To many liberals, the notion of individualism stands in opposition to nationalism, and in favor of globalism. As the New York Times expresses it, individualism “promotes a more universalist outlook. In focusing on individual rights and welfare, it reduces the emphasis on groups – and the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that notoriously erode generosity toward those outside one’s own circle.”
According to NYT, individualism in that sense means looking beyond the confines of one’s own group. The argument is that, by prioritizing individual concerns and not the concerns of the community or country, individualism paradoxically encourages a wider appreciation of our common humanity:
Individualism, as defined by behavioral scientists, means valuing autonomy, self-expression and the pursuit of personal goals rather than prioritizing the interests of the group – be it family, community or country.
The point being made by NYT is that individualism often encourages traits that might seem surprising—while many might associate individualism with selfishness, to liberals it is more about altruism and generosity toward others. In that sense liberals use the term “individualism” to advance a view diametrically opposed, for example, to the views promoted by objectivists.
Individualism certainly means different things to different people, a point which Friedrich von Hayek highlighted in distinguishing between true and false individualism. He observed that individualism “has been used to describe several attitudes toward society which have as little in common among themselves as they have with those traditionally regarded as their opposites.”
It is important to bear this in mind when considering whether a political view is compatible with individualism. Much depends on what is meant by individualism in the first place. For example, if one adopts the NYT view of individualism, then a defense of nationalism would seem to be incompatible with individualism.
How does Murray Rothbard conceptualize individualism? Given the views he expressed in “nations by consent,” it is clear that he does not follow the NYT view of individualism.
In The Ethics of Liberty he defended the natural law individualist tradition which is based on self-ownership and property rights. His notion of self-ownership is explicitly aligned with John Locke’s view that “every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself.”
Individualism in the natural law tradition builds on the idea that natural rights “stem from the nature of man and of the world around him.” Rothbard explained:
It was, in contrast [to earlier statists], the Levellers and particularly John Locke in seventeenth century England who transformed classical natural law into a theory grounded on methodological and hence political individualism. From the Lockean emphasis on the individual as the unit of action, as the entity who thinks, feels, chooses, and acts, stemmed his conception of natural law in politics as establishing the natural rights of each individual. It was the Lockean individualist tradition that profoundly influenced the later American revolutionaries and the dominant tradition of libertarian political thought in the revolutionary new nation. It is this tradition of natural-rights libertarianism upon which the present volume attempts to build.
This moral foundation of natural rights is indispensable to Rothbard’s political and philosophical analysis. He rejects the notion that policy discussions can be “value free,” conducted without any universal moral foundation. Therefore, natural-rights libertarianism is not merely incidental to Rothbard’s political views, nor is it merely an expression of his personal opinions. His political philosophy is explicitly based on a statement of objectively and universally true principles—principles that form the moral foundation of his defense of individual liberty.
That this moral foundation is universal rather than personal is important. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains in his introduction to the Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard’s political philosophy is distinct from matters of personal ethics or personal morality. While personal morality is subjective, libertarianism as a “moral science” is based on universal principles:
Rothbard’s unique contribution is the rediscovery of property and property rights as the common foundation of both economics and political philosophy, and the systematic reconstruction and conceptual integration of modern, marginalist economics and natural-law political philosophy into a unified moral science: libertarianism.
As Hoppe explains, Rothbard’s political philosophy is, like his economic principles, “equally grounded in the acting nature of man” and forms part of a “unified system of rationalist social philosophy.” It forms part of his “system of social and political philosophy based on economics and ethics as its cornerstones.” These principles are not merely a statement of his opinions as to what people should or should not do.
Therefore, to understand the Rothbardian system, a distinction must be drawn between a statement concerning the right to do something—which vests properly in each individual—and “moral or immoral ways of exercising that right,” that is, one’s personal views of whether or how he ought to exercise that right in the specific circumstances. For example, the right to secede is distinct from whether it is prudent to mount an attempt to secede, and a legal or philosophical defense of the right to secede is analytically distinct from a campaign that people in a particular country ought to secede.
Rothbard regards it as axiomatic that human beings have consciousness and free will, in the exercise of which they make choices: “men are free to adopt ideas and to act upon them.” This necessarily means that all human action is individual, as “only an individual can adopt values or make choices; only an individual can act.”
It is, of course, for each man to make his own choices and decide what he ought to do in any situation. Free will means that individuals are not driven into action deterministically, carried along like automatons by social systems, economic structures, or inevitable forces of history. This is why Rothbard rejects scientism—scientism is incompatible with his view of self-ownership and free will. Scientism rejects individualism and sees factors such as the group, or the forces of history, as the determinant of human events:
The key to scientism is its denial of the existence of individual consciousness and will. This takes two main forms: applying mechanical analogies from the physical sciences to individual men, and applying organismic analogies to such fictional collective wholes as “society.” The latter course attributed consciousness and will, not to individuals, but to some collective organic whole of which the individual is merely a determined cell. Both methods are aspects of the rejection of individual consciousness.
Rothbard’s emphasis on voluntary association in social groups should be understood in that light. It is only by defending self-ownership, property rights, free will, and individual choice, that liberty can be advanced. Nations are defensible and just only when they are formed by consent, and it is only individuals who can give that consent. Consent is not just something that is nice to have but is essential to justice. In “The Nationalities Question,” Rothbard explains the importance of voluntary choice in understanding this concept of the nation:
While the State is a pernicious and coercive collectivist concept, the “nation” may be and generally is voluntary. The nation properly refers, not to the State, but to the entire web of culture, values, traditions, religion, and language in which the individuals of a society are raised. It is almost embarrassingly banal to emphasize that point, but apparently many libertarians aggressively overlook the obvious. Let us never forget the great libertarian Randolph Bourne’s analysis of the crucial distinction between “the nation” (the land, the culture, the terrain, the people) and “the State” (the coercive apparatus of bureaucrats and politicians), and of his important conclusion that one may be a true patriot of one’s nation or country while—and even for that very reason—opposing the state that rules over it.
