capitalism

General Introduction
Libertarianism is a major feature of intellectual and
political life as we enter the first years of the new century.
It is at one and the same time a movement in politics,
a recognized philosophy, and a set of distinctive
policy prescriptions. As such, libertarianism, and the
individuals who espouse it, play a prominent role in
intellectual and political arguments in several countries.
In disciplines such as philosophy, political science,
jurisprudence, and economics, there is a recognized
and substantial libertarian position and body of literature.
All of that is in marked contrast to the situation
that prevailed 30 or 40 years ago. At that time, libertarian
ideas and analyses had little public visibility. This
recent growth might lead one to conclude that libertarian
ideas and politics are a phenomenon of the late
20th and early 21st centuries and should be placed in
some kind of post or late modern category.
In fact, that is untrue. Contemporary libertarianism
is only the latest manifestation of an intellectual, cultural,
and political phenomenon that is as old as
modernity, if not older. It is the movement earlier
described as liberalism. The great problem with contemporary
usage of the term liberal, at least in the
Anglo-Saxon world, is that in the United States (and
to a lesser extent in the British Commonwealth), it has
come to refer to a body of ideas known in the rest of
the world as social democracy or even simply as
socialism. It is this shift in terminology that has led to
the term libertarianism being used in English-speaking
countries for what elsewhere is still called liberalism.
The important thing to realize, however, is that contemporary
libertarianism, in the United States and
elsewhere, is only the most recent chapter in a long
story that, in the Anglo-Saxon world, traces itself back
to classical liberalism.
In what does libertarianism consist? This question
is more difficult and profound than one might at first
suppose. It is easy to think of political philosophies as
concrete, reified entities handed on from one generation
to another like the baton in a relay race. The
reality is more complex. The major ideologies of
modernity—the most prominent of which are liberalism,
socialism, conservatism, and nationalism—can
be thought of differently, and each can be analyzed in
distinct ways. One approach might look at the various
political movements that share similar goals or have
some other form of affinity, which would involve
focusing on the history of political parties, on pressure
groups, and on political biography. A second approach
might concentrate on the development of philosophical
concepts and abstract ideas. A third approach
might center on the exploration of distinctive vocabularies
or languages in which public affairs are discussed
and debated. Yet another might examine the
texts central to the specific ideology and try both to
unearth the original meaning or intention of the
authors and to relate them to their social and political
contexts. Finally, one can explore the distinctive cultural
content and consciousness, or mentalité, associated
with a particular political label.
The intention of all such approaches is to construct
a cogent analysis that explains how ideas, movements,
and philosophical systems that exist in the present
have come about and how they have changed over
time. These analyses trace the origins of ideas, movements,
and philosophical systems and relate them to
other historical phenomena that they have influenced
and by which they have been shaped. The aim is to
avoid the problem of anachronism, of reading the present
into the past and so misunderstanding both past
and present. We should be careful to avoid the Whig
form of intellectual history, which interprets past
ideas only in terms of their connection to the present.
What emerges, with libertarianism as much as any
other system of thought, is a narrative in which we
discover neither a timeless, ahistorical object, nor a
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