WHAT is LIBERTARIANISM?

Liberty. It’s a simple idea, but it’s also the linchpin of a complex system of values and practices: justice, prosperity, responsibility, toleration, cooperation, and peace. Many people believe that liberty is the core political value of modern civilization itself, the one that gives substance and form to all the other values of social life. They’re called libertarians.

Liberty made great progress over hundreds of years, but the first half of the 20th century saw it in retreat. It was a time of savage war, oppression, genocide, protectionism, socialism, fascism—a time when humanity experienced the awful power of the truly unlimited state.

But late in the century the tide started to turn again. Fascism had been militarily defeated. The Soviet Union collapsed. Apartheid was dismantled. More and more nations embraced constitutionally limited government, free markets, free trade, individual rights, and toleration. The promises of the Declaration of Independence were increasingly extended to women, racial and religious minorities, and gay people. The rising tide of prosperity in many nations—from South Korea and Taiwan to Chile and Mexico—led citizens to demand more open and democratic political systems. And libertarianism reemerged as a central political ideology of the modern age, with adherents promoting freedom in almost every country of the globe.

Yet libertarians have not been, and cannot afford to be, complacent about the future. Old threats to liberty remain and new ones have appeared. Fanatical terrorists have declared war on free societies, determined to impose religion by gun and car bomb and to force women to submit to the most degrading tyranny. In response, some in the freer societies have proposed restricting liberty, all in the name of defending our civilization and our heritage.

Yet those who would so lightly throw away freedom to defend civilization don’t understand the very heritage they claim to defend. That heritage is the culmination of a centuries-long struggle to free the individual and to limit the power of the state. At the dawn of the modern world such thinkers as John Locke and Adam Smithchallenged the old regime of monarchy, mercantilism, and religious intolerance. A growing middle class, made possible by the growth of trade, demanded individual rights. In the colonies of north America, radicals such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson led a revolution and set up the world’s first political system based on the natural rights of man. Their philosophy of individual liberty became known as (classical) liberalism, and in the nineteenth century it swept through much of Europe and made inroads in other parts of the world.   CONTINUE READING