A process that drew attention at the turn of the century, and even earlier, was the movement from a bourgeois liberal society into a mass-democratic society. Not all of those who observed this process made the same judgments about it.
In two by-elections in the spring of 1996, the Front National (FN), the party of the radical right in France, helped several candidates of the left gain victory. In Sète, a southern seaport, a communist therefore was able to become mayor. It was in this manner that the leader of the FN, Jean-Marie Le Pen, responded to the rejection of his coalition offers by the Gaullists and the Liberals. At the same time, Le Pen tried to prove his slogan “neither right nor left, but French.” His calculation appeared to work.
Classical liberals and libertarians believe that individuals have rights, even if there is debate about just why we have them or how this can be proved.
The work of Hayek, in contrast with the Marxist-Socialist-Interventionist-Galbraithian paradigm that held sway in the mid-20th century, appears as a beacon for free enterprise amidst a sea of totalitarianism. When considered in comparison to the writings against which he contended, Hayek’s was a lonely voice, crying in the wilderness for freedom; he stood, like the Dutch boy, with his finger in the dike of onrushing statism.
Beginning with this issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, this section will provide short descriptions of recent scholarly articles expounding on libertarian theory or otherwise of special interest to libertarians. The articles listed will be drawn exclusively from non-libertarian periodicals, since specialized libertarian fora are well-known sources of libertarian theory.
No one could have admired and respected Ludwig von Mises more than did Murray Rothbard, who dedicated his magn1 um opus in economic theory, Man, Economy, and State, to his great mentor.
Ludwig von Mises criticized the ‘old liberals’ for assuming the stance of a ‘perfect king’ whose only objective is to make his citizens happy. Mises contended that the fiction of the ‘perfect king’ contributed to the modern notion of a godlike state.
It is not actually possible to describe what a system of privately produced law and order would be like in modem society because one cannot describe what does not exist, and, more fundamentally, guesses based on historic privatized systems or current trends in privatization may miss the mark substantially. The sophisticated crime protection and prevention equipment and the level of training and skill possessed by many crime prevention specialists today may be archaic compared to what would emerge as a result of the incentives created by full privatization.
No doubt punishment serves many purposes. It can deter crime and prevent the offender from committing further crimes. Punishment can even rehabilitate some criminals, if it is not capital. It can satisfy a victim’s longing for revenge, or his relatives’ desire to avenge. Punishment can also be used as a lever to gain restitution, recompense for some of the damage caused by the crime. For these reasons, the issue of punishment is, and always has been, of vital concern to civilized people. They want to know the effects of punishment and effective ways of carrying it out.
The creed of laissez faire-individual liberty, inviolate rights of property, free markets, and minimal government is virtually bound to be a radical one. That is, this libertarian creed is necessarily set in profound conflict with existing forms of polity, which have generally been one or another variety of statism. In this paper, we concentrate, not on examining or justifying the laissez-faire doctrines of various thinkers, but, given those doctrines, how these writers and theorists proposed to try to bring about their ideal polity.
