I. Radical Individualism: Atomistic or Organic?
While the phrase “radical individualism” may connote a distinctively modern outlook, at least two intellectual traditions so describable trace their roots to classical antiquity. The one I don't plan to focus on here is the atomistic individualism that views human beings as radically separate selves locked in a struggle for survival or power. Elements of this view can be found in Thomas Hobbes, Max Stirner, and to some extent (though he is a much more complicated case) Friedrich Nietzsche; and the view's antecedents—as these thinkers well knew—certainly lie in antiquity, with positions like those that Antiphon defends in On Truth and Plato puts in the mouths of Callicles (in the Gorgias), Thrasymachus (in Republic I), and Glaucon and Adeimantus (in Republic II).
The tradition to which I wish to draw attention is a more organic version of individualism which, though it might initially seem less radical than its atomistic rival,1
Tibor Machan, for example, reserves the term “radical individualism” for the Hobbesian atomistic tradition, applying the term “classical individualism” to the more organic tradition. Tibor R. Machan, Classical Individualism: The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being (London: Routledge, 1998).
On French radical liberalism, see Murray N. Rothbard, Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume II (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1995), chap. 14; David M. Hart, “Class Analysis, Slavery, and the Industrialist Theory of History: The Radical Liberalism of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer,” http://homepage.mac.com/dmhart/ComteDunoyer/index.html; David M. Hart, “Gustave de Molinari and the Anti-Statist Liberal Tradition: Part I,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 5, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 263–90; “Part II,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 5, no. 4 (Fall 1981): 399–434; and “Part III,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 6, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 83–104, http://homepage.mac.com/dmhart/Molinari.
Mill's degree of support for economic regulation and British imperialism places him outside the mainstream of the radical individualist tradition.
On American individualist anarchism, see James J. Martin, Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827–1908 (Colorado Springs, CO: Ralph Myles, 1970); and Wendy McElroy, The Debates of Liberty: An Overview of Individualist Anarchism, 1881–1908 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003).
While these thinkers are often misidentified as atomistic—partly because of their own willingness on occasion to employ atomistic language—their stress on the inherent sociality of human beings and the natural harmony of human interests entitles them to a different category; and this camp's roots, too, lie deep within classical antiquity. This camp's form of individualism merits the label “organic” in two respects: in its members' view of individuals as essentially related to society, and in their view of different aspects of society (political, economic, cultural) as essentially related to one another.
These organic individualists, I argue, have a double claim to be more “radical” than their atomistic cousins.5
Incidentally, I do not intend my distinction between atomistic and organic individualists to line up in any neat way with Hayek's distinction between rationalist and antirationalist individualists; in fact, I am inclined to think that Hayek's distinction is to some degree a false dichotomy. See Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), chap. 1.
On Nietzsche, see Lester H. Hunt, Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue (London: Routledge, 1993), chaps. 3–4.
“You won't find any [plowman who will work for lower wages], for we plowmen are no longer doing otherwise, and, if one puts in an appearance who takes less, then let him beware of us.” Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, trans. Steven T. Byington (New York: Benj. R. Tucker, 1907), 359.
The second basis of the organicists' greater claim to the title “radical individualism” turns on a different and more philosophical sense of the term “radical.” In this sense, a radical understanding of a social phenomenon is one that declines to see it in isolation from a broader context, but instead views social phenomena as organically interconnected across political, economic, and cultural spheres—so that addressing social problems calls for system-wide change rather than local fixes.8
For this aspect of the individualist tradition, see Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); Sciabarra, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); and Roderick T. Long and Charles W. Johnson, “Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?” http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/libertarian-feminism (May 2005). In the present essay, I use the term “organicist” in a broader sense than Sciabarra does.
I shall not offer a precise definition of “radical individualism,” since I take it, like most such labels in intellectual history, to be a cluster concept rather than a matter of necessary and sufficient conditions. Nonetheless, I assume that a theory is individualist to the extent that it accepts any or all of methodological motivational individualism, normative motivational individualism, social individualism, economic individualism, and political individualism; and that a theory is radically individualist, first, to the extent that it accepts more of these four perspectives, or accepts them to a more extreme degree, and second, to the extent that it emphasizes the interconnected nature of social phenomena. To recap, then, atomistic individualists count as somewhat radical since they accept motivational individualism, both explanatory and normative, to an extreme degree, and sometimes social individualism as well; but organic individualists count as more radical in virtue of accepting to an extreme degree not only these but also economic and political individualism—and they also count as more radical because of their greater acceptance of essential interconnectedness. Moreover, organic individualists' greater radicalism in the second mode helps to explain their greater radicalism in the first mode, since a focus on interconnectedness leads the organic individualists to view sociality as constitutive of human identity, and thus not as something which must be imposed by coercive government or conformist social pressure.
In other words, both camps of radical individualists emphasize, often to the point of psychological egoism, the need to explain action in terms of the pursuit of individual interests; and both camps endorse, often to the point of ethical egoism, the legitimacy of such pursuit. But the atomistic individualists view such pursuit as leading to inevitable conflicts, which only forcible constraint can resolve, while the organic individualists, with their greater emphasis on sociality, are led to embrace, often to the point of anarchism, a minimization of all coercive constraints on individual activity.9
Benjamin Tucker summed up the tendency of radical, organic individualism in a 1907 advertisement for his “Unique Book-Shop,” offering “The Literature that Makes for Egoism in Philosophy; Anarchism in Politics; Iconoclasm in Art; With Now and Then a Book that Makes the Other Way.” Reproduced in Michael E. Coughlin, Charles H. Hamilton, and Mark A. Sullivan, eds., Benjamin R. Tucker and the Champions of Liberty: A Centenary Anthology (St. Paul, MN: Michael E. Coughlin and Mark A. Sullivan, 1986), 102.
The thesis I wish to defend is that radical individualism in the organic sense is best understood as the heir and continuator of classical Greek and Roman thought. I do not maintain that the ancient thinkers on whom this tradition draws were themselves radical individualists; by and large they were not. In case after case, however, the central themes and arguments of the radical individualists were partly anticipated by, and directly or indirectly draw on, classical originals.
I begin, in the two sections immediately following, by attempting to clear away certain misconceptions that tend to obscure the connection between radical individualism and the classical tradition. In Section II, I seek to explain how a failure to distinguish between state and society has led modern readers to underestimate the degree of the radical individualists' organicism and continuity with classical precedent. In Section III, I rebut the charge that classical ethics is too greatly oriented toward warlike and hegemonic relations among people to be plausibly identified as an ancestor of radical individualism.
Then, in three further sections, I explore some of the specific points of similarity and influence between classical and radical individualist thought. In Section IV, I identify the classical background of the radical individualists' tendency to view human conduct in terms of hypothetical imperatives. In Section V, I show how the radical individualists' emphasis on spontaneous order and noninstrumental concern may be seen as a development of the argument of the “Great Speech” in Plato's Protagoras. And in Section VI, I argue that the radical individualists' tendency to undermine the legitimacy of established authority by embracing a moralized conception of “law” and related terms has its origins in Socratic and Stoic precedent.
II. Organicism and the State
One factor that helps to explain why the organic nature and classical pedigree of radical individualism have often gone unnoticed is the radical individualists' attitude toward the state, which they regard as an administrative convenience at best and an inherently criminal enterprise at worst. Aristotle, by contrast, famously compared the individual's relation to the state with the hand's relation to the body10
Aristotle, Pol. I.1.1253a19–30.
For the relation between Aristotelian individuals and the state, see Fred D. Miller Jr., Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Robert Mayhew, Aristotle's Criticism of Plato's Republic (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).
It is a matter of controversy whether Aristotle means that a human being cannot exist at all outside the state (i.e., that outside the state a human being ceases to be human except homonymously), or merely that a human being cannot function properly outside the state. In support of the former is the hand analogy (cf. Meteor. IV.12.389b31–390a20); in support of the latter is Aristotle's saying, not that whoever is stateless is nonhuman, but that whoever is naturally stateless is nonhuman (Pol. I.1.1253a2–5, 26–30). These represent different versions of organicism, but organicism nonetheless (since both tie the individual's identity to the state, albeit to different degrees), and we need not decide between them here.
With this position the organic individualists, being largely anarchists or near-anarchists, unsurprisingly disagree—but only because they draw, as Aristotle does not, a sharp distinction between state and society.13
The locus classicus is Thomas Paine in Common Sense: “Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.” Thomas Paine, Common Sense, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1948), 1–46, at p. 4. The state/society distinction is sometimes regarded as alien to antiquity; in his book Was Athens a Democracy? Popular Rule, Liberty, and Equality in Ancient and Modern Political Thought (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy, 1989), Mogens Herman Hansen argues to the contrary that the distinction was in fact recognized in popular political culture—but not so much, he notes, among philosophers. Cicero, however, makes the distinction, explaining that human beings form society out of fellow-feeling, but form states to protect their property (Off. I.158, II.73).
[T]here can be no correct idea of a part without a correct idea of the correlative whole…. If the part is conceived without any reference to the whole, it becomes itself a whole—an independent entity; and its relations to existence in general are misapprehended…. The process of loading a gun is meaningless until the subsequent actions performed with the gun are known. A fragment of a sentence, if not unintelligible, is wrongly interpreted in the absence of the remainder…. Suppose a being ignorant of the human body to find a detached arm. If not misconceived by him as a supposed whole, instead of being conceived as a part, still its relations to other parts, and its structure, would be wholly inexplicable. Admitting that the cooperation of its bones and muscles might be divined, yet no thought could be framed of the share taken by the arm in the actions of the unknown whole it belonged to; nor could any interpretation be put upon the nerves and vessels ramifying through it, which severally refer to certain central organs. A theory of the structure of the arm implies a theory of the structure of the body at large.14
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Ethics, vol. 1, ed. Tibor R. Machan (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1978), 37–38.
Spencer accordingly concludes that society is an organism and that individuals have their identity only in connection with society. Far from drawing an authoritarian or collectivist moral from this conception, however, Spencer insists that it is precisely because individuals are organically related to society that imposing cooperative arrangements on them through governmental compulsion is unnecessary.15
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State; with Six Essays on Government, Society, and Freedom (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), 456–64.
In like terms, Ludwig von Mises distinguishes organization, “an association based on authority,” from organism, cohering through “mutuality,” and warns against interpreting social formations as “having been organized from outside” when in fact they have “grown themselves, organically.”16
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, trans. J. Kahane (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), 262.
Benjamin R. Tucker, Instead of a Book, By a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism (New York: Benj. R. Tucker, 1897), 35.
Ibid., ix.
Ibid., 35.
The State, unlike society, is a discrete organism. If it should be destroyed to-morrow, individuals would still continue to exist. Production, exchange, and association would go on as before, but much more freely…. The individual is not related to the State as the tiger's paw is related to the tiger. Kill the tiger, and the tiger's paw no longer performs its office; kill the State, and the individual still lives and satisfies his wants.20
Ibid., 36.
For Frédéric Bastiat, too, while the state is “the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else,”21
Frédéric Bastiat, Selected Essays on Political Economy, trans. Seymour Cain, ed. George B. de Huszar (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1968), 144.
Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Harmonies, trans. W. Hayden Boyers, ed. George B. de Huszar (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1968), 64.
Mises, Socialism, 259.
Neither a “commodity” or an “economic good,” nor “food” or “money,” can be defined in physical terms…. Economic theory has nothing to say about the little round disks of metal as which an objective or materialist view might try to define money…. Nor could we distinguish in physical terms whether two men barter or exchange or whether they are playing some game or performing some ritual.24
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1979), 53; cf. Barry Smith, “Austrian Economics and Austrian Philosophy,” in Wolfgang Grassl and Barry Smith, eds., Austrian Economics: Historical and Philosophical Background (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 1–36; Roderick T. Long, “Anti-Psychologism in Economics: Wittgenstein and Mises,” Review of Austrian Economics 17, no. 4 (2004), 345–69.
Hence, nothing I do counts as “selling,” say, apart from my beliefs and desires. But not just mine: try as I might, I cannot engage in selling unless other people have the relevant beliefs and desires also (e.g., nothing counts as “money” unless it enjoys a widespread expectation of acceptance). Indeed, individual actions can be understood only in terms of the network of social beliefs and practices that give them meaning; writing a check, for example, is an individual's action, but in so describing it we make use of irreducibly social concepts. In short, then, the radical individualists' quarrel with Aristotle's famous hand analogy—an analogy often regarded as radically anti-individualistic—lies not with Aristotle's organicism but with his failure to distinguish society from state.
III. Slavery, Patriarchy, and Hegemony
Greco-Roman society was a slaveholding, patriarchal civilization that glorified martial valor and denigrated commerce and productive labor. The radical individualists, by contrast, were at the forefront of the abolitionist and feminist movements, and proclaimed the superiority of “industrial” over “militant” modes of social organization.25
For the role of radical individualists in the abolitionist and feminist movements, see Wendy McElroy, “The Roots of Individualist Feminism in 19th-Century America,” in Wendy McElroy, ed., Freedom, Feminism, and the State: An Overview of Individualist Feminism, 2d ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1991), 3–26. For some striking parallels between the radical individualists of the nineteenth century and the radical feminists of our own day, see Long and Johnson, “Libertarian Feminism.”
Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns,” in Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 307–28.
Bastiat, Selected Essays, 245.
Now even if one grants that classical ethics celebrates domination, it does not follow that an antidomination ethic can borrow nothing of value from a prodomination ethic. Thomas Jefferson maintained that ancient ethics was sound on obligation to oneself but weak on obligations to others,28
“Let a just view be taken of the moral principles inculcated by the most esteemed of the sects of ancient philosophy…. Their precepts related chiefly to ourselves…. In this branch of philosophy they were really great…. In developing our duties to others, they were short and defective.” Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803, in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin, 1977), 490–94.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 69.
David Kelley, “The Code of the Creator,” in William Thomas, ed., The Literary Art of Ayn Rand (Poughkeepsie, NY: Objectivist Center, 2005), 243–57.
In general, the radical individualists tend to be suspicious of, and to seek to transcend, false dichotomies31
This is part of what Sciabarra identifies as their “dialectical” orientation: “A thinker who employs a dialectical method embraces neither a pole nor a middle of a duality of extremes…. He or she presents an integrated alternative that examines the premises at the base of an opposition as a means to its transcendence. [The dialectical thinker] does not literally construct a synthesis out of the debris of false alternatives [but rather] aims to transcend the limitations that … traditional dichotomies embody.” Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, 16–17. Transcending a false dichotomy involves neither embracing both sides of a genuine contradiction nor denying that the two sides contradict each other, but rather showing either that the opposite sides are contraries rather than contradictories (i.e., while they cannot both be true, they can both be false) or else that the terms in which the opposition is drawn are conceptually confused and should be abandoned.
Thus, even if it were true—or to whatever extent it is true—that ancient thinkers endorse an ethic of domination, there could still be aspects of their perspective on which radical individualists mighty profitably draw. But in any case there are already antidomination strands in classical thought as well. Lysias, for example, regards “the liberty of all” as “supreme harmony,” declaring that it is “the way of wild beasts to be forcibly subjected to one another, but the way of human beings to define justice by law and to persuade by reasoned discourse [logos].”32
Lysias, Funeral Oration, in Lysiae Orationes, ed. Karl Hude (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 17–19; translation mine.
Aristotle, Pol. I.1.1253a7–18.
Aristotle, Pol. VII.2.1324b22–36.
Xenophon, Mem. IV.6.12.
Quoted in Xenophon, Mem. II.1.8–13.
Cicero, Off. I.11.
Taking seriously the superiority of persuasive over coercive modes of interaction has radically libertarian, even anarchistic, political implications; most of these thinkers, of course, did not draw out any such implications, but a few did. For example, Zeno of Citium, founder of Stoicism, envisioned a republic without borders or law courts,38
Plutarch, De Fortuna Alexandri 329a–b; Diogenes Laertius VII.1.33, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols., ed. R. D. Hicks (Loeb Classical Library, 1925).
“Then truly the life of the gods will pass to men. For everything will be full of justice and mutual friendship, and there will come to be no need of city-walls or laws and all the things we manufacture on account of one another.” Diogenes of Oenoanda, New fragment 21.1.4–14, 21.2.10–14, quoted in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, Volume I: Translations of the Principal Sources with Philosophical Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 134.
For an exploration of individualist, proto-libertarian themes in Socratic, Aristotelian, and Hellenistic philosophy, see R. F. Stalley and Roderick T. Long, “Socrates and Early Socratic Philosophers of Law,” in Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Carrie-Ann Biondi, eds., A History of the Philosophy of Law from the Ancient Greeks to the Scholastics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007); Roderick T. Long, “Aristotle's Conception of Freedom,” Review of Metaphysics 49 (June 1996): 775–802; Long, “Aristotle's Egalitarian Utopia: The polis kat' euchen,” in Mogens Herman Hansen, ed., The Imaginary Polis: Symposium, January 7–10, 2004: Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre 7 (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy, 2005), 164–96; and Long, “Hellenistic Philosophers of Law,” in Miller and Biondi, eds., A History of the Philosophy of Law.
The classical condemnation of coercion and compulsion, if followed to its logical conclusion, must also cast suspicion on such institutions as slavery and the subjugation of women—as indeed it did, for Alcidamas famously criticized the former41
“God has left all men free; nature has made none a slave.” Scholiast on Rhet. 1373b18.
Plato, Rep. V.454c–457c. Cf. Gregory Vlastos, “Was Plato a Feminist?” in Nancy Tuana, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Plato (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 11–23.
Aristotle, Pol. I.1.1252a24–b10, I.2.1253b15–1255a3, I.5.1259b22–1260b8.
Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Still more feminist themes are present in classical ethics. Plato may have favored sexual equality in practice as well as in theory; at any rate, he admitted female students into the Academy. These students wore male clothing,45
Diogenes Laertius III.46; Philodemus, Academicorum Historia, Papyrus Herculaneum 1021, in Tiziano Dorandi, ed., Filodemo: Storia dei Filosofi: Platone e l'Academia (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991).
Diogenes Laertius VI.7.96–97.
Diogenes Laertius VII.1.33.
Diogenes Laertius VI.2.72.
Diogenes Laertius VI.1.12.
Plutarch, De Mulierum Virtutibus.
Then there is Xenophon, whose views on the political status of women are more progressive than is often recognized,51
Cf. Sarah B. Pomeroy, Xenophon, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 36–39.
Cf. also Xenophon, Mem. II.7.12.
Xenophon, Oec. XI.23–25.
Xenophon, Oec. VII.43; cf. Mem. III.9.11.
Xenophon, Oec. XII.1–2.
Xenophon, Oec. XXI.2–12; Mem. III.1 6–7, 4.6–12.
Xenophon, Mem. II.1.
Xenophon, Oec. III.14. If the Oeconomicus is later than Aeschines' Aspasia, the reference to Aspasia here may be intended to remind the reader of the defense of women's qualification to wield power in Aeschines' dialogue. If, instead, Xenophon's dialogue is earlier, the story of Xenophon's marriage in the Aspasia might be intended as a comment on the Oeconomicus. In “Aeschines on Socratic Eros,” in Paul Vander Waerdt, ed., The Socratic Movement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 87–106, at pp. 103–5, Charles H. Kahn argues convincingly that Aeschines' Aspasia must be earlier than 385 b.c.; if Xenophon's thoughts on estate-management reflect his days on his own estate at Scillus, the Oeconomicus will have been written after his arrival at Scillus (394 b.c.), making Aeschines' precedence likely, but not certain.
Xenophon, Oec. VII.23–27; cf. Oec. X.1, Symp. II.9–12.
Xenophon, Hell. III.1.10–15. Lest Xenophon be thought to undercut Mania's accomplishments in remarking that she eventually came to grief through taking precautions against strangers but not against her loved ones, it should be pointed out that Xenophon in his own case (Anab. VII.6) proclaims that taking precautions against enemies but not against friends is quite proper and nothing to be ashamed of.
Xenophon, Const. Lac. I.3–4; cf. Cyneg. XIII.18. Spencer would likewise complain, in the late nineteenth century, that women's upbringing encouraged “a certain delicacy, a strength not competent to more than a mile or two's walk, an appetite fastidious and easily satisfied, joined with that timidity which commonly accompanies feebleness.” Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (New York: D. Appleton, 1887), 254.
Euripides, Andromache 595–601; Aristotle, Pol. II.6.1269b22, 1270a23.
Other aspects of ancient political thought find an echo in radical individualism. The radical individualists' penchant for class analysis,63
Class analysis in the modern era, while often regarded as a Marxist contribution, was in fact pioneered by pre-Marxist radical individualist thinkers like Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, though for the individualists class was based on access to the means of parasitism (especially via governmental patronage, or what today would be called “rent-seeking”) rather than on access to the means of production: “There are but two great parties to be found in the world: one of men who seek their living from the fruit of their own labor or property, and the other of men who seek their living from the labor or property of others. The first is the party of farmers, manufacturers, tradesmen, scholars, the industrious of all classes; the second is the party of courtiers, officeholders, monks, standing armies, pirates, and freeloaders. Since the beginning of the world these two parties have been in a never-ending state of war….” Charles Comte, “De la multiplication des pauvres, des gens à place, et des gens à pensions,” in Le Censeur Européen 7 (1818), 1–79, at pp. 1–2; translation mine. On Comte's analysis, the parasitic party typically employs state power to constitute itself as a ruling and exploiting class. Cf. Hart, “Class Analysis, Slavery, and the Industrialist Theory of History”; Mark Weinburg, “The Social Analysis of Three Early Nineteenth Century French Liberals: Say, Comte, and Dunoyer,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 2, no. 1 (1978): 45–63, http://mises.org/journals/jls/2_1/2_1_4.pdf; Leonard P. Liggio, “Charles Dunoyer and French Classical Liberalism,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (1977): 153–78, http://mises.org/journals/jls/1_3/1_3_1.pdf; Ralph Raico, “Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory: A Comment on Professor Liggio's Paper,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (1977): 179–83, http://mises.org/journals/jls/1_3/1_3_2.pdf; Raico, “Classical Liberal Roots of the Marxist Doctrine of Classes,” June 14, 2006, http://mises.org/story/2217; and Roderick T. Long, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class,” Social Philosophy and Policy 15, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 303–49. Marx is arguably more indebted to this approach in his applied analysis—e.g., in his Eighteenth Brumaire, which stresses the state's role in exploitation—than in his official theory of class, where the villain is private property, and the state is more or less an afterthought. By identifying the free market as the cause of, rather than the cure for, exploitation and oppression, Marx transformed class analysis from an individualist to an anti-individualist enterprise.
Cf. Roderick T. Long, “Equality: The Unknown Ideal,” October 16, 2001, http://mises.org/story/804; and Long, “Aristotle's Egalitarian Utopia.”
Moreover, not all classical thinkers shared Plato's conviction that military pursuits are nobler than productive and commercial ones. Hesiod's Works and Days is a sustained celebration of productive labor and critique of aristocratic and warlike values; the beneficial competition associated with commerce, where “potter vies with potter,” is contrasted with the hateful and destructive effects of military competition. The Stoics, too, defended commerce and debated fine points of business ethics.65
Cicero, Off. III.50–63, 89–92.
The radical individualists tend to favor private property and free markets;66
While there are exceptions (e.g., William Thompson, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and, on the issue of land, Herbert Spencer), support for private property and free markets tended to prevail even among those radical individualists who called themselves “socialists”—meaning by “socialism” not state ownership or regulation, but workers' control of industry. When Proudhon proclaimed that “property is theft,” he was not rejecting private ownership, but rather distinguishing “possession,” a legitimate form of private holding based on labor, from “property,” an illegitimate form of private holding not so based; see Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, trans. Benjamin R. Tucker (New York: Humboldt, 1890). Thomas Hodgskin's distinction between “artificial” and “natural” property is analogous; see Thomas Hodgskin, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (London: B. Steil, 1832). Tucker even called his own form of “socialism” the “logical carrying out” of laissez-faire Manchesterism (Instead of a Book, 10; cf. 404). The association of socialism with central planning is as misleading for the interpretation of the radical individualists' free-market version of “socialism” as the association of capitalism with plutocracy and privilege is misleading for the interpretation of the radical individualists' egalitarian, anticorporatist version of “capitalism.” Cf. Roderick T. Long, “Immanent Liberalism: The Politics of Mutual Consent,” Social Philosophy and Policy 12, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 1–31; and Roderick T. Long, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class,” Social Philosophy and Policy 15, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 303–49.
Aristotle, Pol. II.1.1262b36–II.2.1264a11.
The primary concern of any administrator of a republic must be to see that each person shall keep what belongs to him, and that private persons shall not have their goods taken by public enactment…. For it was above all for the sake of ensuring that each shall retain his own that republics and states were set up. For while [mere] human association is a natural impulse, nevertheless it was in the hope of maintaining custody of their possessions that people sought the protection of cities…. For this, as I noted above, is the special function of a state and a city: to secure to each person free and unmolested custody over his own possessions.68
Cicero, Off. II.73, 78; translation mine.
Aristotle's claim that “the product is, in a way, the producer in actualization,” and so “the producer loves the product, because he loves [his own] being,”69
Aristotle, EN IX.7.1168a4–9.
“The producer has left a fragment of his own person in the thing which has thus become valuable, and may hence be regarded as a prolongation of the faculties of man acting upon external nature. As a free being he belongs to himself; now, the cause, that is to say, the productive force, is himself; the effect, that is to say, the wealth produced, is still himself. Who shall dare contest his title of ownership so clearly marked by the seal of his personality?” Louis Wolowski and Émile Levasseur, “Note on Property,” in John J. Lalor, ed., Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the United States, vol. 3 (New York: Charles E. Merrill and Co., 1888), 391–95, at p. 392.
Cicero, Off. I.21; cf. 51.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 150–53, 230–31; cf. Karl Hess, “Where Are the Specifics?” Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 (June 15, 1969): 2; Murray N. Rothbard, “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 (June 15, 1969): 3–4; and Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998), chaps. 9–11.
Cicero, Off. II.81–82.
Murray N. Rothbard, Economic Thought before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume I (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1995), chaps. 2–4; Rothbard, The Logic of Action I: Method, Money, and the Austrian School (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1997), chap. 8; Alejandro A. Chafuen, Faith and Liberty: The Economic Thought of the Late Scholastics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003).
It is sometimes said that classical ethics differs essentially from modern ethics in having an orientation toward concern with honor and shame, that is, with one's standing in the eyes of one's peers rather than with one's own inner integrity—in contrast with the emphasis that “social individualism” places on autonomous self-development and independent judgment. But while there may be some truth to this generalization as far as popular morality goes,75
And even there the contrast is probably overstated; for it is not as though concern with reputation and social status are absent from present-day popular morality.
Plato, Cr. 44c–d.
Plato, Rep. I.349a–350c.
Aristotle, EN I.5.1095b23–31.
Cicero, Off. I.107–21.
The Cynics, too, stress being true to one's own nature and rejecting social conformity, even to the point of being willing to copulate and defecate in public—since any action not intrinsically objectionable cannot be made objectionable by social disapproval. Ayn Rand may be giving a nod to the Cynics when she writes in The Fountainhead of her fictional individualist hero, Howard Roark: “For him, the streets were empty. He could have walked there naked without concern.”80
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Signet, 1997), 17.
Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd—and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone's approval?—does it matter?—am I tied? And for that instant, each man was free—free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room.81
Ibid., 679.
In short, independence is a basis of, not an obstacle to, benevolence: when we stop letting others' opinions determine our destiny, those others lose power over us and cease being a threat to our happiness, and so the fear and resentment we might otherwise feel toward them give way to fellow-feeling. For Rand, as for Plato,82
For Plato it is the self-sufficing possession of a good condition, and the consequent lack of envy, that leads both men (Rep. VI.500b–d) and gods (Tim. 29d–30b) to seek to reproduce that good condition in others.
“[A] rational man never holds a desire or pursues a goal which cannot be achieved directly or indirectly by his own effort. It is with a proper understanding of this ‘indirectly’ that the crucial social issue begins. Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life. The only difference is that he supports his life by trading his products or services for the products or services of others…. [H]e depends on nothing but his own effort: directly, by doing objectively valuable work—indirectly, through the objective evaluation of his work by others…. He trades value for value.” Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, 1964), 59–60; italics in the original. Nor is this analysis confined to narrowly economic exchange: “In spiritual issues … the currency or medium of exchange is different, but the principle is the same. Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtue of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange….” Ibid., 35.
Tucker, Instead of a Book, 403–4.
The point of these various examples is not, of course, to show that the ancients were radical individualists, but rather to rebut the charge (brought, e.g., by Bastiat) that the ancient ethos was too wedded to domination, war, slavery, male supremacy, social conformity, and anticommercialism to have much in common with radical individualism. On the contrary, it is precisely in classical thought that we may find the seeds from which the radical individualist position on these matters grew.
IV. Praxis and Telos
As I mentioned earlier, radical individualists tend inter alia to be motivational individualists, both in the “methodologically subjectivist” sense of explaining people's actions in terms of their beliefs, desires, and preferences, and in the “ethically internalist” sense of denying that there could be moral duties that did not somehow engage the agent's preferences. Indeed, most of these thinkers go beyond mere internalism to ethical eudaimonism, insisting that all moral duties must be in the agent's self-interest.85
Hence, many radical individualists even call themselves “egoists” (e.g., Bellegarrigue, Tucker, Chernyshevsky, Rand), though their conception of a fundamental harmony of interests among rational agents belies some of the ordinary associations with that term.
The Stoics are a partial exception, since they hold that we may quite rationally choose some actions because trying to perform those actions is a means to or part of our happiness, even though actually succeeding in performing such actions is neither; but this is only a technical deviation and still accords in spirit with the doctrine enunciated. The Cyrenaic hedonists are perhaps a more genuine exception; but theirs is not the version of classical hedonism that became most influential.
Both among the classical philosophers and among their radical individualist descendants there has been dispute as to whether the claim that we always act to promote our own happiness entails psychological determinism. For some reasons for thinking it doesn't, see Roderick T. Long, “Praxeology: Who Needs It,” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 6, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 299–316, esp. pp. 309–10.
The methodologically subjectivist project of explaining people's actions in terms of their own beliefs and values leads naturally enough into economic theory, so it is no surprise that, as I have noted, the first systematic body of European economic theory originates with the Aristotelian Scholastics. The Scholastics also pioneered a subjective theory of economic value, which was inherited by the Continental tradition generally; while English economists were attempting in vain to uphold backward-looking, objective theories of value based on labor or cost of production, it was the radical individualists in the French liberal tradition who kept the forward-looking subjective theory alive. Today, the French économistes are recognized as forerunners of Austrian economics, one of the foremost currents feeding modern-day economic libertarianism88
Rothbard, Classical Economics, chap. 14; Joseph T. Salerno, “Comment on the French Liberal School,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 2, no. 1 (1978): 65–68, http://mises.org/journals/jls/2_1/2_1_5.pdf; Salerno, “Neglect of the French Liberal School in Anglo-American Economics: A Critique of Received Explanations,” Review of Austrian Economics 2, no. 1 (1988): 113–56, http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae2_1_7.pdf.
See, e.g., Carl Menger, Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences, trans. Francis J. Nock (Grove City, PA: Libertarian Press, 1996), 207–9; and Carl Menger, Principles of Economics, trans. James Dingwall and Bert F. Hoselitz (Grove City, PA: Libertarian Press, 1994), 53n. Cf. Barry Smith, “Aristotle, Menger, Mises: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Economics,” in Bruce J. Caldwell, ed., Carl Menger and His Legacy in Economics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 263–88. Also, for parallels between Austrian thought and the ideas of Socrates, see Roderick T. Long, “Beyond Subjectivism: Socrates' Praxeological Project,” in Roderick T. Long, Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action: Praxeological Investigations (London: Routledge, 2007).
The ethical internalism and eudaimonism of the radical individualists can also be traced, in many instances, to specifically classical origins. Mises, for example, writes that the “autonomous, rationalistic and voluntaristic ethics” of Epicurus “inaugurated … the spiritual, moral and intellectual emancipation of mankind” by challenging the prevailing “heteronomous” systems of morality.90
Mises is deliberately using the term “heteronomous” in a way contrary to Immanuel Kant, who applied it to actions based on inclination, since in such actions, according to Kant, the rational will is directed by an alien force, inclination, rather than by its own internal commitments. For Mises, by contrast, it is precisely by legitimizing inclination as a source of motivation that an ethical theory avoids heteronomy. Ironically, both Kant and Mises are ethical internalists, but of very different sorts (e.g., Kant's version attempts to avoid any trace of eudaimonism). There is, to be sure, a story to be told about Kant's own contribution to the radical individualist tradition, though exploring those connections lies beyond the scope of this essay.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 3d ed. (Chicago: Contemporary Books), 147, 883.
Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, 1984), 98–99.
This emphasis on hypothetical imperatives does not lead to an anything-goes subjectivist attitude to morality, however, because the radical individualists generally hold that there are certain values (e.g., social cooperation)93
See, e.g., Larry J. Eshelman, “Ludwig von Mises on Principle,” in Review of Austrian Economics 6, no. 2 (1993): 3–41, http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae6_2_1.pdf; Henry Hazlitt, The Foundations of Morality (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1972); and Leland B. Yeager, Ethics as Social Science: The Moral Philosophy of Social Cooperation (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2001).
Cf. Neera Badhwar, Is Virtue Only a Means to Happiness? (Poughkeepsie, NY: Objectivist Center, 2001).
Perhaps ironically, this is also a Kantian idea; Kant writes that we cannot rationally commit ourselves either to leaving our natural talents undeveloped or to forgoing all aid from other people, since talents and aid are useful “for all sorts of possible purposes.” Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 3d ed., trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 31–32.
Cicero, Off. III.9.
But see Section V below.
The rules of conduct [are] not designed to produce particular foreseen benefits for particular people, but are multi-purpose instruments developed as adaptations to certain kinds of environment because they help to deal with certain kinds of situation…. And this adaptation to a kind of environment takes place through a process very different from that in which we might decide on a procedure designed to achieve particular foreseen results…. Just as a man, setting out on a walking tour, will take his pocket knife with him, not for a particular foreseen use but in order to be equipped for various possible contingencies, or to be able to cope with kinds of situation likely to occur, so the rules of conduct … are not means for known particular purposes but adaptations to kinds of situations which past experience has shown to recur in the kind of world we live in…. The whole system of rules … does not aim at the achievement of known particular results but is preserved as a means for assisting in the pursuit of a great variety of individual purposes.98
Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy, Volume I: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 4–5.
Since the purpose of moral rules is to meet a variety of generic possible needs rather than certain specifically foreseen needs, the temptation to trade morality off against expediency is blocked, Hayek argues.
The similarities between classical and radical individualist versions of eudaimonism do not end there. The classical eudaimonists often tried to specify the content of happiness by grounding it in a human being's biological function as a rational and social animal;99
See, e.g., Plato, Rep. I.352d–354a; Aristotle, EN I.7.1097b22–1098a18.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letter 121; translation mine.
Spencer, Man Versus the State, 149–51.
Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, chap. 1.
Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, chaps. 1–6.
Aristotle, EN IX.8.1168b15–1169b3. Because Rand wrote positively about “selfishness” and “capitalism,” used a dollar sign as her personal symbol, and called love of money “the root of all good,” it is often assumed that she conceptualized happiness primarily in terms of accumulating material wealth—which would certainly be a departure from the classical tradition, and from most of the radical individualists as well. But in fact she was not especially interested in acquiring riches; for Rand, those who “place money first” are “second-handers” who seek “to show, to stun, to entertain, to impress others”—thus fatally making the judgment of others, rather than their own, their “motive power” and “prime concern” (The Fountainhead, 606–9). Rand's own “love of money” is not so much a love of having money as a love of the noncoercive, nonsacrificial mode of social interaction she sees money as representing: “Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.” Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Signet, 1996), 380.
Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, chap. 4.
Thus, the radical individualists' emphasis, both explanatory and ethical, on the pursuit of individual self-interest has a solidly classical basis.
V. The Legacy of Protagoras
In Plato's Protagoras, Plato attributes to Protagoras (with what accuracy we do not know) a critique of atomistic individualism, in the form of a myth in which Prometheus, pitying human beings for their lack of natural gifts by comparison with the other animals, steals technical wisdom—we might think of it as a kind of instrumental rationality—from the goddess Athena and grants it to the human race. The result is that while humans are now enabled to use tools and engage in various sorts of intelligent planning, they are unable to live together peacefully—for the same instrumental rationality that brings them together into cooperative association also leads them to cheat on the cooperation and stab each other in the back.
This is a picture made familiar by Hobbesians and game theorists: intelligent, self-interested agents caught in the trap of their own rationality, unable to maintain stable cooperative relationships even though all would benefit from their being maintained. But Protagoras's solution is not to have a Hobbesian sovereign forcibly impose terms of cooperation on them; nor does he, like Critias (or whoever wrote the Sisyphus), invoke a noble lie to put the fear of gods in them. Nor, again, does he, like Glaucon in Republic II, envision a mere state of truce, a nonaggression pact held together by mutual fear—which would be using instrumental rationality to solve the problem created by instrumental rationality.
Instead, Protagoras appeals to a different kind of rationality: Zeus intervenes to supplement humans' technical wisdom with political wisdom, which enables them to form stable cooperative ties—and he makes sure to distribute such wisdom throughout the entire population, since social order could not prevail, communities could not persist, if the ability to cooperate were confined to a few experts. That such political wisdom involves a more than merely instrumental concern for others, a commitment to fair dealing with them, is suggested by Protagoras's identification of justice, friendship, order, and aidôs (a term that can mean both “shame” and “respect”) as among the components and/or fruits of political wisdom.
The moral to which Protagoras's myth points, then, is that merely instrumental rationality is insufficient to render human cooperation stable. But the upshot is optimistic, not pessimistic: since cooperation does prevail for the most part, since human communities do exist, since crime is the exception rather than the rule, Protagoras invites us to conclude that humans are generally capable of forming noninstrumental cooperative ties. (And his answer surely makes more sense than the Hobbesian one: governmental authority can hardly be a precondition of cooperation, since it requires cooperation to set up a government in the first place.) Protagoras's point is that cooperation would be more unstable than it is if we were capable only of a strategic attitude toward other people, regarding deference to their claims solely as a causal means to some further goal; the fact of cooperation thus shows that we are in fact capable of, and indeed disposed toward, honoring other people's claims for their own sake.
Despite what might be suggested by the talk of political wisdom being a gift from Zeus,106
The historical Protagoras was, famously, agnostic about the gods. One of his few surviving direct quotations is “Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have.” Quoted in Rosamund Kent Sprague, ed., The Elder Sophists (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 20. In light of this, Plato presumably intends for us to take Protagoras's tale of divine intervention metaphorically.
It is important to recall the context in which Protagoras offers his argument. At Prot. 319b–320b, Socrates argues that if political wisdom were teachable, then (a) there would be specialized political experts, in which case the democratic practice of accepting input on political matters from all citizens equally would not make sense, yet surely it does; and (b) wise statesmen like Pericles would be both willing and able to teach such wisdom to their own children, yet they do not. Therefore, Socrates concludes, political wisdom is not teachable. Now it is doubtful that Socrates himself accepts this argument, since we have good reason to think that he does not really regard democratic practice as sensible (cf. Cr. 44c–d, Gorg. 471e–472d) or Pericles as a wise statesman (cf. Gorg. 503b–e, 515c–516d); but Socrates offers the argument as a problem for Protagoras, presumably on the ground that Protagoras may be expected to find the premises, but not the conclusion, attractive. In any case, Protagoras does not challenge either the premise that democratic practice makes sense or the premise that democratic statesmen are wise; instead, he proposes to explain how those premises are in fact both true and compatible with wisdom's teachability (Prot. 322d–323c, 326e–327d). Hence, Protagoras's myth constitutes a defense of democracy against implicit Socratic criticism.
Today, Protagoras is better known for his apparently relativist doctrine, examined in Plato's Theaetetus, that “man is the measure of all things,” i.e., that whatever seems true to a person is true for that person. While both the Theaetetus doctrine and the Protagoras doctrine reject the idea of expertise being confined to a few, they have little else in common, and in particular the Protagoras doctrine does not appear to depend in any way on the far more extreme—and as Plato arguably shows, ultimately incoherent—Theaetetus doctrine. Indeed, the Protagoras doctrine insists that political wisdom differs from other forms of expertise in not being confined to a few, a position plainly incompatible with the Theaetetus doctrine. Leaving aside questions about the historical Protagoras, I doubt that these two doctrines, advanced by the character Protagoras in two different dialogues, were intended by Plato to be parts of a single position.
Thinkers in the mainline tradition of Greek philosophical ethics inaugurated by Socrates will be reluctant (rightly so, I think) to attribute political wisdom to people merely on the ground that those people are, for the most part, successfully cooperating. “Cooperating to do what?” will be the question. Still, successful cooperation is surely part of a just social order, even if it is not the whole of it, and the later Socratic tradition (broadly understood) is happy enough to find the seeds of true wisdom and justice in people's ordinary moral and linguistic conceptions and practices—what Aristotle calls “reputable beliefs” (endoxa)108
For Aristotle on endoxa, see Roderick T. Long, Reason and Value: Aristotle Versus Rand (Poughkeepsie, NY: Objectivist Center, 2000).
Plato, Smp. 204d–212c.
Aristotle, Pol. I.1.1252b30–31.
Epicureanism might seem to be an exception here, since Epicurus insists that justice has only instrumental value and arises from contract111
Epicurus, KD 33–34.
Epicurus, Sent. Vat. 23 (reading hairetê for arêtê).
Cicero, Fin. I.66–70.
Diogenes Laertius X.9; Cicero, Fin. I.65.
The Epicureans also inherit Protagoras's friendliness to the notion that social cooperation can develop and persist spontaneously, without direction or compulsion. This is not to say that either Protagoras or the Epicureans renounce all need for force in human affairs. (Neither, for that matter, do most of the radical individualists.) But by relying on widespread political wisdom, rather than either a Hobbesian sovereign or an elite corps of educators, to originate and maintain social cooperation, Protagoras gives evidence of a conviction that spontaneous order rather than top-down control is the decisive factor in cooperation; and the Epicureans certainly follow him here. To be sure, they insist that only a wise minority can be trusted to behave justly without the incentive of legal punishment;115
Hermarchus ap. Porphyry, De Abstinentia I.7–12.
Epicurus, Epist. Herod. 75–76; Lucretius V.1028–90.
We likewise find an appreciation of spontaneous order in Cicero, who suggested that Rome owed its success to its constitutional order's having evolved gradually through a process drawing on collective human experience, rather than having been the deliberate product of a single designer:
Cato used to say that our constitution was superior to those of other States on account of the fact that almost every one of those other commonwealths had been established by one man, the author of their laws and institutions…. On the other hand our own commonwealth was based upon the genius, not of one man, but many; it was founded, not in one generation, but in a long period of several centuries and many ages of men. For, said he, there never has lived a man possessed of so great genius that nothing could escape him, nor could the combined powers of all the men living at one time possibly make all the necessary provisions for the future without the aid of actual experience and the test of time.117
Cicero, Rep. II.1.2, in Cicero, De Re Publica; De Legibus, trans. Clinton Walter Keyes (London: William Heinemann, 1928); cf. Polybius VI.9–10.
Echoes of such Protagorean ideas as the spontaneous maintenance of social order and the stability of cooperation run through the radical individualist tradition. Among the classical liberal thinkers who most strongly influenced this tradition are John Locke, who insisted against Hobbes that individuals in a stateless society would recognize a moral law based on their common humanity, and so would find mutual cooperation easier to maintain than Hobbes supposed;118
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690), ed. Peter Laslett, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), III.2.2.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), 2 vols., ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), IV.2.
The keynote for the radical individualist approach to these issues was set by Thomas Paine, who proclaimed that nature “has not only forced man into society by a diversity of wants which the reciprocal aid of each other can supply, but she has implanted in him a system of social affections, which, though not necessary to his existence, are essential to his happiness.” While Paine, unlike Protagoras, regards social impulses as innate rather than acquired, he is otherwise making the same point Protagoras makes: that the attitudes necessary for cooperation are distributed throughout society and do not require inculcation by some specialized expert or heavy-handed ruler. Paine writes:
Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole…. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.121
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1948), 357.
As this passage shows, viewing cooperation as a product of spontaneous order provides vital ammunition for those seeking to limit or abolish the power of the state: the less social order depends on government enforcement, the more feasible it becomes to restrict the scope of such enforcement. Hence the prominence of spontaneous-order themes in radical individualist literature.
Spencer was, famously, one of the foremost champions of the spontaneous evolution of cosmic, biological, and social order:
It is not by “the hero as king,” any more than by “collective wisdom,” that men have been segregated into producers, wholesale distributors, and retail distributors. Our industrial organization, from its main outlines down to its minutest details, has become what it is, not simply without legislative guidance, but, to a considerable extent, in spite of legislative hindrances. It has arisen under the pressure of human wants and resulting activities…. Through the combination thus spontaneously evolved, every citizen is supplied with daily necessaries; while he yields some product or aid to others.122
Spencer, Man Versus the State, 385.
For Spencer, as for Protagoras, language is the paradigm case of a body of knowledge and practices absorbed from one's social environment rather than explicitly inculcated by specific teachers—though Spencer, typically, gives this idea an evolutionary spin in Epicurean fashion:
No language is a cunningly-devised scheme of a ruler or body of legislators. There was no council of savages to invent the parts of speech, and decide on what principles they should be used…. Going on without any authority or appointed regulation, this natural process went on without any man observing that it was going on. Solely under pressure of the need for communicating their ideas and feelings—solely in pursuit of their personal interests—men little by little developed speech in absolute unconsciousness that they were doing anything more than pursuing their personal interests.123
Ibid., 437–38.
Hayek, like Spencer, took spontaneous order as the leitmotif of his work, and gave an evolutionary spin to what is, in effect, still Protagoras's distinction between technical and political wisdom:
Which individuals and which groups succeed and continue to exist depends as much on the goals that they pursue, the values that govern their action, as on the tools and capacities at their command. Whether a group will prosper or be extinguished depends as much on the ethical code it obeys, or the ideals of beauty or well-being that guide it, as on the degree to which it has learned or not learned to satisfy its material needs.124
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 36.
Hayek also follows Protagoras and Spencer in treating the rules that make civil cooperation possible as tacit absorptions from the social environment rather than as the explicit inculcations of teachers:
We understand one another and get along with one another, are able to act successfully on our plans, because, most of the time, members of our civilization conform to unconscious patterns of conduct, show a regularity in their actions that is not the result of commands or coercion, often not even of any conscious adherence to known rules, but of firmly established habits and traditions…. [O]ur morals are not a product but a presupposition of our reason, part of the ends which the instrument of our intellect has been developed to serve.125
Ibid., 62–63.
Like Cicero, then, Hayek denigrates the “rationalist” and “constructivist” mind-set that assumes the superiority of deliberate planning to spontaneous social evolution. On the contrary, Hayek argues, market incentives serve to coordinate individuals' plans through the “utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.”126
Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 78.
Ibid., 32.
Spencer additionally held that the progress of both biological and social evolution is gradually weakening our egoistic and combative impulses, and strengthening our altruistic and cooperative ones—and that its doing so is greatly to everyone's benefit. (Here evolution takes over the role of the Protagorean Zeus.) The human race is gradually moving from a regime of compulsory cooperation to one of voluntary cooperation,128
Spencer, Principles of Ethics, vol. I, 271–85.
Herbert Spencer, Social Statics; or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (New York: D. Appleton, 1878), 24.
[F]orced, as men in society are, to seek satisfaction of their own wants by satisfying the wants of others; and led as they also are by sentiments which social life has fostered, to satisfy many wants of others irrespective of their own; they are moved by two sets of forces which, working together, will amply suffice to carry on all needful activities… .130
Spencer, Man Versus the State, 478.
Moreover, while Spencer was a consequentialist of sorts, he held that we stand to reap the beneficial results of moral principles only if we commit ourselves to them as principles rather than mere strategies of expediency—another case of having instrumental reasons to adopt noninstrumental concerns.131
Spencer, Social Statics, chap. 1.
Mises, Liberalism, 56–57.
Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy. Volume I: Rules and Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), chap. 3.
Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, 32.
Tucker might seem to be an exception to the account I have been giving, since he was a Stirnerite egoist who held that might makes right, and that justice is no more than a mutual nonaggression pact that nobody has reason to honor any farther than it suits his interests.135
Tucker, Instead of a Book, 24.
Ibid., 132.
Ibid., 24–25.
Ibid., 51.
Likewise Francis Tandy, a disciple of Tucker's, expounding the Tuckerite egoist position in his 1896 book Voluntary Socialism, writes that while violations of the Spencerian law of equal freedom may be expedient in “very exceptional” cases, “an unflinching adherence to the principle in all cases … would, in the long run, be less harmful than a very lax application of it.”139
Francis Dashwood Tandy, Voluntary Socialism: A Sketch (Denver, CO: F. D. Tandy, 1896), 53n.
Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1985), 56–57; cf. Larry Eshelman's comment that “Mises's moral ‘utilitarianism,’ in spite of his repeated attacks on natural law and natural rights, owes more to the principled, categorical moral framework of Spencer and Herbert, than to the maximizing, comparative moral framework of Bentham and Mill” (Eshelman, “Ludwig von Mises on Principle,” 38).
But what does it mean to treat instrumental concerns as noninstrumental? When I choose respect for others' rights, say, as though such respect had noninstrumental value for me, do I actually attach noninstrumental value to it, or am I merely pretending? There would seem to be no third possibility. If I actually attach noninstrumental value to it, then it would seem that I can no longer consistently accept a purely instrumental account of its value. I may have had a purely instrumental motivation for cultivating such noninstrumental concern in myself, but once I have it, my resulting perspective is no longer an instrumental one. In contrast, if I don't embrace such respect as a genuinely noninstrumental concern, then I will continue to be open to the temptation to make the very sorts of trade-offs of principle for expediency that the radical individualists regard as inexpedient in the long run. Thus, concerns treated as noninstrumental just are noninstrumental concerns, and so-called “indirect consequentialist” arguments, whatever their authors may intend, are really consequentialist arguments for abandoning consequentialism.141
I elaborate this argument in Roderick T. Long, “Review of Leland B. Yeager's Ethics as Social Science,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 6, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 89–98, http://mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae6_1_7.pdf; and Long, “The Value in Friendship,” Philosophical Investigations 26, no. 1 (2003): 73–77.
For Ayn Rand's ambivalence on this question, see Long, Reason and Value, and Badhwar, Is Virtue Only a Means to Happiness?
Both in their views on the robust and undirected nature of social cooperation and in their views on instrumental grounds for adopting noninstrumental concerns, then, the radical individualists may be seen as developing classical themes first pioneered by the originator (be that person Plato or Protagoras) of the ideas in the “Great Speech” in Plato's Protagoras.
VI. Law Versus Convention
One final point of contact between the classical and individualist traditions is a radically antipositivist conception of law—an insistence that unjust governmental edicts are not merely bad laws, but no laws at all. Such a position, of course, has no necessary link to radical individualism: an authoritarian collectivist might likewise claim, for example, that only authoritarian collectivist measures count as genuine laws. Nonetheless, the antipositivist conception is particularly congenial to the perspective of dissidents against authority (including, though not limited to, radical individualists), because it serves to delegitimize the state's commands and to legitimize resistance to the existing power structure; that is why the doctrine was invoked by American revolutionaries in the eighteenth century, by abolitionists in the nineteenth, and by civil rights activists like Martin Luther King, Jr., in the twentieth. In Dr. King's words:
You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws…. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”143
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” in James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco: Harper, 1990), 293. I am not claiming that King was a radical individualist, only that he shared with the radical individualists a concern to delegitimize established authority, and like them found antipositivism useful in this regard.
In Plato's Minos, Socrates inaugurates this tradition by declaring that since laws essentially aim to enact justice rather than injustice—or as he puts it, “law wishes to be the discovery of what is so”—no statute whose content falls short of justice should be counted as a genuine law.144
Plato, Minos 314c–317d.
Xenophon, Mem. I.2.40–46; cf. IV.4.
Aristotle, Pol. VII.2.1324b28–30.
This idea that the difference between true law and mere command must rest on moral authority rather than mere power is taken up by the Stoics. Cicero, expounding the Stoic conception of natural law, writes that “true law is right reason in agreement with nature,” so that “there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times.”147
Cicero, Rep. III.22.33, in Cicero, De Re Publica; De Legibus, 211.
I find that it has been the opinion of the wisest men that Law is not a product of human thought, nor is it any enactment of peoples, but something eternal…. From this point of view it can be readily understood that those who formulated wicked and unrighteous statutes for nations … put into effect anything but “laws.” It may thus be clear that in the very definition of the term “law” there inheres the idea and principle of choosing what is just and true…. What of the many deadly, the many pestilential statutes which nations put in force? These no more deserve to be called laws than the rules a band of robbers might pass in their assembly. For if ignorant and unskillful men have prescribed deadly poisons instead of healing drugs, these cannot possibly be called physicians' prescriptions… .148
Cicero, Leg. II.8, in Cicero, De Re Publica; De Legibus, 379–85. For a defense of this argument, see Roderick T. Long, “Federalism and the Bill of Rights: The Pros and Cons of Kelo,” July 8, 2005, http://lewrockwell.com/long/long14.html.
This approach governed not only Roman legal theory but, at least to some extent, Roman legal practice. As the legal scholar Bruno Leoni notes:
The Roman jurist was a sort of scientist: the objects of his research were the solutions to cases that citizens submitted to him for study, just as industrialists might today submit to a physicist or to an engineer a technical problem concerning their plants or their production. Hence, private Roman law was something to be described or to be discovered, not something to be enacted—a world of things that there were, forming part of the common heritage of all Roman citizens. Nobody enacted that law; nobody could change it by any exercise of his personal will.149
Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law, expanded 3d ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991), 83. Leoni does not mean to deny that there were such things as enacted statutes in Roman private law; his claim is simply that such statutes were so few, in comparison with those of public law, that private disputants “could rarely base their claims on a statute” (82), thus leaving the vast bulk of private law to be determined by judicial rather than legislative process.
However strange it might sound to modern ears to say that unjust statutes are not laws (rather than saying that they are bad laws), the Socratic position became the dominant opinion in jurisprudence throughout most of European history. Augustine, as we have seen, enunciated the motto lex injusta non est lex (“an unjust law is not a law”), in which he was followed by jurists for over a millennium. In the thirteenth century, for example, Thomas Aquinas wrote that “every human law has the nature of law in so far as it is derived from the law of nature,” but “if it is in any respect at odds with the law of nature, it will then no longer be law, but a corruption of law.”150
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IaIIae.95.2, in Aquinas, Political Writings, ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 130.
Francisco Suárez, On Law and God the Lawgiver, excerpted in J. B. Schneewind, Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant: An Anthology, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 73–74.
Richard Overton, A Defiance Against All Arbitrary Usurpations or Encroachments (1646), quoted in Carl Watner, “‘Come What, Come Will!’ Richard Overton, Libertarian Leveller,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 4, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 405–32, at 415, http://mises.org/journals/jls/4_4/4_4_7.pdf.
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), introduction, section 2.
The radical individualists' critique of state power draws, then, on this moralized conception of law running back to Socrates. Bastiat, for example, defines law as “the organization of the natural right of lawful defense,” adding that the “nature of law is to maintain justice.” It follows that any legislative violation of liberty or justice is a “perversion of the law … in direct opposition to its own purpose.”154
Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, trans. Dean Russell (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1964), 7–9, 13.
Lysander Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1860), chap. 17.
justice is an immutable, natural principle; and not anything that can be made, unmade, or altered by human power…. Lawmakers, as they call themselves, can add nothing to it, nor take anything from it. Therefore all their laws, as they call them,—that is, all the laws of their own making,—have no color of authority or obligation…. It is intrinsically just as false, absurd, ludicrous, and ridiculous to say that lawmakers, so-called, can invent and make any laws, of their own … as it would be to say that they can invent and make such mathematics, chemistry, physiology, or other sciences, as they see fit… .156
Lysander Spooner, A Letter to Grover Cleveland on His False Inaugural Address, the Usurpations and Crimes of Lawmakers and Judges, and the Consequent Poverty, Ignorance, and Servitude of the People (Boston: Benj. R. Tucker, 1886), 3–4.
Such is equally the opinion of Rose Wilder Lane a century later, who “den[ies] that legislators make law,” holding that they create only “legal Acts, statutes, which may or may not coincide with real Law, and in fact seldom do.”157
Rose Wilder Lane, Letter to Jasper Crane, February 14, 1961, in Roger Lea MacBride, ed., The Lady and the Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1973), 268.
Law in the sense of enforced rules of conduct is undoubtedly coeval with society; only the observance of common rules makes the peaceful existence of individuals in society possible…. Such rules might in a sense not be known and still have to be discovered, because from “knowing how” to act, or from being able to recognize that the acts of another did or did not conform to accepted practices, it is still a long way to being able to state such rules in words. But while it might be generally recognized that the discovery and statement of what the accepted rules were (or the articulation of rules that would be approved when acted upon) was a task requiring special wisdom, nobody yet conceived of law as something which men could make at will.158
Hayek, Rules and Order, 72–73.
There are some differences here, to be sure. Where Spooner is a straightforward natural-law theorist in a manner reminiscent of the Stoics, Hayek seeks to transcend the distinction between natural law and conventional law; for Hayek, law is “conventional” in the sense that it is the product of human custom—but “natural” in the sense that it is not the product of anyone's deliberate decision. Such a position is perhaps already implicit in Protagoras's insight that we learn the rules that constitute political wisdom as we learn our native language, tacitly and without reliance on specific teachers. While the Stoic and Protagorean approaches differ, they may both be seen as versions of antipositivism.
Nor is such antipositivism confined to the sphere of law. Socrates maintained that only beneficial acquisition counts as genuine wealth or profit,159
Xenophon Oec. I.1–15; Plato, Hipparchus; pseudo-Plato, Eryxias.
Plato, Ap. 39e–40a.
Aristotle, Pol. III.5.1279b20–1280a6; cf. Long, “Aristotle's Egalitarian Utopia,” 175–82.
Here, too, the radical individualists are followers. Part of Spooner's argument for the unconstitutionality of slavery, for example, was that the U.S. Constitution guarantees to the several states a “republican form of government,” and by Spooner's lights a slaveholding state is no true republic—since it is part of the true concept of a republic that “the public, the mass of the people, if not the entire people, participate in the grant of powers to the government, and in the protection afforded by the government,” rendering it impossible that “a government, under which any considerable number of the people … are disfranchised and enslaved, can be a republic.”162
Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, 106.
Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles; with Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2004), 1079; Samuel E. Konkin III, Strategy of the New Libertarian Alliance, no. 1 (May Day 1981).
Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, rev. ed. (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1978), 23–24.
Anselme Bellegarrigue, Anarchie: Journal de l'Order 1 (Paris, 1850): 1.
Anselme Bellegarrigue, Les Femmes d'Amérique (Paris: Blanchard, 1853).
By challenging the conventional understanding of crucial terms like “law” and “robbery,” the radical individualists sought to undermine the moral legitimacy that conventional usage lends to established authority. It would be a mistake, however, to take the individualists as arbitrarily changing the meanings of words for their own purposes; in each case they insist, in good Socratic fashion, that their favored meaning is already implicit in ordinary usage and simply needs bringing out. In short, the radical individualists hold that there is a conflict between the central thrust of certain ideas and the ways in which they are conventionally applied—a conflict which they propose to resolve by following the idea's logical tendency and jettisoning its traditional applications.
In a debate with Horace Greeley over marriage law, Stephen Pearl Andrews summed up the general approach:
I am as honestly and thoroughly opposed to Adultery, for example, as the Editor of the Tribune can be, except that we might differ in the definition. I charge adultery upon nine-tenths of the married couples in this city, committed not out of, but within, the limits of their marriage bonds…. Mr. Greeley denounces me, as favoring Impurity and Adultery…. If by Adultery is meant a breach of a legal bond, binding a man and woman, between whom there are repugnance and disgust instead of attraction and love, to live together in the marital embrace, then there may be some grounds for the charge; but if, as I choose to define it, Adultery means a sexual union, induced by any other motive, however amiable or justifiable in itself, than that mutual Love which by Nature prompts the amative conjunction of the sexes, materially and spiritually, then do I oppose and inveigh against, and then does Mr. Greeley defend and uphold Adultery.167
Stephen Pearl Andrews, ed., Love, Marriage, and Divorce and the Sovereignty of the Individual: A Discussion by Henry James, Horace Greeley, and Stephen Pearl Andrews (New York: Source Book Press, 1962), 11–14.
It was the Greek philosophers who first separated nomos in the sense of mere “convention,” potentially opposed to nature, from nomos in the sense of “law,” opposed to violence and in accordance with nature;168
Lysias, Funeral Oration 17–19; Plato, Minos 313c–315b; Xenophon, Mem. I.2.40–47; Aristotle, Pol. VII.2.1324b23–30. Cf. Roderick T. Long, “Three Conceptions of Nature in Hellenistic Philosophy of Law” (unpublished); and Stalley and Long, “Socrates and Early Socratic Philosophers of Law,” section 3.
VII. Conclusion
While the classical Greco-Roman tradition is not ordinarily thought of as associated in any significant way with radical individualism, the two intellectual traditions most commonly described as radically individualist—one atomistic, the other organic—both draw heavily on classical precedent. In particular, the more organic individualist tradition, which I have argued is also the more radical, turns out to be continuing and developing ancient themes in many of its central positions—including, as we have seen, its stand on such topics as human sociality, hegemonic relationships, “militant” versus “industrial” society, methodological individualism, ethical eudaimonism, psychological independence, spontaneous order, noninstrumental concern, and a moralized conception of law.
The identification of these connections between the classical tradition and the organic individualist tradition suggests, at the least, that scholars working primarily in the study of one of these traditions might profit from an investigation of the other. More controversially, perhaps, such connections would seem to imply that those who find either one of these traditions attractive (i.e., for its substantive content rather than merely as a historical curiosity) might wish to explore the extent to which they are or should be committed to the foundations or applications offered by the other.
