Exploring Libertarianism
Like self-organizing systems in nature, social order can emerge from the free interaction of many people instead of being imposed from above. When those interactions are voluntary and respect other people’s agency, domination is cast off and order grows out of liberty rather than against it. Seen this way, libertarianism is less a finished blueprint than an ethic and a process: an ongoing effort to build a freer, more just world without handing control to any single authority or representative.
In English, “libertarian” began in metaphysics: in 1789 it named those who believed in free will rather than determinism. Its political life started in French. In 1857 Joseph Déjacque, a French anarchist who had fled France to avoid prison and was living in exile in the United States, carried it into social philosophy. He used “libertarian” to mean anarchism carried all the way through, as opposed to what he saw as Proudhon’s half-way, “liberal” anarchism. He called Proudhon an “anarchiste juste-milieu, libéral et non LIBERTAIRE”: a middle-of-the-road anarchist, liberal and not libertarian (Déjacque 1857; Graham 2005). Later the word’s tone flipped. By the 1890s, after a wave of bombings and anti-anarchist laws in France, libertaire had become the milder-sounding label (Nettlau 1897)… Continue: The Origins of the Word “Libertarian”
In 1850 Anselme Bellegarrigue, a French individualist anarchist, published L’Anarchie, journal de l’ordre, often called the first anarchist manifesto. It declared that “anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war.” The idea goes back to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. In What Is Property? (1840) he wrote that just as people seek justice in equality, society seeks order in anarchy. He later put it as “anarchy is order without power.” Bellegarrigue boiled Proudhon’s idea down to a slogan: Anarchy is Order. Nobody knows whether the circle-A, Ⓐ, was inspired by that phrase. I also like to to think of it as a beginning (Alpha, A) and sometimes an end (Omega, O), or Alpha without Origin or a continuation or evolution of a now distant or lost beginning. In Greek, ἄρχων (archōn, ruler) and ἀρχή (archē, beginning or origin) share a root in ἄρχειν (archein), which means both “to begin” and “to rule.” In Athens it was even the name for a year when no chief magistrate (archon) was chosen. The related adjective ἄναρχος (anarchos) could also mean “without beginning.” The one who began was once simply the one who went first. The ruler is the one who claims to be the only beginning, the source all order must flow from: literally a mon-archy, a single origin. Anarchy rejects the ruler’s claim to be the only beginning, and in doing so keeps beginnings plural. It is democracy carried all the way through: not one ruler, not a majority ruling the rest, but everyone a beginning. It is democracy without the kratos (power or rule).
In everyday speech, chaos means randomness and disorder, and anarchy, as anti-politics, gets lumped in as chaos rather than order. The usual reasoning is equivocation: chaos is bad, anarchy is chaos, so anarchy is bad. Can Order come out of the chaos of many paths, maybe if there is one vision, Anarchy as Order, not following orders.
Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics showing that behavior that looks random can come from simple, deterministic rules and hide a deeper order. Fractals are one picture of this: self-similar patterns repeating across scales, made by feeding an equation’s output back into itself again and again. Oddly, even though the process is fully determined, or without free will, the result can’t be predicted. A system’s future is set by its starting state, with no randomness involved, yet the tiniest change to that state can send it down a completely different road.
Human interaction works like the butterfly effect: a small change can snowball, or jump, into very different outcomes. Every small decision and every bit of feedback shapes what comes next, which makes prediction hard. That’s chaos in the mathematical sense.
States build linear, cause-and-effect thinking into their structure: rigid, “orderly,” top-down patterns, with some window dressing of order by democracy from below. States try to control outcomes through fixed inputs, and they still produce chaos, often the worst kind. Libertarianism, or anarchism, puts the sovereignty or agency of the individual above that of the state. The difference comes down to feedback. Under a state, a few people decide and everyone else lives with the consequences. Under libertarianism, everyone’s choices shape the pattern, and liberty is what gets amplified.
To stretch the metaphor further: anarchism is quantum. It’s nonlinear and it’s concern is the very small, the individual. To borrow from Heisenberg, the more precisely we measure the momentum of libertarian action for change, the less we can pin down where any one libertarian stands, and vice versa. Momentum needs fuzzy positions. Coalitions that got things done, like ending the draft, the criminal justice reform push of the 2010s, and cannabis legalization, worked because nobody asked whether you were a minarchist, an anarcho-capitalist, a left-libertarian, or a “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” suburbanite. People agreed on the direction and left the coordinates vague. Precise positions kill momentum. Ask everyone to say exactly where they stand on roads, the Fed, intellectual property, open borders, or the non-aggression principle in edge cases, and the movement turns into a seminar. Libertarian purity fights prove the point. And here we are…
The Heisenberg analogy does creak in one place. In physics the trade-off has a fixed floor (ħ/2). In politics the constant seems to depend on how individualist the members are, and libertarians may have the biggest Planck constant of all. That’s one reason “herding cats” is the other go-to metaphor.
The take-home lesson? Live in the moment, don’t expect perfect outcomes, engage with people, give feedback, and make sure the starting state, or beginning, is a good one. Being an ass along the way can snowball into a fractal of repeating asses. We don’t need asses amplified. The “chaos” of anarchism, amplifying liberty at the beginning, is a far more beautiful future than a goose-stepping bureaucracy that smells like ass. Wait, did I just step in kratos?
