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Q: Are libertarianism and socialism mutually exclusive?
A: No. Libertarians believe liberty consists of personal autonomy, and they justify a strong distrust of the state upon this foundation. Socialism is a social and economic system characterised by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy, as well as a political theory and movement that aims at the establishment of such a system. Although socialism is commonly associated with the planned economies proffered by Marxism-Leninism and other "authoritarian socialists," libertarian socialism rejects economic direction from a central authority such as the state. Thus, libertarianism and anarchism have been synonyms since the 1890s, and other equivalents include libertarian socialism, socialist anarchism, and left-libertarianism. The libertarianism of the 19th century had two strong currents, social anarchism and individualist anarchism, both of which fall under the umbrella of libertarian socialism and were explicitly anti-capitalist.
In the 20th century, members of the Old Right in the United States such as Albert Jay Nock and H. L. Mencken began identifying as libertarians to declare their commitment to individualism and distance themselves from liberals who supported welfare capitalism. Some libertarians (e.g. Murray Rothbard, who popularized the libertarian philosophy anarcho-capitalism) were explicitly influenced by the American individualist anarchists, but most were "a rather automatic product of the American environment." This modern American libertarianism is also referred to as right-libertarianism.
Q: What is right-libertarianism? What is left-libertarianism?
Q: How are all these political philosophies related? Which ones are closely related or inclusive?
A: Some labels and qualifiers are typically used to group together multiple political movements or ideologies or distance them from others. Below is a rough and simplified visual representation of how many of the political camps described in the article (i.e. groups that have either identified or been described as libertarian) relate to one another, without any regard to their affinity for one another, their prominence or their significance.
Libertarian classification diagram
Libertarianism diagram
References
Badie, Bertrand; Berg-Schlosser, Dirk; Morlino, Leonardo (2011). International Encyclopedia of Political Science. SAGE Publications, Inc. p. 2456. ISBN 978-1412959636. "Socialist systems are those regimes based on the economic and political theory of socialism, which advocates public ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources."
Sacco, Nicola and Vanzetti, Bartolomeo (1928). The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti. New York: Octagon Books. p. 274. "After all we are socialists as the social-democrats, the socialists, the communists, and the I.W.W. are all Socialists. The difference—the fundamental one—between us and all the other is that they are authoritarian while we are libertarian; they believe in a State or Government of their own; we believe in no State or Government."
Nettlau, Max (1996). A Short History of Anarchism (in English, translated). London:Freedom Press. p. 162. ISBN 978-0-900384-89-9. OCLC37529250.
Guérin, Daniel (1970). Anarchism: From Theory to Practice. New York:Monthly Review Press. ISBN 978-0853451754. "Some contemporary anarchists have tried to clear up the misunderstanding by adopting a more explicit term: they align themselves with libertarian socialism or communism."
Ostergaard, Geoffrey. "Anarchism". The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern Social Thought. Blackwell Publishing. p. 14.
^ Bookchin, Murray and Biehl, Janet (1997). The Murray Bookchin Reader. New York:Cassell. p. 170.
Marshall, Peter (2009). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. Oakland:PM Press. p. 4. ISBN 978-1-60486-064-1. " emerged at the end of the eighteenth century in its modern form as a response partly to the rise of centalized States and nationalism, and partly to industrialization and capital. Anarchism thus took up the dual challenge of overthrowing both Capital and the State."
^ Chartier, Gary. Johnson, Charles W. (2011). Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Minor Compositions. pp. 4-5. ISBN 978-1570272424. "The anticapitalism of the 'first wave' individualists was obvious to them and to many of their contemporaries."
DeLeon, David (1978). The American as Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism.Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 127. "only a few individuals like Murray Rothbard, in Power and Market, and some article writers were influenced by . Most had not evolved consciously from this tradition; they had been a rather automatic product of the American environment."
^ Goodway, David (2006). Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward. Liverpool:Liverpool University Press. p. 4. "'Libertarian' and 'libertarianism' are frequently employed by anarchists as synonyms for 'anarchist' and 'anarchism', largely as an attempt to distance themselves from the negative connotations of 'anarchy' and its derivatives. The situation has been vastly complicated in recent decades with the rise of anarcho-capitalism, 'minimal statism' and an extreme right-wing laissez-faire philosophy advocated by such theorists as Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick and their adoption of the words 'libertarian' and 'libertarianism'. It has therefore now become necessary to distinguish between their right libertarianism and the left libertarianism of the anarchist tradition."
Hamowy, Ronald. "Left Libertarianism." The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. p. 288
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This history section may need some bold restructuring, as it is currently an incoherent mess. Rather than providing a broad, chronological overview of the history of libertarianism, it's broken up into subsections that cover different wings of libertarian thought. So while it starts with its origins in classical liberalism during the 17th and 18th centuries, which is a fair enough introduction; it then has an "anarchism" section which focuses mostly on the French Revolution; then a "libertarian socialism" section, which stretches from the 1840s to the 1970s; then an "Individualist anarchism in the United States" section, which jumps back to the 1820s and goes on to 1900; then it moves on to an uncited, meandering and incoherent spiel about Geoism; then it finally ends with a section about libertarianism in the post-WWII United States.
This is less a section about the history of libertarianism than it is a random series of peeks at different subsects of libertarianism, with little-to-no connection between them. Perhaps some of this can be incorporated into a different section about the variants of libertarianism, but currently it makes for an ill-conceived history section. --Grnrchst (talk) 09:13, 7 June 2022 (UTC)
Issues with the article
@North8000: You've talked about how this article has some issues, including more of a focus on philosophy and practice. Are there any other issues with the article and if so, how can they be fixed? How can the article be fixed to reflect the ideology's implementations in practice alongside the philosophy? X-Editor (talk) 05:00, 15 June 2022 (UTC)
That's complicated question. Just quick shooting from the hip:
Seek out material on current libertarian practice and current libertarian self-identification, current organizations, institutions & publication(s) and dramatically expand on that
Reduce the coverage of specialized philosophies
Make the lead be more a summary of the article.
Try for more coherent organized writing in the larger more complex areas such as libertarianism in the US
Increase simplified "overview" type coverage, especially of the dramatically different meanings of the terms on the two sides of the pond and the terms with equivalent meaning on the other side of the pond.
In the end it would be a summary of the revised body of the article and so to some extent the problems/fixes are the same as for the body. But also right now it's too loaded with / dependent on obscure and/or questionable philosophical-strand terms, too focused on history and historical subjective "ownership" of terms (although history is important), too focused on obscure philosophy terms vs. common meanings of common libertarian terms. North8000 (talk) 17:02, 15 June 2022 (UTC)
Maybe the history section should be split off into its own article called History of Libertarianism once the history section is simplified, because simplifying would lose a lot of valuable content that should still be on Misplaced Pages. X-Editor (talk) 19:33, 15 June 2022 (UTC)
I agree that we don't want to lose anything that is in the article (except possibly commentary type stuff). But also note that I was only talking about the lead. Overall, I don't think that history takes up too much space in this article other than it needs some organizing / tightening up I think that obscure libertarian philosophies and related obscure terminology takes up too much space. Overabundance of such actually be a minus. I originally tried to learn libertarianism by learning those terms and a taxonomy of those terms and it took me many years to figure out that it was a waste of time.....that I was just trying to learn the obscure creations and created terms of individual philosophers. North8000 (talk) 19:59, 15 June 2022 (UTC)
(per table below) I believe that that section IS relevant to the article but was too long / undue. I'm not sure what to do next. North8000 (talk) 23:28, 15 June 2022 (UTC)
Cool. Evolution of the article is invited. But before anyone goes off the deep end we need to understand that we need to understand that we are speaking two different languages here about two different topics which have enough overlap that they need to be in the same article. Here is your translation table for the common meanings:
Vague description
US term
European term
Prioritizes freedom and minimization of government, not defined by complex philosophies
Libertarian
Liberal
More radical anti-government, more defined by complex philosophies
Anarchist, somewhat leftish
Libertarian
And, for our European friends, a major part of the meaning of "liberal" in the US includes favoring expansion of social programs and taxes to pay for them.
So everybody, please recognize this and don't (based on terminologies) say that the other half of the article is all wrong.
@North8000: It's not somewhat leftish, it's usually full on left-wing anarchist. Regardless, you did define the different terms very well, which will hopefully clear up confusion. X-Editor (talk)
Don't forget that I was using American-ese in that column! :-) In American-ese, full left means being for expansion of governmental social programs and taxes to pay for them, and redistribution of wealth by the government.
I've been active at this article for almost 12 years, many of them as an attempted moderator. A pattern is that someone unaware of the two languages comes in and says that half the article is not about libertarianism. So I wrote the above to try to avoid that confusion. North8000 (talk) 01:08, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
@North8000: Sorry for misinterpreting what you were trying to say, although there are anti-state leftists in the US that want to solve these problems without the state, but you are right that other leftists want to use the state for that task. You should add that column to the Q&A section of the talk page, since it clears up a lot of confusion. X-Editor (talk) 05:57, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
My main focus was to avoid debates fueled by tower-of-babel misunderstandings. And second to acknowledge some main elements which exist which we need to keep in mind when improving this article. A subtle one is that in Europe it's more defined by detailed philosophies and in the US (where there are maybe 50,000,000 vague self-declared libertarians) it really isn't. I do realize that everything I wrote is a (hopefully useful) massive over generalization and thus wrong in many cases. . If you felt like it I'd be interested in knowing which side of the Atlantic you live on, but if not, "rather not" is a fine answer. I'm on the West side of the pond. North8000 (talk) 13:28, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
@North8000: I'm more familiar with US Libertarianism because people in the US are extremely outspoken about their politics. I also added info about an attempt to try US Libertarianism in the real world, but I'm not sure how many other in practice movements there are. X-Editor (talk) 18:53, 16 June 2022 (UTC)
@X-Editor: If you are curious the "libertarian" meaning that 20%-30% of Americans self identify as has a very short and vague meaning. It's sort of "place a higher priority on freedom" (including privacy as a means to that end.) And on "smaller and less intrusive government." And note the mere "place a higher priority on" and so a mild version of those advocacies. And most of them vote Republican and Democrat, not Libertarian party. Probably equivalent to someone in Europe saying that they are a liberal. North8000 (talk) 17:08, 10 July 2022 (UTC)
North8000, although what you have provided is one definition of libertarianism, this would be a very different article if we used it. Every U.S. president from Washington to Hoover and ever Republican president from Reagan to Trump would be libertarians. For example in her book Roads to Dominion, p. 7, Sara Diamond writes, "Libertarianism, anticommunist militarism, and traditionalism have been the three pillars of the U.S. Right." Similar definitions were used by both social scientists and the founders of the modern conservative movement.
On the other hand, the term is used to refer more narrowly to the movement founded by Rothbard, Nolan and Hess, which drew on earlier libertarian movements, especially individualist anarchism. Rothbard distinguished his form of libertarianism by his emphasis on property ownership.
Libertarianism btw is not synonymous with liberalism. Hence French has three terms: libéralisme, libertairism and libertarianisme. The English term libertarianism is a translation of the French term libertairism, while the French term libertarianisme is a French translation of the English term libertarianism. Note the French article defines liberalism in the same way that the English article does, although it points out that the term is iused in different sense. Libertarianisme comes closest to the article North8000 suggests.
@The Four Deuces: I was not intending to create a new working definition for the term for the article, I was just trying to describe the most common meaning of the term in the US. But I disagree that that definition includes all of the people / presidents that you describe. The Nolan chart is probably the best decoder ring for the common meaning of the term in the US and IMO most or all of those presidents were in different corners of the chart than libertarianism. BTW I think that it is important recognize a 2nd tower of Babel between analysis by a European and US person. IMO a European would approach the topic as being mostly defined by history, taxonomy and well developed philosophies. A US person would tend to put extra weight on the common (vague) meaning of the term in the US. North8000 (talk) 17:14, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
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