The following story is part of Walter Block's Autobiography Archive.

A Journey in Libertarianland

In a way, it all began with Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson. In my junior year of high school my friend Steve Brecher had gotten me to read Ayn Rand’s novels. I don’t recall how he got me to read them. He probably appealed to the natural perversity that I revealed in our first intellectual conversation. He, already an Objectivist, said, "I’m a radical capitalist." I said, "Then I guess I’m a reactionary socialist." (I had some vague sense that I ought to be a socialist since I had heard that socialism was "scientific"; but, if he was going to be a radical capitalist, I was going to be a reactionary socialist.) In any case, I read Rand’s novels and was especially impressed by her moral and psychological contrast between self-oriented and other-oriented individuals. In English class, someone was complaining about the "selfishness" that Johnson exhibited in his drive to psychologically dominate the members of his circle. I found myself saying that it wasn’t selfishness at all but a type of selflessness. Steve caught my eye and nodded. Steve and I were also partners on the debate team. Each year we got lots of material from the Foundation of Economic Education on that year’s national debate topic. Those materials were my main introduction to free market economics.

This was in Queens, NY in the early sixties. So it was natural for Steve and I (and our girlfriends) to head into Manhattan for NBI lectures. I attended several of those lectures series as a high school student and when I returned to New York for summers during my undergraduate years; but I never had the misfortune of getting close to the Randian inner circle. I majored in Philosophy at Union College from the Fall of '63 to my early graduation in the Spring of ‘66. My best teacher there was the humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz – who I realize in retrospect was extremely tolerant of my undergraduate omniscience. My political activism reached its peak during the 1964 presidential campaign when I organized a (small!) campus political group – "Atheists for Goldwater."

In the Fall of '66 I began Ph.D. work in Philosophy at The University of Rochester. I did a lot of work with the great Kant scholar Lewis White Beck and was dutifully planning on writing a dissertation on synthetic a priori propositions. Fortunately, I had lunch one day with the metaphysician Richard Taylor. Somehow, in conversation, I said "It would be fun to write a dissertation on natural rights." "So," he asked, "why don’t you?" So, I did. The main ambition of that dissertation was to ground a theory of rights upon a Rand-like doctrine of ethical egoism. Since, in part under the Kantian influence of Beck, I took rights to be strongly deontological claims, the ambition of the dissertation required an investigation of how one could connect in one coherent system the consequentialist claims of ethical egoism with the deontological claims of rights theory. In one form or another the investigation of the relationship between consequentialist and non-consequentialist normative principles has ever since remained central to my intellectual endeavors.

While I was in graduate school, I read some letters in the fledgling Reason magazine about market anarchism and soon became convinced that the Randian case for limited government and against market anarchism would not hold. I also had the good fortune to meet the Objectivist philosopher George Walsh at a taped version of some NBI lectures in Rochester. In the late sixties, George (to his later regret) moved from Hobart and William Smith College to the new Eisenhower College. In the Spring of '70, he and I successfully contrived to get me a Philosophy position at Eisenhower. The contrivance consisted of my passing myself off as a Marxist.

Early during my stay at Eisenhower College, I become annoyed by the sophomoric moral relativism of various of my colleagues. Initially as a memo to them, I wrote up "How to Derive Ethical Egoism." I submitted it to The Personalist, which was then being edited by John Hospers. With its acceptance, I had my first published article! I recall being so excited that I could not hold steady the hot cup of coffee which I bought to calm myself down. The Personalist also published the key chapter of my dissertation, "Egoism and Rights"; and through these publications I meet my good friends and fellow travelers Tibor Machan, Douglas Rasmussen, Douglas DenUyl, Jeff Paul, Ellen Paul, and Fred Miller.

During the early seventies, I also spoke at a couple of Libertarian Scholars Conferences. At the first one, at Hunter College, I meet Murray Rothbard. Unfortunately, I was still in my new Ph.D. semi-omniscient phase. Upon being introduced, I said something like "Glad to meet you; I can refute the following six of your important contentions." This probably did not make too favorable an impression. A year or two later, I wrote an essay on foreign/defense policy for Reason magazine in which I argued for an almost completely isolationist defense policy. My conclusion depended in part on just war principles which allow one sometimes to strike defensively against an aggressor even if one’s defensive act will unintentionally kill innocent bystanders. Murray thought that this was equivalent to endorsing the spraying a crowd with a machine gun to stop a fleeing criminal. Perhaps the last time I met Murray was by far the most convivial. In the late 1970s Murray and James Buchanan both gave papers on anarchism at a meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy in Washington, DC. There was a jolly dinner afterwards during which Murray had a good laugh about his commentator being moved to tears – real tears – by the "heartlessness" of Murray’s "Society without the State." The anthology, Anarchism, edited by Chapman and Pennock, which grew out of that meeting, also contains my essay, "Nozick’s Anarchism."

During the 1973–74 academic year, I contrived to be fired by Eisenhower College. Better yet, I arranged to be a Visiting Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard for the 1974–75 academic year. That was the year right after Bob Nozick’s publication of Anarchy, State and Utopia. I commuted into Cambridge one day a week from Amherst (where my wife, Mary Sirridge, was teaching in the Philosophy department) and spent a couple of hours each of those days talking to Nozick about moral and political philosophy. (Bob and I also had some nice philosophical walks through Belmont, MA during a subsequent summer.) In Amherst, through our respective wives, I became friendly with the leftist, quasi-anarchist, quasi-Marxist, Kantian scholar, Robert Paul Woolf. I gave guest lectures on libertarianism in his political philosophy classes. One result was that, when I was back on the job market that year, I had strong letters of recommendation from the best known "right-wing" philosopher in the country and one of the best known "left-wing" philosophers.

During this period I had my first two articles accepted in Ethics and wrote my first of quite a number of essays for anthologies edited by Tibor Machan. I also reviewed Anarchy, State and Utopia for several libertarian publications and reviewed For A New Liberty for The American Political Science Review. I also wrote a review-article about David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom for Reason. Amazingly, until I read Friedman’s book, I had been unaware of the concept of public goods and of the special difficulties associated with their market production. It has since seemed to me that both the market anarchist and the minimal statist who abjures taxation face the same hard question, viz., whether effective rights-protecting institutions (whether they be competitive protection agencies or minimal states) can be financed non-coercively. This question overshadows the traditional debate between the market anarchist and the minimal statist in which both parties tend to ignore the special problems of securing voluntary funding for rights-protective services.

Also, during my year at Harvard, I read another book that has had a very considerable effect on my views, the recently published first volume of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty. I had already read most of Hayek’s Individualism and Economic Order, which I had found much more helpful than Mises’s Socialism. But what most impressed me about Law, Legislation, and Liberty was its very suggestive extension of the idea of spontaneous order not merely to social order in general but also to such intellectual orders as law and morality. Hayek has sensitized me to a type of hyper-rationalism which often appears among academic political philosophers. More importantly, Hayek’s emphasis on rules and the rationality of rule-governed conduct has reinforced my own anti-consequentialist orientation.

In August of '75, I headed down to the Big Easy, to take up a new position in the Philosophy Department at Tulane University. And I have taught at Tulane – in Philosophy and in Political Economy – ever since. Around the time of my arrival at Tulane I began my long and very rewarding relationship with the Liberty Fund. A very large proportion of what I have learned since the mid-70s, I have learned through my participation in and organization of Liberty Fund colloquia on topics in economics, history, law, philosophy, and political theory. I have edited two books for Liberty Press – Auberon Herbert’s The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and other Essays and Herbert Spencer’s The Man versus the State.

A good deal of my work over the past couple of decades has coalesced around two main themes. The first is (still) the grounding of rights theory in an individualistic conception of value. My more recent work in this area, which began with my "Moral Individualism: Agent-Relativity and Deontic Restraints" (in Social Philosophy and Policy, Autumn 1989), may have been reignited by my encounter with Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community by my walkabout buddy Loren Lomasky. The second theme is the grounding of property rights and the articulation and defense of a plausible Lockean proviso. My work in this area began with my "Self-Ownership and the Right of Property" (in The Monist, October 1990) and "The Self-Ownership Proviso: A New and Improved Lockean Proviso" (in Social Philosophy and Policy, Winter, 1995). My work on this second theme has in part been a response the left (i.e., Georgist) libertarianism of Hillel Steiner and to the Marxist criticisms of libertarianism offered by G.A. Cohen. It certainly has been the use of the language of "self-ownership" by Steiner (who affirms self-ownership) and G.A. Cohen (who rejects it) that has brought me back to the self-ownership terminology that was embraced by Rothbard. Quite a number of my essays on these and related themes have appeared in the journal of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University. The Center is the wonderful creation of Jeff Paul, Ellen Paul, and Fred Miller.

During most of the nineties, I had the rewarding experience of teaching at the summer seminars of the Institute for Humane Studies. And, in a partial and very qualified trip back to my roots, I have recently lectured regularly at The Objectivist Center’s summer seminars. Next year I hope to finish my longstanding, but always evolving, book project tentatively entitled: Moral Individualism: Value, Constraint, and Classical Liberalism.

January 16, 2003

Eric Mack [send him mail] is Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Member of the Murphy Institute of Political Economy at Tulane University.

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