By David J. Allen

In the following brief essay, I want to highlight a tension in the doctrine of (political) libertarianism.

I define libertarianism as the view that the state should be ‘minimal’; i.e., the state should minimise its involvement in the private affairs of its citizens as much as possible. As stated, this is a very vague position, for how much is ‘as much as possible’? J. S. Mill’s liberal principle may help in clarifying the minimal state: the state should interfere only in preventing its citizens from harming one another or otherwise hindering each other’s projects. The state should not actively assist, but only prevent harm. This too is vague, but the gist is hopefully clear enough for our purposes.

The justification of the minimal state is the priority of freedom. In order for people to be free, according to the libertarian, they must be unhindered by the state. However, the state is necessary insofar as some institution is needed to facilitate lawful, non-harmful interaction. Nobody wants a Hobbesian state of all against all, and so the state facilitates peace, whilst permitting freedom through removing itself from the private sphere in all but this peacekeeping capacity.

The tension I want to elucidate is that between this drive for freedom and the externality of the state from private life. I will argue that this model of the state as necessary but Other leads to alienation from the rules that govern one’s behaviour, and that we cannot be free if we are alienated from the state. As such, libertarianism cannot be justified by an appeal to freedom, as a libertarian state in fact creates an alienated citizenry who are constrained, not freed, by their social environment.

I premise these considerations on the following principle:

F A person’s degree of freedom is dependent not only on the autonomy of their choices within certain boundaries, but on the degree to which those boundaries themselves are an expression of their autonomy.

What this amounts to is the claim that the rules by which a state is governed must be an expression of the will of the citizenry in order for them to be free.

The justification of this principle lies in considerations of alienation. A person is alienated from their social environment if they are unable to identify with it. This may be a feeling of distance from the governing principles of the state (subjective alienation) or it might be the case that the state is set up so that the rules within which citizens make choices are not consistent with their needs, not an expression of their autonomous will (objective alienation). So long as a person is alienated in either of these respects they cannot feel or be free respectively.

Obviously, these scenarios call for different responses. An objectively alienating state must be restructured if its citizens are to genuinely be free, in the sense laid out in F. If the citizenry are subjectively alienated, then what is needed is for them to be shown that they are in fact in control of the rules that govern their lives, that the state is an expression of their autonomy.

Now, the libertarian state aims to uphold freedom. This is its fundamental purpose. However, the libertarian state, I claim, leads to both subjective and objective alienation, and so cannot be an expression of the full-fledged freedom expressed in F. For the libertarian, as has already been mentioned, freedom is the freedom to make uninhibited choices insofar as these choices don’t hurt of hinder others. To facilitate this, the state and private life are to be kept as separate as possible. However, this leads to the state being, and being experienced as, an Other. Thus, the rules that govern social, political and economic interaction are, and are seen as, alien also. (We can see at least the subjective mode of this phenomenon manifested today in the increasing prevalence of ‘Grumpy Old Men’/Daily Mail culture in Britain.)

It is as a result of this enforced gap between the state and its citizens that the libertarian state cannot facilitate freedom as defined in F. As such, I claim, the libertarian state does not allow for genuine freedom, but only a freedom to choose within a set of limits which are, and are felt to be, alienating. We are free only to roam this cage.

Of course, the libertarian is free to reject F as a realistic or even a desirable model of freedom. However, it seems clear to me that the citizenry whose projects are facilitated by the state and who reciprocally feel the state to be an expression of their needs will be less alienated from the state and thus be freer within the state. The boundaries of their possibilities are within their own control, not an external force to be weathered and endured.

These are only some initial thoughts on this subject, but it seems to me that alienation and freedom are intimately related in such a way that the less alienated a person is from their social environment and state, from other citizens and from the rules that structure social, political and economic interaction, the glue of the body politic, the more freedom they possess. Thus, the libertarian state, which necessarily creates and maintains an alienating gap between the state and its citizens, cannot be a place of real, unalienated freedom. And since freedom is the ultimate goal of the libertarian, this conclusion serves to undermine the doctrine at its core. If we really care about freedom, we should ask ourselves if the alienated conditions of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism, the concrete instantiation of the libertarian ideology, are sufficient to be its true expression. I suspect that the answer is No.