That is the title of a new and recommended book. From my review:
Arguments would make an excellent book of supplemental readings for a course in political philosophy. Such a course could use another supplement, consisting of readings of philosophers arguing for non-libertarian ideas.
Later, I write,
After reading this book, I could not help pondering why it is that libertarianism does not hold sway among most philosophers or with the general public. My answer is that people rely on what I call small-community intuitionism.
I think Alastair Macintyre and Charles Taylor are a couple of the most interesting communitarian philosophers and reading them (especially Macintyre) would be informative for understanding the appeal of communitarianism.
Again, aren’t half the libertarians in the US religious local community types? (Say Utah Mormons, Front Porch Conservatives, etc) And looking at US history, I almost argue there was a local theology country in which the local communities were primarily run by the church and richest citizens. (Even in the cities, they broke into more local neighborhoods, as New York had Little Italy or Harlem, etc.) However this started breaking down after the turn of century we movement of people and goods increased. (In terms of old movies, how many times is the chief villain the Rich Factory Owner or Rancher that was keeping the rest of the population poor or run out of town? You don’t see this local villain or rancher type anymore.)
And I always assumed Ron Paul was more successful than his son, Rand, because Ron Paul did speak well of local community institutions in his lifetime versus his son that appears to read ZeroHedge several times a week. So yea it does seem like libertarians are either, ZeroHedge or Benedict Option types.
I don’t think the defining characteristic of a libertarian is his opposition to communal institutions but rather his requirement that they be voluntary institutions.
I can understand the confusion since people who greatly value communal institutions are more likely than others to favor making participation therein mandatory, and libertarians are more likely than others to dislike even voluntary communal institutions, but that doesn’t mean position necessarily follows from the other.
A ‘communitarian voluntarist’ (nice coinage?) might agree with a communitarian on the usefulness or necessity of communal institutions but would disagree with the premise of innate collective responsibility that communitarians use to justify mandatory participation in communal institutions.
I don’t think the defining characteristic of a libertarian is his opposition to communal institutions but rather his requirement that they be voluntary institutions.
Well that is the defining libertarian answer. However, outside of Utah, where do you see strong communal institutions? They don’t seem to exist. Remember one of the arguments why the African-American inner cities went to hell in the 1970 – 1980s? Some of it was blamed on de-segregation when the Black Middle Class (ie the Cosbys) move to the suburbs. And the rural WWC towns appear to a slower moving version of the Middle/Upper Class slowly moving away leaving. So when libertarians say communal institutions are the solution, then they should know better that communal solutions will do anything.
I recall Karl Popper’s argum entry that human beings are constitutionallying (genetically?) averse to change and, of course, risk. Incremental appearances of statism, i.e., any government policies that are not libertarian, represent, among other desires, a wish to slow the pace of change. Popper noted that evens medieval serfs were averse to creeping appearances of market forces upon the arrival of the Reformation and the Renaissance.
Do any of these arguments for liberty also compel a conclusion disfavoring poltical systems that tend to undermine liberty?