In my head libertarians are the right and anarchists are the left but they are similar in ideals (little to no government intervention). At least in the sense that if you talk to a libertarian I feel they tend to sound socially right and an anarchist tends to sound socially left. I have no idea if this makes sense at all. If you’re going to tell me to read more, sure, recommend some literature though.
Note: Yes, this post is technically against the rules. But it’s generalized enough that it sparks an interesting discussion removed from contemporary politics, so I personally don’t mind. I’ll defer to any other mods if they want to remove it.
Stay classy
Sorry I didn’t think about the fact libertarian is a US politics thing or the whole left/right thing. In no way do I want this to be a discussion about US politics or political arguments. You’ll see in my post history I frequently ask questions like this.
the one driving factor behind libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, or the NAP. the idea is that the only justified use of violence or force is to respond to someone else’s violence or force. in simpler terms, “do no harm, take no shit.” the problem is how you define “harm” and “shit” which is how you end up with right libertarians and left libertarians who each see the other’s “taking no shit” as the initial “doing harm”
if John Nestlé (name chosen for no particular reason) comes to town and takes all the water in the lake, bottles it up, and sells it, and then people start dying of thirst and fight to get their water back, who is doing harm and who is taking no shit? left libertarians say that the townsfolk are well within their rights to get their water back, but right libertarians would say John Nestlé’s business is well within it’s right to defend itself from them. both of those viewpoints come from the non-aggression principle, just going in with wildly different postulates. right now in america the capital-L Libertarian party is mostly right libertarians, so the term has come to be synonymous with them here
if you consider hierarchies to be a form of violence and believe that the only justifiable use of hierarchy is to destroy hierachy, then you are an anarchist and a libertarian. but with the conmotation the word has come to take on, they would certainly avoid calling themselves that
“Little to no government intervention” is the one thing all the self-described libertarians I’ve met seem to agree on.
“No oppressive power structures” is the thing that the anarchists agree on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#Definitions
Although libertarianism originated as a form of anarchist or left-wing politics,[27] since the development in the mid-20th century of modern libertarianism in the United States caused it to be commonly associated with right-wing politics, several authors and political scientists have used two or more categorizations[9][10][28] to distinguish libertarian views on the nature of property and capital, usually along left–right or socialist–capitalist lines.[11]
Relevant diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#/media/File:Libertarianism-groups-diagram.svg
TLDR: Classic libertarians think the government should have limited power so they can’t hurt people. American libertarians think the government should have limited power so they can’t help people.
“Classic” libertarians were anarchists, communists, and socialists and the term was co-opted and its meaning shifted by capitalists and liberals. That’s my TL;DR.
No, classical liberalism originates with Locke and Mill. Niether of whom were anarchist, socialist, or communist. Those ideas came 150 years after Locke. Mill was the contemporary of the early anarchists, communists and socialists who all originated in the mid 19th century.
From the Wikipedia page:
In the late 20th century, many Americans with classical liberal beliefs began to describe themselves as libertarians.
I was alluding to that, but I appreciate the added clarity.
More clarity: modern libertarian was revived in the 1970s and blew up in the 1980s and it took most of it’s core thought from classic liberalism, but considered itself a more ‘pure’ form because it takes a more extreme take on the premises of classical liberalism.
Basically libertarians came from people who thought classical liberalism wasn’t extreme, or ‘pure’ enough to be a proper ideal theory from which to create an ideal society. They key figure in this is Robert Nozick and book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974, which he wrote as a response to John Rawl’s 1971 A theory of Justice. Both are considered founding texts for modern political philosophy and political science. Rawl’s work is more in line with classical liberalism, but has socialist leanings, which pissed off people like Nozick, because libertarians thing socialism is bad. Rawl’s book was massively influential, far more so that Nozick’s work was.
