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The following story is part of Walter Block's Autobiography Archive. How I Became a Libertarian
Until 1983, I was almost untouched by political philosophy. Growing up in a small town in the geographical triangle of France, Germany, and Luxembourg, I hated borders, because the customs officers always gave us children a hard time when we had forgotten our passports or had smuggled two packages of coffee from Luxembourg back home to Germany. My family had relatives in France and Luxembourg. As a consequence, I did not develop strong nationalist feelings, but grew up with that down-to-earth approach of tolerance and diversity that was typical of the Saarland. As my grandmother used to say: "Everybody wants to live." This was her personal way of expressing the axiom of self-ownership, I guess. During the summer term of 1983, I stepped for the first time into one of Professor Gerard Radnitzky’s classes. Among students, he had a reputation of talking almost incomprehensible methodological jargon and being extremely conservative. In other words: the average student avoided his classes. (By the way, students at Trier University felt obliged to cultivate at least a soft Marxist attitude, because this most disastrous among all political philosophers was born in Trier.) However, I became interested in the subject of Radnitzky’s class: social justice. At that time, I could not believe that anyone, however conservative, would question that social justice exists and has to exist. But this tremendously charming professor with his slight Southern Moravian/Viennese accent, who constantly switched between German and English, gently smiled while explaining Hayek’s thesis that social justice is confusing categories and thus a mistake. My soul was in trouble, but after all that was the kind of intellectual challenge I missed for so many years at Trier University, where most philosophy professors taught history of philosophy rather than philosophy itself. Gerard Radnitzky was different. His analytical background1 and his logical rigor were refreshing. This class made me do a volte-face. I liked the Popperian/Hayekian approach to philosophy that I found in Radnitzky. Through him, I had the chance to learn from Hayek three important insights. First, the idea of pattern recognition and pattern prediction along with the insight that the mind is a recognition apparatus that is affected by human evolution and by our own development. It is thus influenced by cultural input; secondly, there exist two moral systems, that of the horde and that of the abstract society, and the first cannot replace the second without disastrous consequences; thirdly, the twin ideas of cultural evolution and spontaneous order, i.e. that many ordered structures in society developed spontaneously through human interactions in the process of cultural evolution. Apart from my great admiration for Hayek, I was disappointed about his insufficient definition of individual freedom. Popper was even worse in this respect, and I developed my own definition. The upshot of my "explication," which claims to be free of inner contradictions, is to look at freedom and coercion as both including offers of two kinds, i.e. that both ask for two different decisions, one on the object-level and one on the meta-level.2 In sum: Man is a chooser, and cannot but choose. We choose all the time. A constant flux of information impinges upon the individual. He makes a selection according to his preferences; attends to some of it (relevance) and ignores the rest. Some of the selection is explicitly made, some only implicitly and even subconsciously. When we notice that we are faced with a choice situation, we have – in principle – two options: either to attend to the choice offered to us or imposed upon us and hence to change our original plans, or to ignore the choice imposed upon us or offered to us. The individual makes explicitly or implicitly (sometimes even subconsciously) a cost-benefit-assay. Perhaps a simple example may illustrate the point. Walking in the city and proceeding according to my plan I have to cross a street, and I see a car approaching at a certain distance. Then I have to decide whether to walk or to stop and wait for the car to pass. Implicitly I calculate the risk and make predictions. When passing a market of vegetables, fruits, etc., I may hear a merchant promoting his merchandise by shouting: "apples, oranges, bananas". I hear his shouting, and the first decision I have to take is whether to attend to the offer made and have look at the sorts of fruit he offers, or to ignore the shouting and stick to my original plan of passing the market without paying attention to it. This first decision precedes logically a possible second decision between sorts of fruit, and hence it does so also historically. Of course, the individual my not notice a time difference between the two; the difference may be subliminal. Alluding to the customary terminology in pragmatics and semantics I labelled the first decision, a decision at the meta-level, for short a "meta decision", and the second decision (choosing between apples, oranges, etc.) a decision at the object level, an "object decision". An earmark of the "meta choice" is that it is always a choice between exactly two alternatives, whereas the "object choice" may be between two plus n items. How does coercion come in? Consider two types of cases. Case A: a robber armed with a pistol confronts me with "Your money or your life!" If I perceive the threat as a credible threat, if I feel threatened, then I conclude that ignoring the meta choice, I may run the risk of being shot at (the risk of incurring costs in my private sphere, in this case physical harm). The situation is a clear case of COERCION. The distinction of meta levels enables us to avoid circularity: if we defined "Freedom" as the absence of coercion and stipulated (as we often do in everyday speech) that if the actor does voluntarily what the other party "asks" him, beseeches him, urges him, the (etc.) to do, then the definition would be circular. That the credibility of the threat (as perceived by the actor) is essential we recognize if we consider a type case B. Case B: the individual confronting the actor with "Life or money" is obviously incapable of posing a serious physical threat (e.g., a child with a toy pistol). B is clearly not a case of coercion. The individual approaching the actor offers him a free choice: whether or not he donates some money to the other party. To summarize, the difference between a case of coercion and a case of free choice (as exemplified by Cases A and B above) is in the artificial costs to be expected in case of a negative meta-decision (when ignoring the choice imposed upon the actor). All this sounds very technical. In fact, it is. Usually, I make myself better understood by quoting Marlon Brando, who as the Godfather mentioned that he was going to make someone an "offer he could not refuse." In other words, refusing the offer would be too costly for that person. This is exactly the type of costs I have in mind when talking of the costs of a negative decision at the meta-level in the case of coercion. Again, via Radnitzky, I became familiar with the anarcho-capitalist position of Murray Rothbard and Hans Herrmann Hoppe. It was through Rothbard that I began to understand that the distinction between spontaneous and constructive orders, as stressed by Hayek, was less important than the distinction between free and coercive orders. And what I liked most in Hoppe was the explicit attempt to develop a fully coherent libertarian position. Of course, the man who influenced Hayek, Rothbard, and Hoppe most, had a big impact on me too: Ludwig von Mises. I was and am still fascinated by his crystal-clear style. Think for instance of his magnificent way to explain why interventionism does not work. He needed only a couple of pages in Liberalism, and nobody after him ever expressed it better or clearer. Also, the two insights that a) liberalism was always in favour of everybody and never favoured a distinct group, and b) liberalism is opposed to both conservatism and socialism, will always remain associated with his name, for me. In Germany, this view is still "unorthodox," to say the least. Even historians, who should know better, usually view conservatism and socialism as the two big antagonists and think that liberalism belongs to either of them. Consequently they interpret economy as a threat to liberty and democracy as its defender, rather than vice versa. Hence, it comes as no surprise that the best history on German liberalism was not written by a native, but by Ralph Raico whose book Die Partei der Freiheit is unique. When he worked on his book, his colleagues usually teased him by asking, "Why are going to write the shortest history book ever?" Well, the red and brown socialisms erased the liberal tradition in Germany very effectively. Influenced by Radnitzky, I never saw a convincing argument in favour of natural rights, and believing in Hume’s is/ought distinction, I cannot imagine what such an argument – per impossibile – should look like. However, through Anthony de Jasay’s thesis that contracts breed rights rather than the other way round, I realised that libertarianism can operate without the assumption of natural rights. What I also realised is that such a libertarian approach is yet not fully developed and needs to be carefully stated. Nevertheless, the cornerstones are there: Individual contracting as expression of individual liberties; a model of a free society resting on a net of individual contracts that lead to a system of multilateral insurances of private property and individual freedom; finally, a coherent definition of individual freedom and private property. Notes:
February 25, 2003 Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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