capitalism

Conservative Critique of Libertarianism 95
Carey, George W., ed. Freedom and Virtue: The
Conservative/Libertarian Debate. Wilmington, DE:
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998.
Meyer, Frank S. In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays.
Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1996.
Oakeshott, Michael. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays.
Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991 [1962].
CONSERVATIVE CRITIQUE
OF LIBERTARIANISM
Libertarianism and conservatism are frequently classified
together as right-wing political philosophies, which is
understandable given the content and history of these
views. Both philosophies are hostile to the egalitarianism
that has motivated socialists and modern liberals and to the
statism with which egalitarians have sought to implement
their program. Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism,
was a Whig who sympathized with Adam Smith’s
economics, whereas John Locke, the intellectual ancestor
of natural rights libertarians such as Robert Nozick and
Murray Rothbard, gave his own doctrine of natural rights a
theological foundation. Conservatives in the Anglo-
American tradition have generally tended to follow Burke
in endorsing the free market, and belief in Lockean natural
rights has often been associated with the sort of religious
worldview that most conservatives find congenial.
Accordingly, some conservatives have drawn the conclusion
that libertarianism and conservatism are complementary
tendencies that are best understood as merely different
aspects of the same basic political outlook (e.g., as representing,
respectively, the freedom and order that are both
grounded in the same natural law, and whose unique balance
within Western civilization proves that both are the
inevitable outcome of a process of cultural evolution). The
most influential defender of this fusionist position was
Frank S. Meyer, and his views did much to shape the contemporary
conservative movement. But it also has been
criticized by other conservatives, who tend to regard the
similarities between libertarianism and conservatism as
superficial, masking a deep philosophical divide that makes
the two views ultimately irreconcilable.
Conservatives who hold this view generally regard libertarianism
as merely one utopian modern ideology among
others and as no less beholden to bloodless and rationalistic
abstractions than socialism and fascism, even if the
abstractions (“liberty,” “rights,” and “the market,” rather
than “class,” “race,” or “the people”) are different and less
dangerous. As Michael Oakeshott said disparagingly of
F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, “a plan to resist all
planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs
to the same style of politics.” Russell Kirk’s criticism of
libertarianism along similar lines is perhaps best known.
His arguments are stated in, among other places, his essay
“A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians” and are representative
of conservative misgivings.
Kirk’s first objection is that libertarians no less than
Marxists deny the existence of the “transcendent moral
order” to which conservatives are committed and “mistake
our ephemeral existence as individuals for the be-all and
end-all.” In response, many libertarians would say that libertarianism
does not necessarily deny that such a moral
order exists, but holds only that it would be wrong and selfdefeating
to attempt to enforce it through the intervention
of government. To do so would interfere with an individual’s
right of self-ownership, respect for which entails
allowing for the possibility that individuals will sometimes
abuse their rights by acting immorally. However, some conservatives
argue that this reply misses the point of Kirk’s
objection. The sort of transcendent moral order Kirk has in
mind, they would say, presumably involves something like
the natural ends or purposes attributed to human beings by
traditional Thomistic natural law theory or God’s ultimate
ownership of human beings as affirmed by Locke in his
version of natural law. This sort of order puts definite constraints
on the kinds of natural rights that human beings can
coherently be said to have because the point of our having
natural rights, according to these theories, is to facilitate the
realization of our natural ends or purposes (according to
traditional Thomists) or to safeguard God’s property
(according to Locke). For traditional Thomistic natural law
theorists, this entails that there can in principle be no right
to do what is contrary to our natural ends or purposes and,
hence, no right to do what is intrinsically immoral (e.g.,
using illicit drugs or viewing pornography). For Locke, it
entails that there can be no right to do what would violate
God’s rights over us (e.g., committing suicide). The thrust
of Kirk’s objection, then, would seem to be that, in insisting
on a right to do many things that traditional natural law
theories, whether Thomist or Lockean, would regard as
immoral, libertarianism implicitly rejects the metaphysical
foundations on which many conservatives take our moral
obligations to rest.
Kirk’s second objection is that order is prior to either
liberty or justice because liberty and justice “may be established
only after order is reasonably secure.” However, he
argues, libertarians “give primacy to an abstract Liberty”
and thereby “imperil the very freedom that they praise.” To
this notion some libertarians reply that Kirk has things
backward: Respect for individual rights to life, liberty, and
property is in their view the foundation of order, because it
makes possible the voluntary transactions out of which
order—whether economic order, or indeed, for some libertarians,
even legal and social order—spontaneously arises
via an “invisible hand” mechanism. This disagreement
brings us to Kirk’s third criticism, which is directed at the