In the United States, libertarianism is a political philosophy promoting individual liberty.Long, Roderick T. (1998). "Towards a Libertarian Theory of Class". Social Philosophy and Policy. 15 (2): 303–349 (online: "Part 1" , "Part 2" ).Becker, Lawrence C.; Becker, Charlotte B. (2001). Encyclopedia of Ethics: P–W. 3. Taylor & Francis. p. 1562 .Paul, Ellen F. (2007). Liberalism: Old and New. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 187 .Christiano, Thomas; John P. Christman (2009). Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy. "Individualism and Libertarian Rights". Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 121 .Bevir, Mark (2010). Encyclopedia of Political Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications; Cato Institute. p. 811. Libertarianism has been described as laissez-faire on economic issues while supporting civil liberties and personal freedom.Boaz, David; Kirby, David (October 18, 2006). The Libertarian Vote. Cato Institute. The movement is often associated with a foreign policy of non-interventionism.Olsen, Edward A. (2002). US National Defense for the Twenty-First Century: The Grand Exit Strategy. Taylor & Francis. p. 182 . . Broadly, there are four principal traditions within libertarianism, namely the libertarianism that developed in the mid-20th century out of the revival tradition of classical liberalism in the United States after "liberalism" associated with the New Deal; the libertarianism developed in the 1950s by anarcho-capitalist author Murray Rothbard, who based it on the anti-New Deal Old Right and 19th-century libertarianism and American individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner while rejecting the labor theory of value in favor of Austrian School economics and the subjective theory of value; the libertarianism developed in the 1970s by Robert Nozick and founded in American and European classical liberal traditions;Van der Vossen, Bas (January 28, 2019). "Libertarianism" . Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved August 23, 2020. and the libertarianism associated with the Libertarian Party, which was founded in 1971, including politicians such as David Nolan and Ron Paul.
The right-libertarianism associated with people such as Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick,Marshall, Peter (2008). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: Harper Perennial. p. 565. "The problem with the term 'libertarian' is that it is now also used by the Right. [...] In its moderate form, right libertarianism embraces laissez-faire liberals like Robert Nozick who call for a minimal State, and in its extreme form, anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and David Friedman who entirely repudiate the role of the State and look to the market as a means of ensuring social order". whose book Anarchy, State, and Utopia received significant attention in academia according to David Lewis Schaefer. Right-libertarianism is the dominant form of libertarianism in the United States, compared to that of left-libertarianism.Carlson, Jennifer D. (2012). "Libertarianism". In Miller, Wilburn R., ed. The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America. London: Sage Publications. p. 1006 . . The latter is associated with the left wing of the modern libertarian movementLong, Riderick T. "Anarchism". In Gaus, Gerald F.; D'Agostino, Fred, eds. (2012). The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy. p. 227. and more recently to the political positions associated with academic philosophers Hillel Steiner, Philippe Van Parijs and Peter Vallentyne that combine self-ownership with an egalitarian approach to natural resources;Kymlicka, Will (2005). "libertarianism, left-". In Honderich, Ted. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 516. . "'Left-libertarianism' is a new term for an old conception of justice, dating back to Grotius. It combines the libertarian assumption that each person possesses a natural right of self-ownership over his person with the egalitarian premise that natural resources should be shared equally. Right-wing libertarians argue that the right of self-ownership entails the right to appropriate unequal parts of the external world, such as unequal amounts of land. According to left-libertarians, however, the world's natural resources were initially unowned, or belonged equally to all, and it is illegitimate for anyone to claim exclusive private ownership of these resources to the detriment of others. Such private appropriation is legitimate only if everyone can appropriate an equal amount, or if those who appropriate more are taxed to compensate those who are thereby excluded from what was once common property. Historic proponents of this view include Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. Recent exponents include Philippe Van Parijs and Hillel Steiner." it is also related to anti-capitalist, free-market anarchist strands such as left-wing market anarchism,Chartier, Gary; Johnson, Charles W. (2011). Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. pp. 1–16. referred to as market-oriented left-libertarianism to distinguish itself from other forms of libertarianism.Sheldon Richman (February 3, 2011). "Libertarian Left: Free-market anti-capitalism, the unknown ideal". The American Conservative. . Retrieved November 18, 2019.
Libertarianism includes some anarchist tendencies, although they are not as widespread as in other countries. Although all libertarians oppose government intervention, there is a division between those anarchist or socialist libertarians as well as anarcho-capitalists such as Rothbard and David D. Friedman who adhere to the anti-state position, viewing the state as an unnecessary evil; minarchists such as Nozick who advocate a minimal state, often referred to as a night-watchman state; and classical liberals who support a minimized small governmentGoodman, John C. (December 20, 2005). "What Is Classical Liberalism?". National Center for Policy Analysis. Retrieved June 26, 2019. .Boaz, David (1998). Libertarianism: A Primer. Free Press. pp. 22–26. and a major reversal of the welfare state.
The major libertarian party in the United States is the Libertarian Party. However, libertarians are also represented within the Democratic and Republican parties, while others are independent. Gallup found that voters who identify as libertarians ranged from 17 to 23% of the American electorate.Gallup Poll news release, September 7–10, 2006. Yellow, a political color associated with liberalism worldwide, has also been used as a political color for modern libertarianism in the United States. The Gadsden flag and Pine Tree flag, symbols first used by American revolutionaries, are frequently used by libertarians and the libertarian-leaning Tea Party movement.
Although libertarian continues to be widely used to refer to anti-state socialists internationally,Bookchin, Murray (January 1986). "The Greening of Politics: Toward a New Kind of Political Practice" . Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project (1). "We have permitted cynical political reactionaries and the spokesmen of large corporations to pre-empt these basic libertarian American ideals. We have permitted them not only to become the specious voice of these ideals such that individualism has been used to justify egotism; the pursuit of happiness to justify greed, and even our emphasis on local and regional autonomy has been used to justify parochialism, insularism, and exclusivity – often against ethnic minorities and so-called deviant individuals. We have even permitted these reactionaries to stake out a claim to the word libertarian, a word, in fact, that was literally devised in the 1890s in France by Elisée Reclus as a substitute for the word anarchist, which the government had rendered an illegal expression for identifying one's views. The propertarians, in effect – acolytes of Ayn Rand, the earth mother of greed, egotism, and the virtues of property – have appropriated expressions and traditions that should have been expressed by radicals but were willfully neglected because of the lure of European and Asian traditions of socialism, socialisms that are now entering into decline in the very countries in which they originated". its meaning in the United States has deviated from its political origins to the extent that the common meaning of libertarian in the United States is different from elsewhere.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 Rothbard and 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".The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective (December 11, 2008). "150 years of Libertarian" . Anarchist Writers. The Anarchist Library. Retrieved January 31, 2020.The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective (May 17, 2017). "160 years of Libertarian" . Anarchist Writers. Anarchist FAQ. Retrieved January 31, 2020. In the United States, right-libertarianism has become the most common referent of libertarianismVallentyne, Peter (20 July 2010). "Libertarianism" . Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. Retrieved 26 December 2012. since the late 20th century. Libertarians have worked to implement their ideas through the Libertarian Party, the Free State Project, agorism, and other forms of activism.
Definition
Since the 19th century, the term libertarian has referred to advocates for freedom of the will, or anyone who generally advocated for liberty, but its long association with anarchism extends at least as far back as 1858, when it was used for the title of New York anarchist journal Le Libertaire. In the late 19th century (around the 1880s and 1890s), Anarchist Sébastien Faure used the term libertarian to differentiate between anarchists and authoritarian socialists. While the term libertarian has been largely synonymous with anarchism, its meaning has more recently diluted with wider adoption from ideologically disparate groups. As a term, libertarian can include both the New Left and libertarian Marxists (who do not associate with a vanguard party) as well as extreme liberals (primarily concerned with civil liberties). Additionally, some anarchists use the term libertarian socialist to avoid anarchism's negative connotations and emphasize its connections with socialism.Guérin, Daniel (1970). Anarchism: From Theory to Practice. New York City: Monthly Review Press. p. 12. "[A]narchism is really a synonym for socialism. The anarchist is primarily a socialist whose aim is to abolish the exploitation of man by man. Anarchism is only one of the streams of socialist thought, that stream whose main components are concern for liberty and haste to abolish the State." .