Libertarianism From the Ground Up

ARGUMENTS FOR LIBERTARIANISM typically take two forms. Some libertarians base their creed on natural rights-the idea that each individual has an inborn right to self-ownership, or freedom from aggression, or whatever-and proceed to argue that only a libertarian political regime is compatible with those rights.

- MATT ZWOLINSKI

Others take a consequentialist approach, claiming libertarianism is the best system because it produces the best results, defined according to some philosophical conception of the good.

Libertarians have been making these arguments for the last 170 years or so, and by this point the weak spots are fairly well known. As a result, the arguments on both sides have the character of the opening moves in a chess game: It's all by the book.

Once in a while, however, an argument opens a genuinely different path. John Hasnas, a legal scholar at Georgetown University, has been clearing such a path for a while now, and the chapters in his new book, Common Law Liberalism, have all been previously published elsewhere. But brought together in one volume, these essays set forth an intriguing, novel, and highly promising approach to thinking about a free society.

The book's core idea, to put a sophisticated argument rather crudely, is that the philosophers have screwed us all up.

Philosophers, Hasnas argues, tend to put far too much stock in the construction of logically consistent systems of thought, proceeding from premise to conclusion in a neat, orderly sequence. Logic sets the standard, and if the world fails to live up to that standard, well, that's the world's problem, not ours.

For Hasnas, by contrast, thinking about politics begins not with a moral theory but with the actual conflicts people face when they go about the difficult business of living in a community together. Justice is not something first discerned by philosophical reason and then applied (by lesser minds) to settle particular disputes. Justice develops out of those disputes as an emergent phenomenon, often in ways that are neither foreseen nor intended by the people directly involved.