From: thomasc@athena.mit.edu (Thomas Wallace Colthurst)
Subject: Re: The word "Libertarian" was invented by Spanish Anarchists
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1992 02:19:05 GMT

I would first like to thank Dan for providing an entomology of the political
use of the word libertarian; I had often wondered from whence it arose.  Does
anyone out there have any information as to how it was appropriated from the
Spanish anarchists?

Second, I would like to make some comments on the relationship between
libertarians and anarchists.  Libertarians and anarchists are both united in
thinking that today's government is too big, but there tends to be a far
bit of anomosity between the two groups.  Anarchists, for instance, have
a tendancy to describe libertarians as (in the beautiful words of Don &)
"really just timid and truncated Anarchists," while libertarians follow
the conventional categorization of anarchists as crazy fanatics who will
drag us back down to a mob-ruled, lawless, state of nature.

This division is somewhat analogous to the situation between liberals
and leftists.  Leftists describe liberals as just timid and truncated
leftists, and liberals call leftists crazy fanatics, etc.  Also, just as
many liberal ideas originally started out as socialist or leftist ideas,
much of libertarian ideology is derived from anarchist thought.  An
example of this the libertarian reliance on many of the ideas coming from
the anarcho-capitalists (a school of anarchists which Don & seems to have
neglected).  The anarcho-capitalists, for instance, were among to first
to fully appreciate the spontaneous order created by the capitalist marketplace
without government intervention.

Since this is after all alt.politics.libertarian, I will leave it to others
to convince themselves that there truely is a difference between anarchists
and libertarians, and will instead direct my energies towards convincing
the libertarians that anarchists aren't crazy fanatics.  You would think
that this wouldn't be so hard, as many of the arguments used by the
libertarians against the anarchists are merely rehashed versions of 
standard arguments against the libertarians.  For instance, how many
times have we all heard that in libertaria/anarchy, the rich and powerful
would be able to dominate everyone completely?  That everything would be
in complete chaos without the government there to provide order?  That
anyone who would propose such a thing must be completely immoral?

Let me dispell these myths, for Chris Adamson and others, once and for all.
Yes, anarchy is lawless, by definition.  IT DOES NOT FOLLOW that it will
be mob-ruled, nor that anarchists don't believe in rights, or believe that
"might makes right."  To say that society doesn't guarantee your rights
in anarchy misses the point.  Society doesn't guarantee your rights right
now -- the government does, and doesn't do a very good job of it, in
some people's estimation.  There are many examples of moderately sucessful
anarchies in real life -- look in an advanced anthropology text under
"acephalous societies."

I should probably add that my sympathies lie somewhere between libertarianism
and anarchism, though closer to libertarianism.  The way I reconcile the two
is through a "local libertarianism":  there is a lot of good evidence and
experience that government is too big right now, so let's reduce it.  If
it is still too big, or shows signs of reverting, we can try anarchism.
Locality arguments are familiar to libertarianism in the economic realm
 -- we frequently argue that it is better for individuals,
rather than large global entities like governments, to make economic
decisions for said individuals since they have the best (local) information
about their situation and they are the ones most (locally) affected by
the decision -- and in the moral realm -- we argue that the proper basis
for a society-wide morality is one based on (local) rights rather than
say global utilitarian considerations.  Mine is a locality argument in the
epistemological realm:  our experience with the problems of government
largesse are with today's (temporally local) government, so let us react
with an appropriate local change into a smaller government and go on from
there.  A more radical version of this argument would maintain that our
very ideas about government (our political ideologies) are also shaped by
our temporally local experience with governments, and so should only be
trusted in a similarly local realm of action.

-Thomas C,
Libertarian Theorist In Training