An Introduction to Individual Liberty
The rule of law, unanimous consent, and individual choices--instead of collective choices
Over the few hundred thousand years of human history, individual liberty has existed only for a few hundred years in limited geographical locations and not equally among individuals. Without equal individual liberty, one cannot speak of a system of individual liberty as the ideal of classical liberalism conceived it. Only with the Industrial Revolution, which began at the end of the 18th century in liberal countries (especially in Western Europe and America), did we see the power of equal individual liberty to create wealth and opportunities.
How can we characterize this equal individual liberty? An absence of physical coercion is the simplest way to answer. Such has been the implicit approach of most economists: on free markets, no individual is physically forced, or “forced” by fraud, to accept or decline an exchange. One may argue that coercion is not much easier to define than liberty, so it is useful to resort to one of three contemporary liberal theories to get a better handle on what is meant by individual liberty.
One theory is the rule of law as conceived by economic and legal theorist F.A. Hayek (1899-1992), a laureate of the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics. The general idea is that society is a spontaneous or self-regulated order, and that efficient societies move toward a system of formal equality under the law where each individual is able to pursue his own ends as he defines them. The role of the state is to enforce general, abstract, and generally negative laws prohibiting the use of certain means (murder, theft, etc.) that would be detrimental to the maintenance of the free society. (Hayek’s last book was his 1988 The Fatal Conceit, which I reviewed in Regulation.)
Another school of thought was inspired by the work of economist and political philosopher James Buchanan (1919-2013), laureate of the 1986 Nobel Prize in economics. The fundamental idea is that only unanimous consent, as in a social contract, has a normative value. Majoritarian democracy needs to be constrained so that it does not violate the unanimous constitutional or basic rules that rational individuals would adopt. For a rule to be unanimously consented to, it must be abstract and benefit all individuals. Hence, it must strictly limit the state’s arbitrary power. Another way to look at this ideal is that any individual has a veto on the basic rules governing society. (A 1985 book Buchanan wrote with Geoffrey Brennan, The Reasons of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy, is a good introduction to his thought; I reviewed it at Econlib.)
Another major theory on individual liberty has been developed by a lesser-known economist and political philosopher: Anthony de Jasay (1925-2019). De Jasay conceived of individual liberty as the primacy of individual (and private) choices over collective (and political) choices—a crucial distinction. Individual choices are made based on private property; if they interfered with somebody else’s property, they would be collective choices, not individual choices. De Jasay defined himself as a liberal anarchist, but he mentioned a moderate position that, he said, defines classical liberalism: “a broad presumption of deciding individually any matter whose structure lends itself, with roughly comparable convenience, to both individual and collective choice.” (I provide at Econlib a non-technical review of de Jasay’s main book, The State, published in 1985.)
These and other related ideas are useful to analyze the causes and consequences of social and political events. In a classical liberal or libertarian perspective (which is the one I propose), “the left” and “the right” are equally criticizable, so don’t expect any political partisanship in this newsletter. But you can expect discussions of the mounting tyranny that, in America and other Western countries, has been increasingly threatening our liberties. Many readers of Individual Liberty may discover entirely new ways to look at the social world.