Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I’m not going to write a detailed summary of the interlibertarian squabble between Todd Seavey and Kerry Howley re: whether libertarians can be feminists and vice versa, but if you want catch up, click here, here, here and here. 

To give the briefest outline, Howley thinks that libertarianism is primarily concerned with maximizing freedom and autonomy. She also thinks that it is not only the state which impinges on individual freedom, but also constricting social norms and things that are generally the domain of feminist, as opposed to libertarian, criticism. Seavey, on the other hand, takes the strict libertarian line that libertarians ought to be concerned with the state. For a little taste of how dogmatic he is on this point:

Would Kerry contend the highly-traditionalistic Amish are by definition not libertarian (which seems odd, given their aversion to taxes, Social Security, and police)? Or, if the raising of children by overly bossy parents complicates your answer on the Amish, then what about voluntary adult converts to Mennonite life, of which New York State has plenty, their lives as patriarchal as all get out?

Are we to think that a hypothetical future world in which there is absolutely no government and no coercion (as traditionally defined by libertarians) but in which most women choose to spend their days jobless, giggling, and stripping (without pay) in front of males to get their attention and approval is in some way unlibertarian? It may be offensive. It may be stupid. It certainly doesn’t sound feminist to me, and maybe it’s even a bad idea — but it’s free.

 Thus, a black man who cannot hold employment by law is unfree, but a black man who cannot hold employment because social custom is such that no one will hire him is as free as any white man. A gay couple who must stay closeted to avoid social ostracism is as free as any hetero couple. A woman who has to choose between purdah and exile from her village is basically living in a libertarian paradise, so long as no one writes the rules down.

This may be true in some parallel world, or under some as-yet-unknown definition of the word freedom, but it’s pretty clearly not true given the world we have and the language we use.

Maybe instead of just bickering about how inclusive a term libertarian ought to be, we should pay attention to how, empirically, libertarians and liberals have responded to not-technically-state-coercion. And libertarians, from Barry Goldwater on down, have always adopted this incredibly strict definition of morally objectionable restrictions on freedom. And if you look at the progenitors of modern liberalism, like Mill or Wollstonecraft, they devoted a considerable amount of energy to questioning social norms and expectations. So I think the response that Howley (as well as Will Wilkinson and Brink Lindsey) ought to make is that they are not libertarians. Sure, they aren’t 21st century American liberals either, so maybe “liberals with libertarian characteristics”? But the point is, the strict definition of coercion and individual freedom that Seavey advances has been the core issue seperating libertarians from liberals for as long as there have been libertarians.