained about killing high-level operatives of the Nazi-regime in germany after WWII.

    Well, hardly nobody. Anti-war and anti-death-penalty people did object, and rightly so.

    This is also why I despice the French complains about “killing Saddam”, because they themselves were urgent about killing Germans, whent they had a chance…

    Who does “they themselves” refer to? Most of the people who called for killing Nazi leaders in the 1940s are dead now; there isn’t some timeless agent called “France,” after all. Aren’t most of the French against the death penalty generally now?

  3. Max November 9, 2006 at 6:29 am #

    For me uncertainty about guilt is not the main reason (though it’s often an additional reason) for opposing the death penalty. The main reason is that the death penalty constitutes a use of force greater than is needed to restrain the aggressor, and so violates the spirit of the non-aggression principle.

    For me, the uncertainity is the major key point, why the death sentence shouldn’t be used, because in every day crime, there is almost always not enough evidence to be 100% certain.
    However, exiling people is also no option any more, because there are only few places left where some one could be exiled to. The earth is too densly populated for this kind of treatment. Which leaves prisons and I don’t think a serial-killer like Saddam should be receiving free food, free clothing in a high-security prison for aging dictators. Most likely, he will be send to one of the more comfortable prisons.
    Yes, he would be restrained, but he would also continue to feast on our money.
    —–

    The fraction in question (the French) did a good job of conceiling most of their critizism. In fact, they were so eager for revenge on the German, that they plundered through the rhineland. Of course, “France” in this context doesn’t consist of “all people living in France”, but rather the regime leading France and the provisory French liberation army.
    Today, there are indeed only few of those people left.
    Still, seeing that the French government or leaders where never afraid of using the death sentence themselves (tell it to the king during the French revolution) and they never denounced their own history, they are very keen to prevent others from making their choices. Also, the reason behind the French denial of the death sentence is, as always, that it is cruel.

  4. Administrator November 9, 2006 at 11:36 am #

    Which leaves prisons and I don’t think a serial-killer like Saddam should be receiving free food, free clothing in a high-security prison for aging dictators.

    I don’t know that Hussein should even be in prison; he’s not obviously a threat to anybody now. But I’d say he should be working to make restitution to his victims. (I don’t mean forced labour, I’m against that; but if he wants to make money to earn more than the basic necessities then we could garnish a portion of his wages.) Of course complete restitution is imposisible; but that’s no argument against requiring partial restitution.

    Also, the reason behind the French denial of the death sentence is, as always, that it is cruel.

    That seems like a good reason to be against it.

  5. Bob Hodges November 9, 2006 at 1:51 pm #

    Prof. Long,

    Is there actually a libertarian literature on the revolutions of 1848? If so I’m ignorant of its existance, but Hitchens is of course wrong about a dearth of libertarian analysis regarding 1914.

    Cheers,
    Bob Hodges

  6. Administrator November 9, 2006 at 4:16 pm #

    Well, of course there were libertarians at the time who had a great deal to say about 1848, mostly in French and mostly skeptical (Dunoyer and Molinari on the “right,” and Proudhon and Bellegarrigue on the “left” come to mind).

    But I’ve also read more recent libertarian analysis of 1848 — but can’t recall authors at the moment. I’ll try to dig it up.

  7. Isak Davis November 9, 2006 at 10:47 pm #

    Wouldn’t killing hitler, stalin et al. be considered an act of defense? What about our current prince president?

  8. Administrator November 10, 2006 at 4:26 pm #

    Wouldn’t killing hitler, stalin et al. be considered an act of defense?

    While they were in power, it could. But we’re talking about afterward.

    What about our current prince president?

    When has assassinating a U.S. president not resulted in a dramatic increease in the level of government repression? No thanks.

  9. Joel Schlosberg November 10, 2006 at 6:32 pm #

    H. L. Mencken did an analysis of 1848 which is included in the Mencken Chrestomathy. He treats it, oddly enough, as a prototype of the New Deal.

  10. Rad Geek November 11, 2006 at 10:55 pm #

    Unfortunately Hitchens adds this little bit at the end:

    “And these [leftish Kurds who oppose the death sentence for Saddam], by the way, are the people that every liberal in the world is currently arguing that we should desert.”

    Because, you know, we’re doing the Kurds some big favor by continuing the military occupation to prop up a “unified” Iraqi state at bayonet-point.

  11. Bob Kaercher November 12, 2006 at 1:03 pm #

    Prof. Long:

    A Christopher Hitchens will never understand libertarianism because his first concern is not individual freedom, which is why he never found any “distinctive libertarian view” on the “Vietnam atrocity, nuclear weapons, racism, oligarchy,” in spite of the wealth of libertarian literature available on these topics, as you pointed out. At least three of these things are the results of statism, which is plainly obvious. War, nuclear weapons and oligarchy are all government policies, but for some reason Hitchens fails to see this. The fourth, racism, is often the choice of private individuals, but it’s frequently government policy as well. But again, Hitchens apparently fails to recognize this. It’s evil for private individuals to adopt racist attitudes in their own daily lives, but yet I don’t recall ever seeing Hitchens critique the state’s racist policies of “affirmative action” and welfare dependency. (Perhaps he has, but I’ve never seen it.)

    I know that Hitchens has in recent years disavowed the labels “Marxist” and “socialist” for himself, but his writing often betrays the fact that he’s still caught up in the paradigm of Marxist socialism. People like Hitchens are concerned about remaking the world in the image of what they think it should be, rather than bothering to find out what it IS, how it actually works. This is why I seriously doubt he’ll ever give libertarianism any credence–his first concern is ending certain behaviors, i.e., racism, rather than individual freedom. A libertarian recognizes that in a true state of freedom, people would still be free to choose racism, but at the same time, others would be free to choose to disassociate themselves from racists, but I imagine this would not go far enough toward ending racism in Hitch’s eyes, who–judging by his delusional support of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq–seems to think that state power can and should try to forcibly remake society into a manner closer to the heart’s desires of those who wield state power.

    Hitchens will never quite understand libertarianism until he’s fully capable of questioning his own assumptions–and stops being a pompous, self-inflated gasbag. (OK, that last comment is purely my subjective opinion of him, but you have to admit it is pretty close to the mark.)

    — Bob Kaercher

  12. labyrus November 15, 2006 at 1:36 pm #

    Part of being a left-libertarian is that on the one hand you’re constantly trying to prod fellow libertarians into moving farther left, while on the other hand you’re constantly trying to show fellow leftists that libertarianism is already farther left than they realise. This is certainly an occasion for both responses.
    I’m a social anarchist. I’m not sure if that puts me in the “fellow libertarian” catergory, or the “fellow leftist” catergory but I DO think that anarchism has a distinctly different perspective from left-libertarianism even if we do share many of the same historical roots and intellectual foundations. For the purpose of this post I’m going to use anarchism for what sometimes is called “socialist libertarianism”, and “libertarianism” to refer to the modern and predominately American set of ideas that is usually called that.

    Coming from a social anarchist perspective, I can’t help but agree with Hitchens, largely. It seems to me that those perspectives like yours are very much at the fringes of libertarianism. Maybe I’m wrong.

    I think for a social anarchist, the more individualist libertarian worldview makes us uncomfortable not so much because it’s ahistorical (which I don’t believe it is), but because it’s anti-social. Libertarianism more or less says that individual freedom is paramount, while social anarchism says that individual freedom is important, and can be reconciled without being damaged with the benefits of living in an organized, socialist, society. Libertarianism seems to be both skeptical of those benefits and extremely trusting of the ability of some type of free market to do the work of reconciling any conflicts between the priorities of the individual and of society at large. Many libertarians I’ve met seem to hold a strange and sometimes disturbing faith that the assumptions built into capitalist economics are true of everyone in every situation. These libertarians have also had a profoundly anti-poor attitude – advocating trashing welfare without creating any solutions for people in poverty, blaming the victims of poverty for their situations and suggesting that anyone who’s homeless is somehow “unworthy” of a higher quality of life.

    None of this changes the fact that the anarchist idea of socialism isn’t actually all that different from the left-libertarian idea of the free market – but I think there are some good reasons why leftists are profoundly uncomfortable with looking at most libertarians as “fellow travellers” from left-libertarians. Is libertarianism already farther left than I realise? I don’t know. I’ve met some pretty left-wing libertarians but a lot more right wing ones. I think libertarianism is a good thing in that it questions state power, but it seems to regualarily fail to question power in general. And as far as I know, the largest libertarian organization around is still the libertarian party – a group devoted to achieving state power.

  13. Bob Kaercher November 16, 2006 at 12:40 am #

    Labyrus:

    The misperception of the individualist libertarian worldview being “anti-social” is a common one made by both socialists and many individualist libertarians/anarchists alike. Now, there are many libertarians who do seem to prefer what we would call an “atomistic” society, in which they envision everyone just sort of living on their own patch of land living off their own garden and not interacting with anyone else. And while any truly consistent libertarian anarchist would say that anyone who truly values living in such a way is perfectly free to do so (and good luck to him – he’s gonna need it), such an atomistic, i.e., “anti-social” culture is not necessarily a corollary of the libertarian society.

    In a state of free market anarchy, individuals would be much more free than they are now to pursue their own interests through the market, which is a system of mutually beneficial exchange. That’s hardly “anti-social.” Quite the opposite. This spontaneously evolving network of trade between people gives rise to a division of labor, which in turn establishes a framework of social cooperation, but one that is governed by rights of private property and private contract rather than the arbitrary and capricious whims of government bureaucrats. Harmonious social interaction is absolutely essential to such a system – there’s nothing anti-social about it.

    As for libertarians holding a “disturbing faith that the assumptions built into capitalist economics are true of everyone in every situation,” any libertarians who seem to advocate the free market as a means to some kind of social utopia are advocating free market principles for the wrong reasons. The free market cannot promise utopia. It is, however, the best system for individuals to pursue their own particular visions of utopia — but no promises can be made that every vision will be fulfilled for “everyone in every situation.” A free market can only provide opportunities; it cannot force people to recognize them when they arise and act upon them accordingly, and I’m not aware of any proposed system that can.

    As for libertarians being “anti-poor,” there is a lot of libertarian literature out there that does put the responsibility for being poor squarely on the behavior of the poor, i.e., many are very present-minded and don’t consider too much the future consequences of their present actions. Personal responsibility, after all, is at the core of individual freedom – there is no individual freedom without it. There is also, however, quite a bit of libertarian writing out there that also points out how government policies make the poor poorer, or at the very least erect barriers to economic progress for the poor. Many libertarians have written, for example, on the (obviously) destructive effects of taxation on the poor, and how minimum wage laws effectively price the working poor out of the job market. Protective tariffs on imported goods force the poor to pay higher prices for certain consumer goods, etc. Perhaps there should be more libertarian scholarship on how statist policies are often external factors that negatively impact the poor – all the more reason to abolish those policies.

    As to the Libertarian Party: Excellent point. Libertarians who think they can achieve state power and somehow subsequently reduce it or make it less coercive are deluding themselves. As an anarchist libertarian I don’t even vote, let alone desire to become part of the state in order to somehow “reform” it.

  14. labyrus November 17, 2006 at 11:25 am #

    Bob, thanks for the reply. As I said, I don’t deny that there ARE more “left” voices in libertarianism, and those are ones whose perspectives are extremely important (discussing how statist economics hurts rather than helps the poor is, I think, vital), but I really wonder if these people:

    1)Are anything but the fringes of the libertarian movement/community/whatever you call it?

    It seems like for every piece of libertarian scholarship that explains how western farm subsidies keep farmers in the third world poor, there’s ten that totally ignore the issue and pretend that any liberisation of trade, no matter how lopsided, would be in the best interests of everyone, and suggest that poor farmers are simply misunderstanding their best interests when they oppose harmful, lopsided agreements like the WTO or CAFTA.

    2)Are people I can really look to as allies?

    To clarify this second question a bit, I’m pretty willing to acknowledge that someone like Roderick Long has a very similar outlook to me, but I wonder: is there any useful political alliance anarchist communists can make with libertarians? Our priorities seem overwhelmingly to be in different places. I think the fundamental difference is that Anarchism is a revolutionary ideology, and anarchists try to get involved in social movements and seek social rather than political change, while libertarianism is primarily an intellectual perspective – one which informs individual choices but doesn’t really foster movement building in the same way. So it’s pretty easy for Anarchists to look at libertarians as “fellow travellers”, but I’m not really sure if either group would really get much out of some kind of mutual solidarity. Our actions propably do, on a large scale, support eachothers’, but mutual understanding is in short supply.

    My point wasn’t so much that libertarianism as a whole lives up (down) to the criticisms of it that leftists make, but for someone on the left, there are plenty of visible examples of all of those criticisms – to the extent that I think it’s pretty reasonable to make them. And I do think that the tensions between anarchism and libertarianism have MUCH MORE to do with these differences than with the major intellectual difference (which is more the idea of Individual Private Property, rather than private property or the free market itself).

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