capitalism

Sociology and Libertarianism 481
socialist societies, such as the exceptionally savage persecution
of male homosexuals in the former Soviet Union,
Maoist China, or Cuba. Such persecution is an inevitable
outgrowth of a society in which the dominant institution is
a party hierarchy subject to strict central control and fearful
of any independent links between its members (particularly
those at different levels in the chain of command) or
between its members and outsiders that it cannot control.
It has to be said that most of the sociologists of the last
half of the 20th century neither appreciated nor propagated
these essential insights into how society works. There are
few libertarian sociologists, and most sociologists are,
either directly or indirectly, hostile to individual liberty. In
socialist societies, they were often servants of the state and
may have adhered to the ruling ideology because of the
psychological as well as material rewards that brings. Such
a state can, after all, provide them a privileged position as
prophets of an inevitably triumphant socialist future or participants
in the great plan. In a milder version, the same is
true of many sociologists in Western societies because the
state offers them privileged positions, funds their ideologically
loaded research, and allows them the satisfying delusion
that they are molding society. Self-interest goes some
way toward explaining why so many sociologists fear the
contraction and diminishment of state power and state
intervention. Social democracy often means jobs in the
public sector for sociologists who would otherwise be
unemployable. Sociologists opposed to liberty employed in
education, race relations, welfare, or criminology have
exercised great influence in free-market-based societies
and have inflicted great damage on those societies.
However, the main reason that so many sociologists in
free societies are hostile to libertarianism and unable to
appreciate either its virtues or benefits is because they are
committed egalitarians. For many reasons, societies based
on freedom of speech, freedom to own property, freedom of
contract, free trade, and a free labor market tend to produce
marked inequalities of outcome. Some individuals are far
more successful than others. Although there are high rates
of individual social mobility in capitalist societies, it is in
the nature of things that the inheritance of property, skills,
contacts, a work ethic, and indeed general intelligence and
specific talents mean that the children of the successful are
more likely to succeed. It is a society that is unequal, but on
the whole fair. As such, it is anathema to the professional
egalitarians who dominate the ranks of the sociologists and
who support massive state intervention that curbs liberty
with the aim of producing greater equality of outcome as
well as of opportunity. For the same reasons, modern sociologists
typically resent and distance themselves from psychology
and economics, both of which demonstrate that
inequality is often a natural condition. The central theme of
sociology is the denial of these realities; they must be
denied, hidden, and suppressed by state action.
Sociologists in Western societies are often to be found in
opposition to the very societies that grant them freedom
of speech, subsidize their research, and employ them in
sinecures. One could say that taxpayers are paying for the
rope that will be used to hang them. Marxism appeals to
sociologists (even after the collapse or transformation of
the major socialist economies), and Marxist works, as
David Marsland has pointed out, often dominate their college
reading lists. By contrast, few of them read, or encourage
their students to read, the founding father of sociology,
Adam Smith, who recognized that market forces lead to
social and economic progress, a progress that cannot be
attained in any other way. Sociology lost that insight when
increasing specialization cut it loose from economics and
indeed psychology, which emphasize individual human
autonomy and responsibility.
Most sociologists have no knowledge of either neoclassical
or Austrian economics. Instead of cooperating with economists
to solve the sociological problems highlighted by
economic analysis, they sit on the margins and grumble
about equality. Libertarians may be divided over the uses of
the nation state and its armed forces, but they are likely to
sympathize with the economist’s demonstration of the superiority
of a volunteer over a conscript army. Those sociologists
who accept the need for armies typically also advocate
compulsion and conscription because it equalizes the
chances of being shot at. The sociologists’ response to the
marked rise in living standards and indeed in longevity in
capitalist societies has been to invent the concepts of permanent
poverty and relative deprivation and accordingly to
demand ever greater state intervention. Most sociologists
have become openly hostile to freedom. Even when they
appear to be libertarians as, say, when they favor the legal
sale of recreational drugs, they only do so because those who
use and trade them are seen as underprivileged. They are
quite unable to see that high taxes on tobacco—imposed in
the name of coercive health improvement—are an infringement
of freedom and an incitement to smuggling, illicit trading,
and organized crime in exactly the same way as
restrictions on other recreational drugs. The central weakness
of sociology is the unwillingness of sociologists to understand
the importance of prices and to work with them in the
way economists do.
There is a broader relationship between deviant behavior
and social change that sociologists refuse to acknowledge.
During the late 19th century, the era of the growth of mutual
aid organizations and stable families, the incidence of both
violent and acquisitive crimes fell to low levels in most
Western societies. Individuals chose not to attack the persons
and property of others not because the state prevented
them, but because this spontaneous order created by free
individuals had a law-abiding ethos. The massive rise in
crime of all kinds that has come to be seen as a general characteristic
of modern societies only began in the mid-1950s