From Roderick’s blog, here’s part of his bang-on recent article on the reasons why a thick conception of libertarianism — or just a realistic assessment of the human predicament — recommends a left-libertarian strategy of connecting radical libertarianism with a thoroughgoing form of psychological, institutional, and cultural anti-authoritarianism (as a general thing, and also when it comes to specific forms and markers of privilege and subordination, like bossism, patriarchy, heterosexism, white supremacy, et al.):
But there’s a further left-libertarian moral, because it’s not merely coercive authority that is shown to be problematic by the Stanford and Milgram experiments. The jailors in the Stanford experiment had no power to force their prisoners to stay; and the authorities in the Milgram experiment had no tool of compulsion more imposing than a lab coat. Neither had the backing of any legal sanctions. Nor did they have so much as the power to fire anyone from a job. Yet such authority as existed was still abused, and still obeyed.
The moral is clear: even absent coercive enforcement, there is a tendency for people both to abuse authority when they have it, and to acquiesce, indeed become complicit, in its abuse by others. Hence the assumption, common among some right-libertarians, that authority and hierarchy are fine and dandy so long as they don’t involve literal forcible compulsion, seems dubious.
. . .
If people have a harmful tendency that manifests itself in certain circumstances, then the appropriate response is obviously to try to a) reduce the strength of the tendency, and b) reduce the frequency of the triggering circumstances.
The tendency to abuse and/or obey authority may be too ingrained in human nature (or, more accurately: in the human situation) to be completely eliminated, but cultural factors can certainly reduce or exacerbate it. In our own culture, despite lip service (and, admittedly, often more than lip service) to anti-authoritarian values, the legitimacy of authority is constantly reinforced via everything from political propaganda and tv cop shows to the structure of school and workplace. This is one reason that left-libertarians often stress the need to promote anti-authoritarian moral attitudes that go beyond mere opposition to rights-violations. . . . The other prong of the left-libertarian response is to decrease the frequency of those situations in which tendencies to abuse and/or obey authority is manifested, by working to reduce the prevalence of authority. Even if the elimination of all noncoercive hierarchy is not possible (and perhaps not even desirable), we could certainly do with quite a bit less of it. This is one reason that left-libertarians care, to right-libertarians’ bafflement, about combating such things as the hierarchical structure of the workplace.
— Roderick Long, Austro-Athenian Empire (2009-04-26): Why We Fight (the Power)
Read the whole thing.
As I’ve wrote in Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin (drawing on a similar discussion in Liberty, Equality, Solidarity):
Consider the conceptual reasons that libertarians have to oppose
authoritarianism, not only as enforced by governments but also as
expressed in culture, business, the family, and civil society. Social systems of
status and authority include not only exercises of coercive power by the
government, but also a knot of ideas, practices, and institutions based on
deference to traditionally constituted authority. In politics, these patterns of
deference show up most clearly in the honorary titles, submissive etiquette, and
unquestioning obedience traditionally expected by, and willingly extended to,
heads of state, judges, police, and other visible representatives of government
law and order.
Although these rituals and habits of obedience exist
against the backdrop of statist coercion and intimidation, they are also often
practiced voluntarily. Similar kinds of deference are often demanded from
workers by bosses, or from children by parents or teachers. Submission to
traditionally constituted authorities is reinforced not only through violence
and threats, but also through art, humor, sermons, written history, journalism,
childrearing, and so on. Although political coercion is the most distinctive
expression of political inequality, you could—in principle—have a
consistent authoritarian social order without any use of force. Even in a
completely free society, everyone could, in principle, still voluntarily agree
to bow and scrape and speak only when spoken to in the presence of the (mutually
agreed-upon) town Chief, or unthinkingly agree to obey whatever restrictions and
regulations he tells them to follow over their own business or personal lives,
or agree to give him as much in voluntary taxes
on their income or
property as he might ask. So long as the expectation of submission and the
demands for wealth to be rendered were backed up only by means of verbal
harangues, cultural glorifications of the wise and virtuous authorities, social
ostracism of unruly
dissenters, and so on, these demands would violate
no-one’s individual rights to liberty or property. But while there’s nothing
logically inconsistent about a libertarian envisioning—or even championing—this
sort of social order, it would certainly be weird. Yes, in a free
society the meek could voluntarily agree to bow and scrape, and the proud could
angrily but nonviolently demand obsequious forms of address and immediate
obedience to their commands. But why should they? Non-coercive
authoritarianism may be consistent with libertarian principles, but it
is hard to reasonably reconcile the two; whatever reasons you may have
for rejecting the arrogant claims of power-hungry politicians and
bureaucrats—say, for example, the Jeffersonian notion that all men and women are
born equal in political authority, and that no-one has a natural right to rule
or dominate other people’s affairs—probably serve just as well for reasons to
reject other kinds of authoritarian pretension, even if they are not expressed
by means of coercive government action. While no-one should be forced
as a matter of policy to treat her fellows with the respect due to equals, or to
cultivate independent thinking and contempt for the arrogance of power,
libertarians certainly can—and should—criticize those who do not, and
exhort our fellows not to rely on authoritarian social institutions,
for much the same reasons that we have to endorse libertarianism in the first
place.
In the article, I discuss anti-authoritarianism in light of grounds thickness; but of course there are many other connections involved, and Roderick does an excellent job of drawing out the reasons of consequence thickness and strategic thickness for joining libertarianism to a broad struggle not only against Aggression, but against Authority in all its forms.
In a comment over at Roderick’s place,