When U.S. President Donald Trump announced the imposition of his “Liberation Day” tariffs against most of America’s global trading partners in April 2025, he seemed to harken back to a centuries-old form of economic nationalism known as mercantilism, which sought prosperity through restrictive trade practices. Opponents of mercantilism from the eighteenth century onward, such as Adam Smith and John-Baptiste Say, became known as classical liberals. In the fullness of time, classical liberalism gave rise to the political philosophy we now know as libertarianism.
When most people think of libertarianism, they typically have in mind a small number of figures — including Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises — who were generally associated with the American political right in the mid-twentieth century. But in fact libertarianism was born in the nineteenth century (not the twentieth), and was first developed in Britain and France (not the United States). And as Matt Zwolinski emphasizes in his monumental intellectual history of libertarianism, The Individualists (co-authored with John Tomasi), libertarianism is better thought of as a cluster of related concepts than a unitary doctrine.
It’s true that most libertarians historically have been concerned with the defense of individual autonomy, property rights, free markets, and personal liberty against state coercion. But the first individual to self-identify as a “libertarian” was the nineteenth-century French anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque, and libertarianism as it developed often took radical and left-leaning forms, particularly through its association with the abolitionist movement in America in the years before the Civil War.
In this podcast conversation, Matt Zwolinski (a philosophy professor at the University of San Diego) discusses his investigations into the intellectual history of libertarianism as well as his analysis of the longstanding tensions between radical and reactionary elements within the philosophy. He describes post-Cold War “third wave libertarianism” taking both right-wing expression (in the form of paleolibertarianism) as well as more radical forms (including left-libertarianism and “bleeding-heart libertarianism.”) And he suggests reasons why many libertarians see more potential in combating poverty through Universal Basic Income grants rather than through more traditional government-administered antipoverty programs.
Transcript
Matt Zwolinski: Uncovering what we see as this forgotten early history of libertarianism, to open up possibilities for future development…. There are more directions that libertarianism can go than most people appreciate. And it doesn’t have to look like it looked for most of the 20th century.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Matt Zwolinski. He is a professor of philosophy and an affiliate professor of law at the University of San Diego, where he’s also the director of the USD Center for Ethics, Economics and Public Policy, as well as co-director of the USD Institute for Law and Philosophy. And he is the author of numerous books including The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, which came out from Princeton in 2023, and which he co-authored with John Tomasi. And he is also a co-author with Miranda Fleischer of Universal Basic Income: What Everyone Needs to Know, which likewise was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press. And in 2011 he was the founding editor of Bleeding Heart Libertarians, which was a collective blog and is now a Substack. And not least among his honorifics is that he is a senior fellow of the Niskanen Center. Welcome, Matt!
Matt Zwolinski: It’s a great pleasure and honor to be here, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: And unusually for this podcast, we are speaking to each other face-to-face. Usually I am talking to some disembodied voice on a screen, but you actually are in D.C. and in the Niskanen offices. What brought you here today?
Matt Zwolinski: So I’m here as a dad, chaperoning to eighth-grade kids on their field trip to our nation’s capital. And I’ve been shuttling about seeing monuments and libraries and museums at a pace which is probably tolerable to the energy level of an eighth-grader, but which their dad needs a little bit of a break from. So I’m doing some fun stuff for me today and seeing some old friends and colleagues and talking about ideas, which is what I love to do.
Geoff Kabaservice: Oh, fantastic. Your visit has coincided with D.C.’s Cherry Blossom Festival, which does draw tourists from all across the nation and the world, but it’s been a very collapsed cherry blossom season this year. I think right around the time you got to town is when they had the peduncle elongation and the puffy white and then peak bloom, and then came the inevitable rainstorm that blew all of the blossoms away.
Matt Zwolinski: Yes, I got to see them maybe not quite at peak bloom, but slightly thereafter. And they’re really quite as beautiful as everyone makes them out to be, so I was happy to be here for that.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s a good time to be in D.C. One of the few, I would say.
Matt Zwolinski: And a few interesting things going on policy-wise too?
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. So speaking of that, I don’t typically make any reference to current events when I do these, but I cannot get over the fact that you and I are talking in the immediate wake of Donald Trump’s so-called “Day of Liberation,” in which he has levied global economy-destroying tariffs on much of the world, including uninhabited islands in the South Pacific, for which I guess the penguins will be answerable.
Matt Zwolinski: Are you feeling freer yet, Geoff?
Geoff Kabaservice: Oh, not yet. Free of funds I think this is how I would put it. And this actually seems to be a good time to talk to you about libertarianism, given that the very early “primordial libertarians,” as you call them — like Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say — were largely arguing about the school of mercantilism, which is what Donald Trump seems to be moving us back into. And I’m guessing that this subject came up in your talk at the Cato Institute earlier today.
Matt Zwolinski: Yes, absolutely. It’s on people’s minds. It came up in my Uber ride to the Cato Institute, actually. As an educator, I’ve got to say there’s something rather delightful about hearing ideas that you’ve talked about in the classroom for twenty years finally on everybody’s lips. It’s unfortunate that the circumstances that led to that are as bad as they are, but I do like that people are finally taking ideas seriously and hope that that leads to some useful corrections in the future.
Geoff Kabaservice: So just from a historical standpoint then, mercantilism is often associated with — what was his name? — Colbert, who was finance minister in France under King Louis XIV. How would you describe mercantilism? What distinguishes it as a political system?
Matt Zwolinski: Yes, this is something we touch on in the book without going into great detail about it. But the guiding idea of mercantilism, as I understand it, is that it’s less of a body of systematic thought than it is a kind of mixed-match program for the advancement of business interests within a country, often from the perspective… What mercantilism is in some ways depends on the perspective from which one is looking at it. From the perspective of the state, mercantilism is often seen as the use of economic factors to advance state interests, whereas from the perspective of commerce, it’s the use of state power to advance commercial interests. So you have a bunch of people all trying to use each other for the advancement of their own self-interest, cloaking this in the language of the public interest or the common good.
But really there’s very little in the way of systematic theory underlying mercantilism, in the way that there is a theory of free trade. It’s a kind of ends-justify-the-means type philosophy, where we all know where we want to end up. The only question is, what arguments can we use that are going to meaningfully advance us in that direction?
Geoff Kabaservice: And if some of those classical liberals could be with us here in D.C. for this day after the Day of Liberation, what would they point out to us about mercantilism as a system and particularly its drawbacks?
Matt Zwolinski: You see quite a bit of discussion of this in the 18th century and in the 19th century and in the 20th century. It’s a message that classical liberals and libertarians have been repeating for as long as they have been around. And it’s a dual-pronged message, as I think about it. One prong (and the more well-known prong, I think) is economic. And the idea here is simply that mercantilism is a bad way to advance the wealth and prosperity of a country. It’s motivated by nationalistic concerns, motivated by the idea that a country needs to advance its own interests at the expense of those countries with whom it is competing, if you view it in very zero-sum terms. So if we have a trade deficit with China, that means China’s winning and we must therefore be losing, so we need to do something to get ahead in the trade race.
Classical liberals have long pointed out that this is based on fallacies all the way down. It’s not zero-sum, it’s positive-sum when two individuals trade with each other, when two countries trade with each other. This is a mutually beneficial relationship from which both parties gain more than they give up. To the extent that you prevent or hinder mutually beneficial transactions, you make both parties worse off.
Somebody might benefit. Classical liberals have told a story about why protectionist policies are so common, and it’s generally a story about special interests benefiting at the expense of the common good. If you’re the steel industry in the United States and there’s a tariff placed on foreign steel that makes your steel cheaper by comparison, it stands to promote your self-interest as a company, promote your profits. And it does so by making a small group of people richer at the expense of a much larger group of people who are made poorer. So that’s the standard economic story about protectionism. It’s rent-seeking, it’s a way in which minorities exploit majorities, and it’s bad for the country’s wealth and growth and dynamism on aggregate.
But there’s also, I think, a moral story that was especially common in the 19th century, maybe eclipsed somewhat by the economic story in the 20th century, which is that protectionism is just wrong morally. It’s wrong in its fundamental moral outlook in assuming that the interests of some group of people matter more than the interests of others, that we Americans count for more or ought to be privileged by government policy more than the interests of people in China or Vietnam or the European Union. Classical liberals have always had a strong cosmopolitan bent to their moral approach: that all people everywhere matter equally, that national borders are in some ways arbitrary and morally irrelevant. And so when we divide the world up into these nations and we advance some people’s interest in expense of others, we’re doing something wrong — especially when we do so by force. When the tool at our disposal is compulsion and coercion rather than persuasion, this is something especially objectionable.
And you see that moral rhetoric I think carried to its extreme in two figures from the 19th century. One, a Frenchman, Frédéric Bastiat, whose name a lot of people know still today. And the other, a British gentleman by the name of Richard Cobden, whose name is less well known but really was enormously popular at the time, and well known as a champion of free trade and the benefits of free trade for the common people who have the most to lose from higher prices on bread and the ordinary necessities of life.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, it’s my feeling that the decisions of the Trump era are going to force Americans to re-learn a lot of the theories and ideas that were taken for granted for decades if not centuries in this country and now have to be argued anew.
Matt Zwolinski: Yes. Tyler Cowen has talked about “The Great Forgetting”: that so many of the lessons that we thought we had learned collectively as a society in the past seem to have disappeared. So we need to reestablish why free trade is good, protectionism is bad. Even socialism… You and I both lived through the fall of the Soviet Union. We saw what that was like in our lives and we heard the arguments, the theoretical arguments. We saw the practical consequences. And so that was cemented for us in a way that I think for the coming generations simply isn’t. There’s a disturbingly high number of young people with a more favorable impression of socialism than capitalism. I think it was something like 45 to 35% in a Pew survey that I looked at, which as a child of the ‘80s boggled my mind.
Geoff Kabaservice: “The Great Forgetting,” as Tyler says. I cannot ask help but ask from a somewhat gossipy standpoint how the folks at Cato were feeling this today when you talked to them, given that Cato is the best-known libertarian organization in America.
Matt Zwolinski: I was talking about this with some of them, and I think it’s a mixed feeling. If you’re Scott Lincicome and you work on trade policy, on the one hand this is a disaster scenario for you. Everything you’ve been warning against is now being done and probably worse than you thought it would be. On the other hand, everybody wants to talk to you now; you’re getting calls from CNN and the New York Times in a way that you might not have a couple of months ago.
But no, I think on the whole mood there is a little grim. There was a lot of uncertainty, I guess a year ago, a couple months ago, as to how Trump would govern; how much of what he said about tariffs or a number of other issues that he raised on the campaign trail were serious and how much of it was trolling or just jokes. And I think from a libertarian/classical liberalist perspective, we’re in some ways getting the worst-case scenario here, where all the bad things that we’d written off as mere trollishness are actually coming true in a rather disturbing way. So yeah, somewhat of a somber mood.
Geoff Kabaservice: There’s a connection, of course, between the Niskanen Center and Cato. Niskanen was founded by people who were purged or broke away in the great intra-Cato dispute of 2010 to 2011. I personally did not have any real connection to the libertarian movement. I always looked at it somewhat from outside. But I think the analogy that comes to mind from my own personal experiences is that when I was younger and more flexible, I used to skateboard. I was never good at grinding or all the rest of it. But skateboarding was a creation of surfers and then evolved in its own very different cultural direction, and always looked askance at the surfing community. They knew it was the founder, so to speak, and had a higher level of prestige, but they wanted to show that they were doing their own thing. And Niskanen hasn’t had a really marked libertarian direction for a number of years, and most of the people who were associated with it most directly aren’t in the office on a day-to-day basis. But a lot of their books still are. So I’m familiar with libertarianism in that sense.
And since you actually are directly involved in some of the history that you were telling in your book on The Individualists, can you tell me something about your own origins, where you grew up, where you got educated, and then how you became interested in libertarianism?
Matt Zwolinski: Yes. I started college at Santa Clara University in the Bay Area of California…
Geoff Kabaservice: Is that where you had grown up?
Matt Zwolinski: That’s where I grew up. I lived at home all through college. And I grew up in a home that wasn’t terribly political in any way. I think my father was dispositionally conservative and my mom was a bit more liberal, but we didn’t talk about politics at the dinner table or anything like that. There weren’t a lot of political books or newspapers around the house. So I hadn’t given much thought to political ideas prior to going to college. And even when I got to college — and this was, I guess, 1993 when I started college — I didn’t have any interest in studying politics. I wanted to be a computer science major, though this was long enough ago that there wasn’t actually a computer science major, even in the heart of the Silicon Valley. If you wanted to major in computer science, you actually had to major in math, and then you could emphasize computer science.
I was decent at math, but I don’t think I was good enough to be a math major. So that kind of scared me off and I started looking for alternative courses of study. And so I fell into political science as a means to pursuing a law degree, I thought, until I worked with a lawyer one summer and realized I absolutely did not want to do that for the rest of my life. She was a family lawyer specializing in divorce so it was especially grim work, which may have contributed to my disillusionment.
But then I started wondering, “Okay, what am I going to do?” And around that time, I was taking a philosophy class. It was a Catholic school, and we were all required to take some philosophy. And one of my fellow students in there one day handed me this big fat book by some woman named Ayn Rand and said, “You’ve really got to read this.” And it was The Fountainhead. And I read The Fountainhead and I was enamored of it, and I went down a rabbit hole of studying these ideas.
I ran into another professor at Santa Clara… I didn’t know this at the time, but he was adjuncting at Santa Clara University — he was based in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University — and he had been an associate of Murray Rothbard’s back in the 1960s. And so he would assign all this very obscure reading in his American political theory class, which I thought was just awesome. But he was very coy about his own political opinions. He taught in a very Socratic way, so we never really got to know what he thought. But I was exposed to all these ideas that seemed to be radical and exciting and unheard-of.
And so I very quickly thought, “This is what I want to do for a living. I don’t know how one does it for a living,” because nobody in my family had ever gone to graduate school or anything like that. But I thought, “What the hell? I’m going to try to apply to philosophy graduate school and see what we can do with this.” And so I wound up at the University of Arizona and fell under the mentorship of a guy named David Schmidtz there, who is himself a broadly classical liberal political philosopher, and I quickly realized just how much more complicated all these ideas were than I thought they were when I was an undergraduate. I was pretty sure by the time I was a senior in college that I had figured everything out, that Rand had the answers, and that the philosophy profession was corrupt and/or inept for not having realized this. And then I quickly got smacked into sense in graduate school, having pointed out to me the various complexities and problems that there are in Rand’s ideas and in philosophy more generally. And this led to my very gradual long-term moderation as a thinker.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m all in favor of moderation, but I’m also laughing over here because there actually was a book published more than forty years ago by Jerome Tuccille called It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand.
Matt Zwolinski: And it did for a long time. And even once I became a professor in 2003, I would get not infrequently students coming into my office and telling me about this person they had just discovered and wanted to share their thoughts about — and it was Ayn Rand. Or they’d heard that I had dabbled in libertarian philosophy, and so they wanted to talk to me about this stuff. And interestingly, I don’t get that anymore, almost at all.
Geoff Kabaservice: Is that because students just aren’t reading in the way they used to?
Matt Zwolinski: That is quite possible. And I think it is true that students generally aren’t reading in the way that they used to. If it’s not on YouTube, it doesn’t exist.
Geoff Kabaservice: I picked up Ayn Rand as a high school student, and I saw its appeal. But its appeal to me was an appeal to an adolescent who is put upon by the world, this world that does not recognize his or her genius and gifts. And here is an argument for why you should not only be recognized, you should actually be a secret king of the world. And it also seemed to come with a ready-made analysis of the way things are, that might not have been accurate but could always be drawn out to give the otherwise rootless, unmoored adolescent something to say when it came to politics.
Matt Zwolinski: I think that’s probably right. And if I wanted to be quite candid and self-probing, there were probably some elements in my own biography that made that message especially resonant. But for whatever reason, it seems to me that her influence over young people is waning. In my early years as a professor, I got a lot of people talking to me about Ayn Rand. And then it was people talking to me about Ron Paul for a while, and the Federal Reserve System, which I had very little to say about. And now it’s not clear that there’s any one dominant theme that students come talk to me about.
Geoff Kabaservice: True. But I would actually argue that there’s still a lot of recycled Ayn Rand in the arguments that people get, particularly since libertarianism in different forms has been such an influence on Silicon Valley where you grew up.
Matt Zwolinski: Yes. I’ve been talking about this with a few people recently, and it’s interesting. You do get people like Peter Thiel who will talk about what an influence Ayn Rand was on him. I think even Donald Trump might have said something similar at one point. And so the question is how seriously to take that kind of thing. The way I think about it is that there’s a vibe that one gets from Ayn Rand, very much in line with the narrative that you just put forward: “Nobody gets me, nobody sees the potential I have, the genius I have, and I need to be set free from the constraints of society to unleash my greatness upon the world.” That I think resonates with a lot of people who see themselves as constrained geniuses, misunderstood, in a way that’s quite separate from all the minutiae of Randian philosophy.
It’s not that they’ve thought through whatever arguments there are in Rand, or the logical connection between this idea and that idea. It’s not any systematic philosophy that’s driving them or that’s attracting them or leading them to say that they have this affinity with Ayn Rand. It’s more of this vibe. And so when people look at Silicon Valley libertarianism and they say how inconsistent it is and how they’re not carrying through on this or that aspect of libertarianism — well, yeah, absolutely. These people aren’t ideologues. They aren’t people who spend their days sitting around thinking through the logic of ideas. That’s not what attracted them to this. And I think that’s not how most people are. People like me who want to spend their whole lives reading arguments and thinking about them are weird.
Geoff Kabaservice: I suppose so. But if you actually just went back twenty years ago and talked to people at Silicon Valley, as I did at that time, there was already at that time a tension that you delineate in your book between views of America as a place of equality and the need to recognize that civilization is driven forward usually by an exceptional gifted few. And at that time, twenty years ago, the people in Silicon Valley who I talked to held both of those ideas in balance, and that led them to support Democrats. Whereas now it seems that they have really turned against the egalitarian aspects of American society and are all about “Just give free rein to the individuals who can fully advance humanity or civilization” — if you’re an Elon Musk kind of person who really is into the whole transhumanist idea.
Matt Zwolinski: Yes. Well, one of the themes that we talk about in the book is the way in which libertarianism has taken such starkly different forms over the 170 years or so that it has been in existence as a philosophy, and how that stems from the fundamentally open-ended nature of some of the core concepts at the root of libertarianism. So if you think “I’m a person who’s committed to liberty” or “I’m a person who’s committed to equality,” that can mean a lot of different things. There are a lot of different directions in which you can take or interpret those ideas.
Equality is, to start with, an idea that a lot of libertarians have embraced in some form. They’ve said that, “Look, I believe in equality. And what I mean by that is something like equal rights.” Herbert Spencer, for instance, one of the founding fathers of libertarianism, his fundamental moral principle is something called “the law of equal freedom,” which held that each person should be entitled to the maximum liberty, compatible with a similar liberty for all. This is a kind of egalitarian view, and it led for Spencer in some recognizably egalitarian dimensions. Spencer was a fierce critic of military colonialism because he thought it violated this fundamental egalitarian principle — treating some people’s freedom as less important than the freedom of others. Spencer was a staunch advocate for women’s rights, for the rights of children, all on the basis of this fundamental egalitarian principle.
But you can (and Spencer in fact did) hold that moral egalitarian belief, simultaneously believing that as an empirical matter or a descriptive matter, people aren’t equal, in all kinds of ways. Some people really are more talented than others, they’re smarter than others, they’re stronger than others, they’re better athletes than others. That can be true at the same time as it being true that all people should have this equal moral right to liberty.
So if you interpret these ideas in a certain kind of way, there’s no necessary conflict between egalitarianism and libertarianism. But it’s certainly possible to interpret those ideas in ways that do render some kind of conflict. If you take the libertarianism in a more Nietzschean direction, where the freedom that the great have should be greater than the freedom that the weak have, because it’s more important, that can clearly go in some very different directions.
Geoff Kabaservice: I should point out that The Individualists is an intellectual history. It’s not a history of politics and it’s not a history of the libertarian movement. But what’s also really notable about it is that when people think about libertarian intellectuals, they tend to think of a fairly small group of individuals and a fairly limited canon — people like Ayn Rand and maybe Murray Rothbard, but also Milton Friedman, let’s say, or Friedrich Hayek. And what you and John Tomasi did so well in this book was to point out that actually libertarianism is a much more sprawling, hard-to-define, and colorful phenomenon that actually did not begin in America — it actually began in Britain and France, not in the 20th century but in the 19th century. And a lot of it is just much weirder than we tend to think about.
You also say that it’s not exactly a fixed ideology, it’s like a cluster of ideas. And it has always had radical and reactionary elements to it, and the tension between them is a large part of the intellectual history of your book. But if you have to refine it or reduce it to a definition, it’s a family of theories. And you say that it’s a combination of six commitments: property rights, negative liberty, individualism, free markets, skepticism of authority, and belief in spontaneous order. And what’s interesting is that, if you just take those six commitments, you could actually form sixty-four different varieties of libertarianism — and it seems like there’s at least that many that show up in the book. But what I was really struck by is, again, how weird some of these older elements were, and how libertarianism, although it’s something that we think of as being conservative with a small-c, as bolstering the side of big business and established order and being unsympathetic to socialism or social justice — in fact it has been the opposite of whatever you want to characterize it as, in somebody’s writings at some point throughout history.
Matt Zwolinski: That’s a lovely summary, Geoff, so thank you for that. And I think you got it exactly right in terms of what we were going for in the book. There have been other books that have traced the history of the libertarian movement; Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism is a lovely book in that respect. And so we didn’t want to duplicate that. We wanted instead to write something that was both more focused on ideas and a little bit broader-ranging in its scope in geographic coverage. Because we do see libertarianism as something that has a more or less definite starting point. And as you say, it wasn’t in the 20th century, with the familiar names of Friedman and Rand and Rothbard, but rather in the 19th century, in Britain and France in particular, in the writings of people like Herbert Spencer, Frédéric Bastiat, Gustave de Molinari, Richard Cobden in Britain… All these people were writing and very active around the middle of the 19th century, right around the 1850s. And in our view, they were reacting to something new on the historical stage, which was the rise of socialism as an existential political threat.
Geoff Kabaservice: And socialism, of course, rising in itself as a reaction to the industrial revolution.
Matt Zwolinski: Yes, that’s right. But the way in which socialism developed is important. Because, for a while, socialism had this utopian form to it. If you read someone like Proudhon, for instance, Proudhon wasn’t advocating for seizing the reins of state power and sending his political opponents to the gulag. It was a voluntaristic, anarchistic form of socialism, a cooperative form of socialism, with which many liberals or libertarians at the time really had no problem. It was only in the middle of the 19th century when, first, socialism took on a revolutionary fervor, where barricades were literally being erected in the streets, that libertarians started to worry.
And then in the second half of the 19th century, many liberals saw elements of socialism being implemented in a more gradualist form, a kind of a Fabian approach to socialism, in the policies of the British and French governments. And so what they saw was, “All right, what these guys actually want is state power. They want to seize control of the state and impose socialism on us by force. And if they can’t do it at the point of a gun, they’re going to do it piece-by-piece. And so we’re sliding down this slippery slope. We know what’s at the end of that slope, so we can’t be gradualists along with them anymore. We can’t be giving them this or that concession. We need to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘Beyond this point, I will not go.’”
And so that’s what gave libertarianism this radical, absolutist form, which we think distinguishes it from what you see in earlier classical liberals like Hume or Smith or Kant, who also talked about free markets and private property and limited government. But what you see that’s new in the 19th century is this absolutism; that these things are not just good ideas, they’re not just presumptions that can be outweighed if the circumstances call for it, they are moral imperatives that need to be abided by regardless of what you think the consequences would be.
Geoff Kabaservice: And you identify this as the root of the extremism to which libertarianism is often prone. Because if there is just really the one big commitment that matters, then other commitments are extraneous and everything must be done in order to secure these liberties.
Matt Zwolinski: And in some cases, I think, as an observer of libertarian intellectual history… There are some cases where you see this extremism coming around and it feels morally righteous, and you want to cheer them on. And it’s exciting. When I read Lysander Spooner, who was a 19th-century American libertarian anarchist and very, very actively involved in the abolitionist movement in the United States… Spooner was a radical. He was an absolutist. He was an extremist. He thought, along with the likes of William Lloyd Garrison, that slavery is an absolute evil that must be abolished immediately. And it doesn’t matter if it’s going to be bad for the economy or if it’s going to set back the interests of agriculture. It’s unjust and we’ve got to stop it. And on that particular issue, you read that and you think, “Yeah, that’s the right way of thinking about this.” And all those people who were like, “Well, let’s try to phase it out or make it less bad” — that seems kind of mealy-mouthed and weak. There are certain issues where the extremism seems morally justified.
And then there are others where it just seems weird. One of the libertarian organizations in late 19th-century Britain was this group called the Liberty and Property Defense League, which is a really interesting organization, which we can talk about more. But they published this book called A Plea for Liberty, which was a collection of a number of essays written by members of the organization. And one of the essays in this book — and this was a theme that the League had harped upon for some time — was the moral evil of public libraries. Because libraries, after all, involve seizing by coercion the hard-earned wealth that some people have earned, and using that to force upon other people things that they might not want or be willing to pay for, in the form of free access to books. And so this was clearly one of those steps on a slippery path to socialism that needed to be squashed immediately. And there I look at that and I think, “Well, maybe that was an odd windmill to tilt at.”
Geoff Kabaservice: There’s a part of the libertarian movements that you describe which are very appealing to kooks, to put it simply. And so when you get these sort of — not quite communes, but communities being started where people should live according to their own lights with other libertarians. Sometimes, as in New Harmony, Indiana, it seems very appealing. At other times, nudists show up, and food weirdos, and free love advocates, and all the rest of it, and it destroys the community.
But there’s also another sense, though, in which the moral commitments of libertarianism extend to anarchism and violence. So, for example, Frederick Douglass is a figure who is very appealing to many libertarians nowadays. In fact, my friends at the FREOPP organization, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, use him as their emblem. And Douglass is indeed a very inspiring writer on the subject of freedom, particularly because he experienced un-freedom so directly as an enslaved person. However, I think you also write that it was in his living room that John Brown planned his raid on Harpers Ferry and planned to start an armed slave revolt, which is what led Douglass to flee to Canada during that time.
And there’s also a sense in which every principle of American government could be undermined by the abolitionists: you had William Lloyd Garrison at one point referring to the Constitution as “a covenant with hell.” And so again, there’s a sense that libertarianism sometimes doesn’t really know where to stop, that it takes all these things to their logical conclusions, and that is what undermines it as a legitimate governing philosophy.
Matt Zwolinski: Yes. An interesting footnote to that story… So Lysander Spooner, who I was just praising, went on one of his rather kookier agendas in the wake of John Brown’s arrest, which he viewed as a great injustice. And he thought that in order to get John Brown out of jail, it might be a good idea to kidnap the governor of Virginia and hold him for ransom. Thankfully he was talked out of this plan by some of his friends, but it did cross his mind and get serious consideration.
Geoff Kabaservice: But I’ll tell you something else about Spooner, since we’re mentioning him here… He was in Massachusetts in the 1850s, and he essentially was opposed to the state licensing laws for certifying lawyers. At that time, the laws held that you didn’t have to go to law school; there were hardly any of them at that point. But if you had graduated from a college, which typically required Latin and Greek and a classical course of curriculum, then you could be admitted to the bar after studying for only three years in a law office. But if you didn’t graduate from college, you had to wait five years. And he found this unjust, and persuasively so because the Massachusetts legislature eventually changed that requirement.
Matt Zwolinski: Yes, he was one of the early critics of occupational licensing — which is one of the more noble aspects of libertarian views on these matters. So yes, like a lot of kooks, there are cases where you think he’s got it just exactly right, and there are cases where you think he’s just gone off the rails. And that’s true of a lot of libertarian thought. Again, from my perspective, surveying the history, these are people who pride themselves on being independent thinkers, pride themselves on being very skeptical of authority. And that took a lot of different forms. When you hear “skepticism of authority” in the context of libertarianism, the mind automatically leaps to, “Oh, they’re questioning the government.” Or Spooner is saying, “I never signed a social contract.” And it was that, but it went much beyond that as well.
There was a lot of skepticism of religious authority as well. There was skepticism of scientific authority. These are people who like to make up their own minds about things. These are the people who today are watching videos on YouTube and saying, “I think the climate scientists or the immunologists have got it all wrong. I’ve got this figured out.” And in fact, speaking of immunologists, there was a big movement of late 19th century British libertarians questioning the vaccination movement of the time as being deeply unjust and founded on what they regarded as junk science. There was this big libertarian push against compulsory vaccination, or even to a certain extent voluntary vaccination, on the grounds that this was both immoral and inexpedient.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, that’s right. And again, part of what you do so well in this book is recover “the old, weird America,” as Greil Marcus referred to it, and people like Benjamin Tucker, for example — another person whose thoughts inclined toward anarchism and socialism. And yet what you then see is that libertarianism sort of starts to die in the later 19th century. The radical and left-leaning parts of it become almost forgotten as libertarians join hands with what we think of as the pre-World War II conservative movement.
Matt Zwolinski: That’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: And so people like Leonard Reed and the Foundation for Economic Education become very important in this story. Women like Isabel Paterson and Rose Wilder Lane become very well-known women libertarians. And it becomes seen as a conservative movement, even before some of the canonical texts like Hayek’s Road to Serfdom come along. And yet there always was that hidden part of left-leaning libertarianism — which appealed to you, since you do enter this story as the founder of the Bleeding-Heart Libertarians website later on. And you have been working on this book for a while, I know, because I actually found a Cato Unbound article from 2012…
Matt Zwolinski: Oh gosh.
Geoff Kabaservice: … which you and John Tomasi had written, where you write about writing this book. There was a quote from that article (thirteen years ago) which I found interesting: “We do not argue that traditional libertarianism is wrong. Instead, we claim that from a broader historical perspective, traditional libertarianism is really not so traditional after all. Neoclassical liberalism, as novel or heretical as it may seem to some, has a better claim to that title. The post-war libertarianism of Mises, Rand, and Rothbard crystallized many of the insights of the libertarian intellectual tradition into a coherent body of doctrine for perhaps the first time. But in that process of crystallization, not only impurities but genuine insights were expunged.” And I think this is where you are recovering that tradition for modern-day purposes, if I may put it that way.
Matt Zwolinski: Yes, I think that’s right. I think the story we tell here is one in which, as you say, the nature of the libertarian movement changed quite dramatically between the 19th and 20th centuries. What you had in the 19th century was a mix, I think, of both radical and reactionary elements. There were progressive reformist libertarians who thought that liberty was necessary to protect the interests of the downtrodden, to protect the interests of prostitutes; Josephine Butler was a libertarian feminist who railed against laws that restricted women from working, laws that required the mandatory physical inspection of prostitutes. There was that going on. But there was also, in the Liberty and Property Defense League for instance, an organization that was mainly organized around the defense of business interests. It was funded by wealthy landowners and railroad magnates and beer barons who chirped very loudly whenever their own financial interests were threatened but seemed conspicuously silent whenever the powers of the state were used to advance their interests at the expense of others.
So you had a real mix of both progressive and more conservative elements within the libertarian tradition in the 19th century. In the 20th century what happens, seemingly, is that the threat of socialism comes to dominate the concerns of libertarians in the United States and in Europe — the threat of socialism both in terms of the militaristic expansion threatened by the Soviet Union and the kind of creeping socialism that seemed to be lurking in FDR’s New Deal in the United States or in the various policies enacted in Britain during the Cold War. All of this seemed to libertarians to again bring up this threat of socialism as the paradigmatic threat to liberty that needs to be resisted. And enabled in so doing this marriage of convenience between ideological groups that really didn’t have a whole lot in common other than their disdain for socialism. So you get these Old Right figures like Albert Jay Nock aligning with people who are more paradigmatically libertarian like Ayn Rand, because both despise socialism.
And that issue really dominated libertarianism, and to a certain extent conservatism as well, up until near the end of the 20th century. Once the Berlin Wall falls, once socialism is both intellectually and politically discredited, then the very foundation of this marriage of convenience is dissolved, and it’s no longer clear what if anything is holding these two groups together. And so what you see, and I think we’re still seeing today, is a lot of soul-searching both among libertarians and among conservatives about: What are we now? If we don’t define ourselves in opposition to socialism, what is it that we’re for?
Because libertarianism in particular, I think, has always been a very reactive doctrine. It’s a doctrine that has defined itself in opposition to things it doesn’t like. And so once the thing you don’t like doesn’t exist anymore, it’s not clear what libertarians are for. Are we the anti-war policy party? Are we anti-regulation? What is it? And so part of the motivation in writing this book really is, by uncovering what we see as this forgotten early history of libertarianism, to open up possibilities for future development. There are more directions that libertarianism can go than most people appreciate. And it doesn’t have to look like it looked for most of the 20th century.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, let me jump in on that point. So you talk about “third wave libertarianism” following the end of the Cold War. But that can express it itself in something very much identified with the right, like the paleolibertarianism of Lew Rockwell, but it could identify itself with your bleeding-heart libertarianism as well as left-libertarianism. So although I feel the angels converging on the pin head and starting to sway and ask to be counted, what is the difference between bleeding-heart libertarianism and left libertarianism?
Matt Zwolinski: Look, when we say that the future of libertarianism is open-ended given the absence of socialism, in a way that’s the main point. When we say that there are these three directions it might go, there are undoubtedly more than three. We picked three that seemed especially salient to us, but in a book on intellectual history, it’s always a danger to try to characterize the present time. And I’m sure we’ve omitted some real possibilities there. But there are, out there in the world right now, some group of libertarians with whom I identify more or less who are attempting to reconcile libertarian commitments to private property and free markets and limited government and the rest with a characteristically progressive concern for social justice, in a way that we think is resonant with some of the themes of 19th-century libertarians.
One way of thinking about this is: If what you care about is equal liberty for all, then what that really ought to mean is equal liberty for all. And the way in which liberty is infringed upon can take a lot of different forms, and some of those forms won’t necessarily be apparent to you if you haven’t lived that experience yourself. So if libertarianism is all made up of a bunch of wealthy white guys, they’re going to tend to see the world in a particular kind of way, and they’re going to tend to see the state or its infringements upon liberty in a particular kind of way. If you don’t have women in the libertarian movement, it’s going to be harder for you to recognize the way in which the state poses a threat to women in particular.
Geoff Kabaservice: And the same with African-Americans.
Matt Zwolinski: Or African-Americans or immigrants or whoever. And so part of the BHL project is simply to say, “Look, a lot of this stuff that people on the left — progressives, people who are advocating for DEI and inclusivity — are saying isn’t necessarily at odds with what we’re saying as libertarians. And we should try to look for common ground and ways in which we agree that principles of liberty can be advanced by a commitment to social justice, or the commitment to social justice can be advanced by a concern with liberty.” So that’s BHL. It takes a lot of different forms, but that I think is the broad umbrella concept here.
Left-libertarianism is related though distinct. So when I say “left-libertarianism,” I have in mind in particular work being done by people like Roderick Long or Kevin Carson. These are people who adopt a fairly traditional view of libertarian natural rights, but who hold that the consistent application of libertarianism will require radical restructuring of capitalist economic institutions. And so they often call themselves… In addition to “left-libertarianism,” they call themselves “free market anti-capitalists.” They want a truly free market, and they want to be clear that what that means is not simply a defense of the status quo. And there too, there’s kind of a harkening back to these 19th century themes, where a lot of libertarians in the 19th century portrayed themselves, described themselves as critics of capitalism in order to emphasize that what they wanted was not simply to prop up the status quo. What they wanted was to not just to sort of freeze the distribution of property as it happened to exist at that time and lock it into place through the force of law. But in some cases, what was called for was a radical redistribution of property. If and to the extent that the current distribution was unjust, if it had come about in unjust ways through theft and usurpation (which in many cases it undoubtedly did), then what’s called for is not conservativism but radical sweeping reform.
And so one way of characterizing the difference between BHL and the left-libs is that the left-lib group is, I think in many ways, a much more radical group that challenges the status quo, challenges certain aspects of contemporary capitalism. The bleeding-heart libertarians tend to be a more moderate force in politics.
Geoff Kabaservice: What is it about Universal Basic Income that is attractive particularly to the bleeding-heart libertarians?
Matt Zwolinski: I think, first of all, that a lot of the bleeding-heart libertarians pride themselves on taking issues of poverty more seriously than libertarians have generally done, or have been thought to do at least. So in other words, a lot of these people who identify as bleeding-heart libertarians are coming from an academic background, they’re coming from a background of political philosophy where they’ve been talking with and reading and arguing with people on the left who have been emphasizing to them the significance of distributive justice or concerns about poverty. And I think a lot of us — I’m speaking for myself at least — don’t want to say that those are all just made-up concerns, that they’re just completely out-of-bounds in arguing that poverty is any kind of serious moral phenomenon.
So once you take on board the idea that there’s something morally, politically troubling about poverty or inequality, then the question is: Well, what do you do about it? And that is a question that ought to be answered on the basis of both moral considerations and economic considerations. What is the least coercive approach that we can take to dealing with the problem of poverty? And what’s going to be the most effective in terms of a “bang-for-your-buck” approach to dealing with poverty?
And many of us — again, myself included — have thought that a Universal Basic Income of some sort fits that bill fairly well. It’s a non-paternalistic policy. It doesn’t purport to tell people how to try to run their own lives. It is a policy that can be administered without any kind of complex government bureaucracy. And so it’s largely compatible with a respect for limited government, and it’s a policy that seems to address the problem of poverty in a fairly direct and straightforward, efficient sort of way.
If you want to help people out who are poor, you could do that via a minimum wage. But a minimum wage is a pretty clunky way of fighting poverty, because you have these unintended side effects potentially of putting people out of work. It doesn’t do anything to help people who don’t have a job at all. Some people who are working and earning a minimum wage don’t need any help, like some sixteen-year-old kid who comes from a wealthy middle-class family. So why not just find people who don’t have money and give them money? That seems like a fairly straightforward approach.
Geoff Kabaservice: There is in fact an Annie Lowrey book that you reviewed called Give People Money.
Matt Zwolinski: And so I think that’s why you find people like Milton Friedman advocating… He called it a negative income tax, but I think “negative income tax” and “basic income” are basically functionally identical. You have people like Hayek, who didn’t really get into the details of public policy but who admitted as a moral principle that there’s nothing wrong with ensuring a minimum income floor for everyone within a free society. And I think it’s an idea that’s just resonated very deeply with a lot of broadly liberal thinkers in the modern world.
It is a very complicated policy; the devil is in the details. I think it is a theme of my book on the basic income that there are a lot of different ways in which we could go about doing something like this. Some of them would be an absolute disaster, some of them might be a marked improvement upon the status quo. But it really matters how you iron out those questions of detail.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was reminded when I was reading your book that about twenty-five years ago I had a conversation with Michael Lind. And he’s been all over the map politically, but at that time he was in his radical moderate posture and he co-wrote a book on radical moderation at the time that he was founding the New America Foundation. And he advocated for, essentially, a UBI. But I caught up with him a few years after that, and he said he’d changed his mind on that. Because he felt that it was too much in the American character — maybe human nature — that people don’t like to see other people getting something for nothing, getting money without working for it. And it was too much of an advantage to populist-authoritarian politicians to bring out people’s worst sides and say, “Your hard-earned money is supporting that drug-addicted layabout.”
I was reminded of this not so much in the UBI argument but when you actually were talking about David Hume, who felt that some of these essentially proto-libertarian ideas would only work if there were a radical change in human nature. And Hume actually saw what he called “a limited capacity for sympathy” as a fixed feature of human nature. So it’s interesting the extent to which these century-old philosophical disputes are still very relevant in today’s political campaigning.
Matt Zwolinski: Yes, that’s absolutely right. And I think Lind’s point is… There’s certainly something there. Whenever I talk about the basic income, there are two objections that everybody raises right away, one of which is cost: How expensive is this going to be? But the other one is a more moral objection, based on some kind of commitment to reciprocity. It’s the idea that, look, we don’t have a problem with helping people who genuinely need help, who are trying to support themselves but are for some reason outside of their control unable to do so. That’s perfectly fine, almost everybody thinks.
But what people really have a problem with — and it is not just conservatives but even people on the political left like John Rawls, for instance… John Rawls, the most important philosopher of the left of the 20th century, was a fierce critic of the basic income, because he thought he violated this fundamental principle of reciprocity. A just society is one where all contribute what they can to the common good, and then we take care of the less fortunate. It’s a deal. It’s kind of a bargain, a social contract, where you’ve got to at least try to do your part in order to qualify for the benefits.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’d mentioned that one of the other forms that third wave libertarianism has taken is paleolibertarianism, which very much is a kind of Trumpism, I would say. And a number of paleolibertarians have endorsed Trump in all the times that he’s been running for the presidency. It also made me think that a few years ago I had interviewed Andy Koppelman, when he came out with his book Burning Down the House, which posited Friedrich Hayek as the good face of libertarianism and Murray Rothbard as the bad face. And what’s notable about your book is that you actually do take Rothbard very seriously and with a lot of respect. And yet he in many ways points both to some of the more left-leaning and the more Trump-leaning forms that libertarianism has taken in the post-Cold War era. Can you tell me more about Rothbard, then?
Matt Zwolinski: Yes, it sort of depends on which day of the week you caught him, or which decade of his life to be more specific. But yes, Rothbard was at times very much a prophet of what I described as left-libertarianism, this idea that radical commitment to self-ownership and the ownership of an individual’s labor requires radical, sweeping reforms to existing society in the direction of a broadly progressive, egalitarian direction. At other times, he was writing in ways that very much laid the foundations for the modern paleolibertarian movement, taking a much more populist political approach, an approach that was much less sympathetic to the plight of the poor and much more sympathetic to concerns about law and order and traditional morality. In some ways it was an extension of the fusionist project of a couple decades earlier, but much more radical especially in its populist elements than anything that Frank Meyer had ever anticipated.
He was an interesting fellow. I think there’s a lot to learn from and admire in Rothbard’s work. He was undoubtedly brilliant and wide-ranging in his scholarship. He wrote books on the history of economic thought, on the history of the United States, on Federal Reserve banking policy, on economic theory and moral theory. So there’s really a lot there for people to chew on and learn from. But not perhaps always the best political judgment, or economic or philosophical judgment perhaps, in my view.
And I think the paleo-libertarianism movement is, from my perspective, a deeply unfortunate one — one that has played into some of the worst impulses in American politics of tribalism and racism and nationalism, in ways that have paved the way for Trump and led the Libertarian Party to throw its weight behind Trump. I suspect that if it were not for the influence of Murray Rothbard, you would not have seen that happen to the Libertarian Party. It would have taken a much different direction — perhaps one more in line with my own likings, but perhaps not. One never knows.
Geoff Kabaservice: As kind of a final question or series of comments… A lot of young people at Niskanen, at this particular moment that we’re talking, are throwing up their hands and asking, “What on earth is going to happen to the world given the radical direction that Trump is taking?” And I imagine you must get some of this from your students as well. I never have a good answer to that except to say that I personally am going to keep looking to history for possibly inspiring examples.
I must say that I was actually quite inspired by your description of Richard Cobden, toward the end of your book. You’d mentioned earlier that he was someone who actually created a broad-ranging, widespread, popular agitation for repeal of the Corn Laws, which essentially were the kind of tariffs that kept the prices of agricultural goods high. And he and Richard Bright formed the Anti-Corn Law League in 1839. The Economist magazine, which is still with us, was founded just three years later to push the cause. And eventually they actually got the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, to come around to their side, and they created this coalition that successfully did repeal those laws.
They were making an economic argument that this was bad for the country, which it was economically. But it was also a moral argument that the propertied middle class had to join with the working class against the landed aristocracy, that this was a case where the many had to come together to resist the few and not allow themselves to be divided. But also you had to stick to your principles even when those principles were unpopular, as they shortly would be when Britain entered the Crimean War — and Cobden, through his anti-militarist, anti-imperialist stance, largely lost his popular following. But I kind of feel that that’s how history happens, that that’s how positive progress happens: through people who have their principles, who are pragmatists, but who are willing to work with a very wide group of allies to achieve their goals.
Matt Zwolinski: I think that’s right. And I think stories like that are conserved as a source of inspiration in dark times, as can remembering that we’ve been in dark times before. One of the interesting features of the history of libertarianism as we uncovered it is that towards the end of the 19th century, as I think you mentioned earlier, there was this collapse of the global libertarian movement. And what drove that collapse? There were a number of things. People were dying. A lot of major figures in the libertarian movement died right around the same time: Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner. But a lot of them, even before they had died, had fallen into a state of despondency over the future of liberty and the future of the world — remarkably similar kinds of sentiments echoed by a number of different libertarians at the time. Spencer, Sumner, Molinari, all these guys saw the liberty movement collapsing. They saw what was coming as a century of militarism and nationalism and socialism. And they were basically right. And they thought, “Everything we’ve worked for, everything we’ve devoted our lives to, has collapsed. Nobody has listened to anything we had to say.”
And for a while the movement died out. But it did become resurrected. New figures came into the world who saw the different circumstances of the 20th century and responded to what was in front of them. And I think, in some ways, the changing nature of the world of the 20th century allowed for a kind of coalescence of liberty-minded individuals in a way that wasn’t possible in the world of the 19th century.
And my hope today is that perhaps something like that is on our future. The libertarian movement for a very long time has been beset by the tyranny of small differences. It’s like: “Are you a bleeding-heart libertarian? Are you a left-libertarian? I’ve got to know what kind of libertarian you are before I invite you into my living room.” And in a way, I think we could afford to argue about those small differences because the world we lived in was a fairly peaceful and prosperous world.
But the bright side of turning towards a world that might not be like that, where threats to liberty are obvious and in your face, is that we have something to unite ourselves around. Now, whatever kind of libertarian you are, you can agree that what Trump just did with “terrorists” is a bad idea. You can agree, I hope, that the military annexation of peaceful countries next door to you, whether it’s Ukraine or Greenland, is a bad idea. And so there’s something that can now bring us all together as libertarians. Even if it’s not going to last forever, it could be enough to revitalize and reinvigorate what I think is in many ways a flagging movement. So that’s my hope for the future.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, Matt Zwolinski, thank you very much for shining a light in the darkness. Thank you for coming to Washington D.C. from the far more salubrious climate of San Diego, and congratulations again for the book that you co-wrote with John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism.
Matt Zwolinski: Thanks for having me, Geoff. An absolute pleasure to talk.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.