As Wendy McElroy, Fox News’ resident Libertarian pundit aptly summarized in a column for the Independent Institute, American political Libertarianism is based on Murray Rothbard’s synthesis of four schools of thought, the radical anti-statism of the individualist anarchists and wed it with Austrian economics, the foreign policy of the Old Right (isolationism) and the natural law tradition.
Let’s look at each one of these in turn and see what they have to say.
Individualist Anarchism
There is no better critical examination of the differences between individualist and mutualist schools of Anarchist thought than Murray Bookchin’s Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism – An Unbridgeable Chasm.
Austrian Economics
See Victor Aguilar’s Critique of Austrian Economics.
Isolationist Foreign Policy
When speaking of foreign policy, Isolationism goes well beyond military non-interventionism to couple it with a protectionist economic policy. It is therefore doubtful that any Libertarian would truly espouse an Isolationist foreign policy. The reality of a Libertarian Isolationism is much more along the lines of nonparticipation in foreign political relations, but free trade and affability to all, as in Jefferson’s First Inaugural of 1801: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”
Natural Law Theory (lex naturalis)
It is worth noting that when Libertarians like McElroy and Rothbard speak of “natural law” they speak only of lex naturalis, the legal theory of natural law, not of the ethical theory of natural law. To understand why that is important, let’s look at the difference between the two.
Ethical natural law theory states (broadly) that the moral standards that govern human behavior are, in some sense, objectively derived from the nature of human beings. Legal natural law theory, on the other hand states (also broadly) that the authority of at least some legal standards necessarily derives, at least in part, from considerations having to do with the moral merit of those standards.