Libertarian vs. Conservative Freedom; Or, the Problem with Secession
(posted by Daniel Koffler)
Will Wilkinson has been arguing with Robin Hanson about the rights and duties of parents to inculcate their children into particular beliefs, or not to do so. Will writes: “It is tyrannical for parents to attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children, especially when this requires social isolation and emotional coercion.” This point underscores an important and perhaps irreconcilable fissure between libertarians and conservatives, namely that the libertarian conception of freedom is pointy and the conservative conception is gunky.
Hang on, let me explain. A pointy topology is one that ultimately decomposes into points — atomic, indivisible regions of zero measure. A gunky topology is one in which every region contains smaller regions of non-zero measure — so decomposition never stops, there’s just more and more finely-grained gunk all the way down.
Now the analogy from topology isn’t perfect, but it is clarifying. When libertarians try to adduce the fundamental bearers of rights and liberties, they look for the smallest atomic and indivisible terminal nodes of a polity — namely, individuals. That’s why, for libertarians, the state is something of a fiction, and while entities larger than individuals may really have rights or liberties — that is, the sentence, “they have rights” is true for some non-individual values of “they” — such rights are completely parasitic on the rights of individuals, and can never contradict or undermine the latter.
Conservatives, by contrast, take a decidedly different approach. For conservatives, rights themselves might be fictions, but to the extent that there are freedoms in a polity, their fundamental bearers are divisible, gunky, larger-than individual entities — families, communities, creeds, tribes, clans, states (in the American sense), etc. On this understanding, “there are individual rights” may be true, but whatever rights individuals have are entirely inherited from and dependent on the nature of these larger structures. (Incidentally, this gives some backing to the conservative idea that threats to the family and traditional social norms are threats to individual freedom, since the latter could not survive the destruction of the former.)
I won’t try to adjudicate between the two views, except to observe that I see no way of harmonizing them and thus no prospects for the tenability of conservative-libertarian fusionism. (The prospects for liberaltarian fusionism are brighter on these considerations, since liberalism and libertarianism, however far they’ve diverged from each other, are both ultimately rooted in a classical liberal, pointy conception of rights.) And furthermore, those who, like me, find explanations of macro-facts in terms of micro-facts vastly more compelling prima facie than the opposite, are likely to find the gunky conservative conception of freedom massively unappealing. That’s not an argument against the view, but rather a statement of taste and intuition I imagine has some popular purchase.
Now notice how seamlessly the pointy conception of freedom handles traditional libertarian debates about state secession, and the Confederate secession in particular. Without coming to any conclusion about the ethical or constitutional permissibility of secession in general, we can very quickly dismiss the Confederate secession as impermissible. Why? Because “states’ rights,” on the pointy conception, are at most a simplifying proxy for the rights of individuals within states. And the Confederate secession clearly vitiated the rights of millions of people in the Confederate states. Note that this account does not depend on an analysis of what it would mean for a seceding state to respect the rights of its inhabitants — a very tricky account to craft that might be required to decide the general question of secession. Whatever makes the difference between secession that respects individual rights and secession that doesn’t, the Confederate secession falls squarely and unequivocally on the latter side.
Hence, for a libertarian guided by a pointy conception of freedom, the Confederate states had no right to secede (at least, under anything like the circumstances in which they seceded). A few extra, arguably modest premises would be all we would need at this point to deliver the further result that Union efforts to stop the secession were justified (even if some Union methods of war-making violated jus in bello). And these conclusions are completely independent of a settlement of the questions of whether states have a right to secede in abstract principle, or whether the Constitution affords such a right. So the pointy-minded libertarian can, on completely motivated and systematic grounds, explain the impermissibility of the Confederate rebellion while keeping the right of secession in general a viable possibility. Huzzah!
Tags: conservatism, libertarianism, rights, secession
July 5th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
This is an interesting dilemma.
If there were some way to disagregate the vast majority of non-slave holding citizens in the south from those that were, and allow them to secede, that’d be consistent with the values of the “pointy” freedom advocates. It’d be consistent with Lysander Spooner’s view, for that matter, who held that the secession of the slaves from the slavemasters was paramount.
In the case of the FLDS, let’s imagine for a minute that they want to secede. Unlike slaves, the children of the compound are not literallly owned, at least no more than other kids in the US, as in they are deemed minors and are without the rights of the majority.
I don’t see why that community should be denied that right. Sans actual slavery - physical bondage - there is no (pluralist) liberal/libertarian way, as I see it, to deny them the right to secede.
For people like Wilkinson and what are called rationalist liberals, a “culture of misogyny”, etc. are enough to deny the (or a) right of secession. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Reason magazine has defended the liberating potential of American gangsta rap in Romania! And Ariel Levy’s “Female Chauvinist Pigs” are nowhere to be found, as far as I can tell, in the FLDS community. Indeed, the Texas authorities found the female Mormon teenagers to be respectful, conscientious and kind.
There’s been some stellar criticisms of, and historical background to, what happened in Texas over at the blog The Immanent Frame (http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/). Here’s a different take on the issue: Is it “Culture” or “Religion” that is under siege? It makes a difference for Constitutional Scholars:
http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/06/26/reforming-culture/
Put me in with the pomos on the critique of the arrogance and pretense to knowledge (of “the good life” for every person, everywhere) on the part of the statist secular elite.
July 6th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
The seceding colonies also permitted slavery, so their secession from England was also unjustified. For your hypothetical Federated States of America seceding from the South to have been justified, they must have had very little resemblance to the government that Spooner and his comrades railed against.
I don’t know whether the individual really should be considered a unitary entity. It seems a rather Cartesian way of looking at things that have changed with advances in psychology.
One argument for emphasizing the rights of families, states and similar entities is that the individual is rather helpless against the state, but when agglomerated in such a fashion they may better resist it. I’ve been reading some of Burke’s reflections and that was his attitude toward large property holders. Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote about the same sort of thing in On Power. I’m of like mind. I’m not so much in favor of “rights” which I don’t believe in anyway as I am opposed to the state, because it’s big and scary. I talked a bit about that here and several other posts at my blog.
I remember when I hung out more exclusively at right-wing fusionist sites they said it was liberals who had deviated and started believing in collective rights, often but not always in reference to “identity politics”. Will Wilkinson got into a dispute on what’s collectivist vs individualist here.
July 7th, 2008 at 8:23 am
“Note that this account does not depend on an analysis of what it would mean for a seceding state to respect the rights of its inhabitants”
Really, this is where the whole post just fails, miserably. You can’t have any meaningful discussion on the subject if you can’t at least define in broad strokes what makes a state legitimate in the first place. If you can’t define that, you can’t possibly define when seceding from a state is justified. And most importantly, you must be much more specific than Koffler was here in describing what “people” you are talking about.
For example, though Koffler studiously evades any attempt to speak explicitly of slavery, we can see that it wasn’t secession, per se, that violated the rights of the slaves. No, their rights were being violated prior to (and continued to be violated in the Union even after) the war began. So it’s less than clear, from this post at least, what about the *secession* violated any person’s rights. And this is directly traceable to the admitted failure to answer the fundamental question involved.
As for the incompatibility of “pointy” and “gunky”, I’m guessing there is generally a less than zero exposure to eastern philosophy? (and from reading Roderick Long, it appears that Aristotlean philosophy can be interpreted in a similar fashion?) Just because there are two concepts that are at some level contradictory does not mean that both can’t be used to describe reality. Or that both aren’t *necessary* to accurately describe reality.
For example, I can claim to be an individualist anarchist and still believe that small groups of like-minded people are the only way to ensure maximum liberty. By seeking to reduce every question to some sort of logically determinative “either/or” solution, libertarians in general leave out the possibility that the real answer is oftentimes “both.”
July 7th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
[...] TGGP: The seceding colonies also permitted slavery, so their secession from England was also unjustified. For your hypothetical Federated States of America … [...]
July 7th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I think by approaching this from the angle of whether states have a right to secede, you’re going at it backward. The real question is whether the U.S. government had any legitimate power to stop the southern states from seceding, and more broadly what the source of its legal authority was. I think the historical evidence shows pretty clearly (as per Madison’s argt in Federalist 39) that the sovereign source of the federal union’s authority, in each state, was that state’s act of ratification. And given the fact that the federal union’s authority in each state is entirely pursuant to that state’s ratification, and defined by the terms of the constitution, it’s fair to ask whether the presence of any morally repugnant domestic institution gives the federal union any more right to interfere in a southern state than, say, in France or Spain if those countries practiced slavery.
July 7th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
P.S. I meant to add:
Once you determine a state’s right to intervene in the internal affairs of other states based on the latter’s domestic social institutions, you’re left wide open to the kinds of liberventionist justifications coming from Tim Starr and his ilk.
July 16th, 2008 at 2:36 am
The US constitution has a Warsaw Pact style loophole allowing it to intervene in any state. Just as the USSR could and did intervene to rectify anything that it considered a departure from communism, so also the USA can and has intervene to rectify anything that it considered a departure from a republican form of government (which is why Vermont didn’t accede to the Union as Ethan Allen’s fiefdom). Not only does that provision imply a lack of full state sovereignty anyway, it also leaves it up to the USA to interpret as, when and if it is applicable and how it may be applied.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:07 am
I don’t think there’s ever been an example of the US using the “republican form of government” argument to intervene in state affairs.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:56 am
I don’t think that that part of the US Constitution was ever used on states that were already in, but it was used to ensure that Vermont could only come in as a republic. Anyway, the point is twofold: the loophole is definitely there (this relates to KC’s earlier point; and, it is - as a matter of fundamental principle - inconsistent with the states having full sovereignty (or it would be up to each of them to determine its own systems). By ratifying or acceding to the US Constitution, states were acknowledging a dependency in this area much as vassals did under the Feudal System.