I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

110 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
In the interim I received a first class education in philosophy and sociology, with only a
smattering of economics thrown in on the side. My most influential teachers were not
particularly libertarian, but they were all hard-nosed. Ernest Nagel, the great philosopher
of science, always defended common sense against its intellectual detractors, and taught me
philosophy of law with the then new book The Concept of Law by H.L.A. Hart. David
Sidorsky forced us to read Plato’s Thaeatetus, Descartes’s Mediations and G.E. Moore’s Ethics
with real care. The last piqued my interest because I could not understand why anyone
would care whether the good was a natural or nonnatural quality, but at least I became
convinced, without really knowing why, that there had to be some connection between
what was good, what was desirable and what was desired. Moore may not have had the right
answers, but at least he had the right questions. And a dose of Sydney Morgenbesser on
meta-ethics made it crystal clear that there was no easy going through the philosophical
thicket. Arthur Danto was ingenious, but I thought always ultimately wrong because he
preferred philosophical ingenuity to psychological information. And Daniel Bell, much my
mentor, introduced me to sociology and political theory. His was a world of detail and
nuance, but he did make it clear that, however Marx might have gone astray, he did understand
at least one thing, namely, that there was no understanding politics without power.
This last message packed real punch, because the cloistered discussions within Hamilton
Hall were not immune from the massive political pressures that were slowly building up
both before and after the Kennedy assassination. Those were heady times, with the civil
rights movement in full swing and the terrible events of Vietnam beginning to unfold. No
one could fail to think about the problems of race and war, and I can recall the strong sense
of support for the civil rights act as a powerful antidote to the evils of segregation in the
South. But I can still remember as a junior sitting in Alan Westin’s government class, as
student after student praised the colorblind nature of the proposed civil rights law while
one of my former Great Neck school mates, Stephen Kahan, protested in his high-pitched
voice that the new laws were defective because they overlooked the public/private distinction
that everyone assumed was either unintelligible or obsolete. It was that initial comment
that planted the seed of doubt that later became a full frontal assault on the antidiscrimination
laws as they applied to private employers in competitive markets. I have since come to
believe that the public/private line does not cover the full front, and that the question of
market structure—monopoly, practical or legal, versus competition—also counts. But those
refinements came only after those initial doubts about the scope of public power, doubts
which at that time were not informed by any political theory.
That missing element of political theory came to me quite by accident at Oriel College,
Oxford University where I studied law (for a degree no less) right after graduation from
Columbia College. The Oxford legal education is quite different from the American, and
at first blush it offered me little reason to expect that I should form a general world view
while working in the stacks of the Oriel College library. The English had a narrow and
constrained view of what constituted the proper subject of a legal education. In part this
came because of the decisive division of power within the English framework, whereby the
critical decisions were made in the Civil Service, away from the watchful eyes of judicial
review. The bottom line, therefore, was that the development rights in the green belt around