(Update on Aug. 5)
The terms “Left” and “Right” first arose during the French Revolution. At the time they had very distinct meanings as to political loyalties. Since then the terms have remained but their meanings have become progressively more blurred.
In a post to a libertarian blog where I often serve as a kind of trouble maker I posted what seemed to me to be the core difference that continues to give these terms some coherence. As I think about it, what I wrote had relevance beyond the debate to which it initially contributed. And so I repeat it here with small modifications for a more general audience.
Slavery and Freedom
Years ago I attended an Institute for Humane Studies meeting where some younger libertarians (my own age at the time) strongly endorsed the right of a person to sell him or herself into slavery. Since then I have heard libertarians make similar defenses of “voluntary” slavery two more times.
I have never heard anyone else defend slavery of any sort except for a drunk Arkansas Republican relative.
The people at the Institute for Humane Studies gathering were rebuked by one of the speakers (I think it was Israel Kirzner but I am not sure) who said that property law did not allow for such things. They seemed to take this as reason enough to abandon their views.
I was bothered deeply at the time for two seemingly opposed reasons. First, that any so called lover of liberty could imagine such a thing. Second, that they would so quickly abandon their views when a figure in authority said they were wrong without really going into why they were wrong.
Bosses and Freedom
Sometime later a noted libertarian leader visited Berkeley, where I was a grad student. With him, I met some libertarian undergraduates. Somehow the conversation got round to how much authority bosses exercised over their employees, and one very sharp guy whose name I forget said that was irrelevant. There was by definition no problem with workplace authority so long as it was based on formal agreement.
This logic was similar but not as explicitly as extreme as the slavery argument above. So long as formal agreement was achieved, the context of the agreement was irrelevant, as were relations of concrete power between the parties.
It seems to me these two incidents might suggest a difference between ‘left’ and ‘right’ political orientations, both within groups such as libertarians, and more broadly across the political spectrum. While today ‘left’ and ‘right’ are overused and multidimensional terms they still point at a very real difference.
Hierarchy
I suggest the difference lies in different levels of comfort with hierarchy. Every libertarian (or liberal of any sort) will accept some degree of hierarchy as necessary. But how much?
Conservatives and conservative liberals have usually supported traditional hierarchies, and I suggest right-oriented libertarians are more comfortable with them than with those who distrust hierarchies or require them to justify themselves. For example, the young libertarians I described above not only were untroubled by extreme inequalities in power (so long as somehow they could find a principle of ‘consent’ underlying them) they also meekly accepted higher authority when told that ‘voluntary’ slavery was wrong, without ever asking why it was wrong. I was appalled both because such extremes seemed to me without merit and because to simply accept authority on such a basic issue without wondering why seemed slavish.
Leftists have traditionally opposed, or at least strongly distrusted, hierarchies in principle. Their roots lay in opposing French aristocratic privileges, and those roots have survived. More left-libertarians (as I was evolving into at that time from a more “rightist” position) will find themselves more comfortable with the left in this regard. Hierarchy is OK, but only if it reflects more than merely formal agreement. Since so much hierarchy does not rest on any such virtue, it is suspect.
Equality
At the same time, every genuine liberal accepts some kind of equality of status as fundamental to their views. In fact, liberalism can be pretty accurately defined as the view that all normal individuals should enjoy equal political and legal status in society. Some go farther. But if you do not agree with this minimum, you are not a liberal.
Liberalism as a political philosophy recognizes both equality of status among human beings and inequality in talents, desert, and luck. Because liberals recognize both they must always cope with how the two interact. In these interactions, hierarchies inevitably arise.
The most basic hierarchy, the one natural to us all, is the family. Children must be in some important sense subordinate to their parents. In addition, they want to be. In his Second Treatise on Government John Locke, for one, gave a careful discussion of children’s rights within the family because from a liberal perspective, children are not possessions or tools of their parents. Liberalism always justifies hierarchy to the extent that it does, on principles of equality.
The justifications for hierarchy by the illiberal right usually build on an analogy with the family. Those lower in status are in some sense analogous to children, with one difference: often they never grow up. The classic statement is by Aristotle, who could apply the principle of equality only to some adult Greek men – though the reasons he gave for their equality could be expanded to encompass women and non-Greeks. This is why Aristotle can be interpreted (for people anyway) in more egalitarian ways. Aristotle’s successors usually did not give such principles, and so became defenders of domination for its own sake based on a flawed family analogy.
To the degree the individual matters, the natural hierarchy of the biological family is colored by two factors usually absent in other hierarchies: it is temporary, lasting to adulthood, and it is tempered by love and obligation. The parents’ hierarchical authority is justified by the services they render their children.
Left, Right and Hierarchy
Hierarchies are not only sometimes justified, they are sometimes abused. Left liberals are more concerned with the least well off, the least equal. At their extreme they are prone to resentment and seeing anyone not equal to another as a kind of victim.
Right liberals tend to be more concerned with honoring the successful, often with little concern for how they got there. At their most extreme they become defenders of some kind of “superman” view and all who are less fortunate are personally to blame.
Anti-liberal rightists such as fascists endorsed hierarchies as justifying the rule of some over others – indefinitely. That some rule and some obey is the normal course of things. Sometimes the ruling hierarchy is the nation (Mussolini), sometimes race (Nazis, Southern segregationists) and sometimes class (Bush). When anti-liberal leftists have supported hierarchies as they frequently have (i.e. Communist Party rule for Marxists) it has been in the name of ultimately abolishing hierarchies. But of course that never happens. Rule “by scientific experts” appeals to both right and left because it can be justified in egalitarian terms: the rules for becoming an expert are the same for all and entry is open to all.
As a “left-Hayekian” it is difficult for me to imagine how a perceptive and humane person who loved liberty could sincerely hold such views as I described above. For right libertarians these same views would to them be the logical extension of the principle of liberty.
UPDATE – Aug. 5:
I have added a small discussion of the family and hierarchy and cleaned up typos.