6.2.2  Individualism                                                     

(This is an archived extract from the book Patterns of Power: Edition 2)

Individualists believe that freedom of the individual is of the highest importance: they want to make their own choices and they want government to play the smallest possible role – with correspondingly low taxation. 

There is a range of opinions on how far the principle of individual freedom can be implemented:

·      Two concepts which are foundation stones of individualism are individual liberty and property rights.  John Locke is credited with having influenced the American Declaration of Independence with this much-quoted assertion of natural law:

“To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.” [1] 

·      A more extreme, libertarian, position is that tax is morally wrong because it is an exercise of government power over the individual.  Milton Friedman summarised the libertarian view on tax as an infringement of personal liberty:

“If I want to do good with other people's money I'd first have to take it away from them. That means that the welfare state philosophy of doing good with other people's money, at its very bottom, is a philosophy of violence and coercion. It's against freedom, because I have to use force to get the money. In the second place, very few people spend other people's money as carefully as they spend their own.” [2] 

·      The most extreme expression of libertarianism is the complete elimination of the State, as advocated by Murray Rothbard for example:

“All of the services commonly thought to require the State – from the coining of money to police protection to the development of law in defense of the rights of person and property – can be and have been supplied far more efficiently and certainly more morally by private persons. The State is in no sense required by the nature of man; quite the contrary.” [3]

Rothbard provided a self-consistent logical defence for having no State at all – in terms of political authority – but he did not argue for complete anarchy, which is a term used in this book to describe an absence of any agreed rules or governance structures. 

·      Robert Nozick argued for what is perhaps the most widely accepted form of libertarianism: the “minimal state”, which is solely a “protection agency” to protect persons and property.[4] 

These writers and their followers all regard property rights as essential, yet this is not a universally accepted position:

·      There is no private property under pure communism.

·      Land is held in common in countries inhabited by nomadic tribes.

These examples illustrate that property rights cannot just be assumed to exist, as libertarians assert;[5] they have to be established by negotiation. 

Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, declared that the mainspring of individualism is to allow people “to follow their own values and preferences rather than somebody else's”.[6]  If one thinks of society as an aggregation of individuals, it seems to be logical that allowing them all to have freedom of choice would be the best way of making everybody happy.  This is the libertarian utopia, and it assumes the acceptability of some assumptions:

·      Pure libertarianism is inconsistent with democracy,[7] as it rejects the idea of deferring to the demands of other people and it does not accept that there are benefits in agreed governance (2.3.2).

·      No-one would have any obligation to anyone else.  Those in need would have no-one to turn to unless they were lucky enough to have family or friends to help them.  Even if the wealthy voluntarily help people in need by giving charity (4.2.4.3), the poor would effectively be in thrall to those who deigned to help them.

·      Everyone would have to be willing to accept the inequality of opportunity which results from the retention of wealth.  Wealthy people might have access to better healthcare than poor people and having wealthy parents might enable some people to start life with a built-in advantage in education. 

·      Any public infrastructure that is needed would have to be provided by private enterprise, in the absence of government intervention (3.2.8), and it would therefore only be for wealth-creation.  The only criterion by which something would be provided, the only test of its value, would be that someone could make money from it. 

Such power relationships create a society in which there is an ‘aristocracy’, or rather a ‘plutocracy’, of those with accumulated family wealth who have a huge advantage over those less fortunate than themselves – even if some of the latter have more ability.  This continuity of power and privilege has echoes of feudalism, and many people see it as unjust. 

Pure libertarianism can be seen as impractical.  People cannot avoid setting up some form of agreement with their neighbours and the wider society.  Even if a group of libertarians were to avoid paying tax to a government – by living on offshore artificial islands and paying directly for the services they required, a concept known as 'seasteading' [8] – they would need some agreements and shared arrangements among themselves: at least some rules of behaviour and a mechanism for paying for shared costs such as maintenance.

No society has implemented a pure libertarian vision, although Victorian England could be said to have come close to it.  And the perceived injustices of that society inspired Karl Marx to try to overthrow capitalism.

Most individualists, though, aren’t pure libertarians.  There are forms of individualism which are reconcilable with the view that individual rights and duties have to be negotiated with the community.  As A.C. Grayling said:

“‘cooperation and mutuality' are not 'conformity and uniformity'; individualism is the rejection of the latter, not the former." [9] 

Individualists would see it as a duty to argue for minimising the role of the State to prevent it from becoming bloated or oppressive.  They create problems for everyone else, though, if they refuse to negotiate with those who do not share their views, or if they won’t accept the outcome of negotiations even when they are conducted meaningfully (2.4). 

© PatternsofPower.org, 2014