Those living in Generation Z are tired of the welfare-warfare state that has dominated political life in America from well before they were born and shows no signs of going away. They would like something new, and you will not be surprised to learn that in my opinion libertarianism is just what they are looking for. Reinterpreting Libertarianism will be an essential guide for young people, particularly those who think of themselves as being on the right rather than the left, who are willing to give the essays in the book the attention that they require. Unfortunately, many of these young people confuse the welfare-warfare state with the free market, and as a result they have been beguiled by anticapitalist views that in some instances fall little short of fascism.
The contributors to this volume are young professors and postdoctoral researchers who remember the horrors of Soviet communism, which after all bears many similarities to fascism, are fully inoculated against anticapitalism. And there is yet more good news. Polish libertarians have gone far beyond needing to learn about libertarianism from others, and they are now major contributors to libertarian thought.
It is heartening to know that the brand of libertarianism they profess is Rothbardianism. As Łukasz Dominiak (who is the most senior academic among them and, it is fair to say, is their guiding spirit), Stanisław Wójtowicz, and Igor Wysocki tell us in the introduction, “Polish libertarian scholarship focuses on what can be called the most radical version of right-libertarianism, which finds its original expression in the works of Murray Rothbard, Walter Block, Hans-Hermann Hoppe . . . and many others. . . . Thus, the fourth wave of Polish libertarian scholarship critically builds on these foundations and develops the Rothbardian theory in new dimensions, both in depth and in breadth.” Often, these new modifications call for substantial revisions to Rothbard’s own positions.
Reinterpreting Libertarianism: New Directions in Libertarian Studies
Edited by Łukasz Dominiak, Igor Wysocki, Stanisław Wójtowicz, and Dawid Megger
Routledge, 2026; x + 245 pp.
The book consists of 13 essays, which cover the libertarian theory of justice, the relation of libertarianism to Thomism, libertarian slavery, and evolutionary game theory, among many other topics. All of the essays are excellent and display analytic talent and wide research. I cannot comment on all of them individually and will just concentrate on a few points of interest.
Igor Wysocki finds Rothbard’s defense of the free market deficient, and it is especially important that we carefully look at his argument, as if he is correct in his criticism, it would be devastating to Rothbard’s entire system. Wysocki has “reconstructed the Rothbardian reasoning in the following syllogistic form: (1) All voluntary exchanges are beneficial, or at the very least, the parties thereto, expect to benefit. (2) All market exchanges are voluntary exchanges. (3) All market exchanges are beneficial, or at the very least, the parties thereto, expect to benefit.”
I must confess that the syllogism strikes me as sound and obviously true. Suppose that I exchange my apple for your orange. I would not have done so had I not preferred an orange to an apple, and you likewise would not have done so had you not preferred an apple to an orange.
It is a commonplace of Austrian economics that every voluntary exchange involves a double inequality, and if Wysocki is right that the syllogism is fallacious, he has made a contribution of revolutionary importance.
What has he to say against it? Just this: “(3), the conclusion of the argument, is propositionally identical with the premise (1). And nothing can be a reason for itself. That is, we are not given any independent reason to believe (3), for (2) is just a definition” (emphasis in original).
Wysocki, as it seems to me, is manifestly in error. The first and third premises are not identical. The first premise is a statement that is self-evidently true. A voluntary exchange is an exchange that you aren’t forced to make; and if you aren’t forced to make the exchange, or threatened with force if you don’t make the exchange, why else would you make it? There are of course a great many complexities in the notion of coercion, and there is an unsurpassed essay by Robert Nozick, “Coercion” (conveniently available in his Socratic Puzzles [Harvard University Press, 1999]) on this topic, but the notion of force is much more readily graspable.
Neither is the second premise a “definition,” if by that is meant a stipulation (i.e., laying down how a term will be used), but, once again, an obviously true statement. A market exchange just is, to reiterate, one you aren’t forced to make. This is no more a “definition,” in the sense Wysocki has in mind, than it is a “definition” to say that analytic philosophers are interested in the close examination of arguments.
To turn to another topic, as everybody knows, Rothbard founded libertarianism on selfownership. But if I own something, then prima facie I can sell it. If that is so, why can’t I sell myself into slavery? Isn’t Rothbard, who denies that you can do this, guilty of inconsistency?
This point has been pressed against him, by Walter Block with his customary polemical exuberance, and, at least during one period of his life, Nozick agreed with him and, for this and other reasons, gave up libertarianism. It is the great merit of Patryk Trzcionka, in his article “Against Libertarian Slavery,” to have shown that Block’s argument is subject to challenge.
One of the challenges is that Block assumes that if you have made a contract—any contract, not just a contract selling yourself into slavery—you can be compelled to specific performance. For example, if I contract with someone to give a concert and on the day of the concert I am sick and can’t sing, I can be dragged from my sickbed and forced to do it. But why assume this? Why not say, instead, that I have to repay the money I was given when I made the contract?
As Trzcionka puts it, “As a result of my contractual agreement to install a TV in someone’s home, the object of the contract is a particular action, not the partial property rights over my muscles and brain. It is therefore not contradictory that I retain my self-ownership rights in relation to the contract binding me if we assume that this contract constitutes only a basis for claims for breach of contract, which should be compensated. This is because using someone to enforce a contract seems, as Rothbard wrote, a grotesque example of disproportionality.”
There is a related difficulty, and this is fundamental. You cannot have exclusive control over someone else’s body, because of his own control over his body. As Trzcionka explains, “We cannot control a living, conscious human being on an exclusive basis since he himself cannot be excluded from the use of the object that would be subject to our power.”
Rothbard went further than Trzcionka. Specifically, a person cannot alienate his will, more particularly his control over his own mind and body. As he says in The Ethics of Liberty, “The only valid transfer of title of ownership in the free society is the case where the property is, in fact and in the nature of man, alienable by man. All physical property owned by a person is alienable, i.e., in natural fact it can be given or transferred to the ownership and control of another party. I can give away or sell to another person my shoes, my house, my car, my money, etc. But there are certain vital things which, in natural fact and in the nature of man, are inalienable, i.e., they cannot in fact be alienated, even voluntarily. Each man has control over his own will and person, and he is, if you wish, ‘stuck’ with that inherent and inalienable ownership. Since his will and control over his own person are inalienable, then so also are his rights to control that person and will. That is the ground for the famous position of the Declaration of Independence that man’s natural rights are inalienable; that is, they cannot be surrendered, even if the person wishes to do so. . . .
“Hence, the unenforceability, in libertarian theory, of voluntary slave contracts. Suppose that Smith makes the following agreement with the Jones Corporation: Smith, for the rest of his life, will obey all orders, under whatever conditions that the Jones Corporation wishes to lay down. Now, in libertarian theory there is nothing to prevent Smith from making this agreement, and from serving the Jones Corporation and from obeying the latter’s orders indefinitely. The problem comes when, at some later date, Smith changes his mind and decides to leave. Shall he be held to his former voluntary promise? Our contention—and one that is fortunately upheld under present law—is that Smith’s promise was not a valid (i.e., not an enforceable) contract. There is no transfer of title in Smith’s agreement, because Smith’s control over his own body and will are inalienable. Since that control cannot be alienated, the agreement was not a valid contract and therefore should not be enforceable. Smith’s agreement was a mere promise, which it might be held he is morally obligated to keep, but which should not be legally obligatory.”
Trzcionka has set forward his argument with incomparably greater subtlety than I have been able to convey here. On one issue, I fear, he will find it difficult to forgive me, and this is that, like several of the contributors to this volume, he has put great emphasis on Wesley Hohfeld’s standard analysis of legal concepts, and I have not delved into this. Professor Dominiak, should he chance to read this review, will find it even harder to forgive me, as the Hohfeldian analysis is fundamental to his entire intellectual edifice. But to explain the Hohfeldian concepts is far beyond my powers.
This is a book that contains many insights, and one that particularly struck me was Dawid Megger’s demonstration that the methodological individualism of Rothbard and Mises can be given an ontological grounding in the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Reinterpreting Libertarianism deserves the attention of all friends of freedom in Generation Z as well as in earlier generations.
