Tag Archives: locke

Edward Feser On The Necessity Of Burke To Libertarians

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Edward Feser:

“It is the Burkean tradition – conservative, religious, celebrating deference and restraint and contemptuous of the “dust and powder of individuality” – to which Hayek points as providing both the true philosophical foundations of market society and the only hope of its renewal. Burke, along with Locke and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, represented in Hayek’s mind a “true individualism” which emphasizes ordered liberty and what the Catholic tradition would call subsidiarity, and has no truck with the radically autonomous self of contemporary egalitarian liberalism and popular libertarianism.”

I am not sure that I fully subscribe to this, but it would be an interesting project to explore strains in Burke’s thought compatible with libertarianism, understood as minarchist or anarcho-capitalist (a position that as it stands today I think an impossibility).

Roderick Long On Equality Before The Law

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Roderick Long on what sort of equality libertarianism entails:

“But if neither legal equality nor equality of liberty is sufficient for a free society as we understand it, in what sense can it be from our equal creation that we derive our right to liberty?

For the answer to this question we must turn from Jefferson to Jefferson’s source, John Locke, who tells us exactly what “equality” in the libertarian sense is: namely, a conditionwherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection….[3] Continue reading →