The Origins of the Word “Libertarian”

Martin Elson

The word “libertarian” began as a term in philosophy, not politics. Its political meaning was coined in 1857 by Joseph Déjacque, a French anarchist who had fled France to avoid prison and was living in exile in the United States, as a name for anarchism carried all the way through, in contrast 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). Its tone later reversed. By the 1890s, after a wave of bombings and anti-anarchist laws in France, libertaire had become the milder-sounding label (Nettlau 1897).

Only a century later, in postwar America, did latecomers take it up for a different cause. Leonard Read founded the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 1946 but resisted any label through the late 1940s. The push came in May 1955, when FEE’s Dean Russell urged in The Freeman that lovers of liberty “trade-mark and reserve” the word “libertarian” for their own use. Read took it up in his 1956 essay “Neither Left Nor Right” (Tucker 2016). That is the sense most Americans now associate with the word, helped by the founding of the Libertarian Party in 1971 (Craig).

Read and Russell preferred “libertarian” to “classical liberal” because “liberal” had come to mean supporters of an active welfare state (Tucker 2016). Their usage spread, and the Libertarian Party took the name at its founding in 1971. Critics on the left describe this as an appropriation of an anarchist term; American libertarians generally see it as reclaiming a word for individual liberty.

Outside the United States, the older meaning survives, though unevenly. French now keeps two separate words: libertaire for anarchists and the anti-authoritarian left, and libertarien, a borrowing of the American term first used in 1978 by the economist Henri Lepage (“Libertarianisme”), for free-market libertarians. Similar distinctions exist in Spanish and Italian with libertario. In English, however, including in Britain, “libertarian” is now widely used in the American free-market sense. The word therefore carries two lineages: an older anarchist one rooted in Déjacque, and a newer American free-market one.

The earliest recorded English use of “libertarian” comes from William Belsham’s Essays, Philosophical, Historical, and Literary (London, 1789). In his opening essay, “On Liberty and Necessity,” Belsham used “Libertarian” for those who believed in free will, setting them against “Necessitarians,” or determinists (Belsham 1789). Belsham himself sided with the Necessitarians. The Oxford English Dictionary records this 1789 sense first, and dates the broader sense, one who advocates liberty, to 1878 (OED).

The political word was born in French. Déjacque (1821–1864) was a wallpaper-hanger and poet who had fought in the Paris uprisings of 1848 and fled France after the 1851 coup. In May 1857, from New Orleans, he wrote an open letter to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De l’être-humain mâle et femelle. In it he attacked Proudhon, the first self-declared anarchist, for defending male authority over women. This is the letter where he called Proudhon “liberal and not libertarian” (Déjacque 1857). Scholars treat this as the first use of libertaire in its modern political sense (Graham 2005).

Déjacque pressed Proudhon to carry his ideas to their end: “Soyez donc franchement, entièrement anarchiste, et non pas quart d’anarchiste, huitième d’anarchiste, seizième d’anarchiste” (Déjacque 1857). Published translations differ only slightly. A literal rendering is “Be then frankly, entirely anarchist, and not a quarter-anarchist, an eighth-anarchist, a sixteenth-anarchist.” Shawn Wilbur, translating the version Déjacque reprinted in Le Libertaire in 1858, gives “Be then frankly an entire anarchist and not a quarter anarchist” (Wilbur). Robert Graham summarizes the charge as Proudhon not being “wholly anarchist,” and renders a later line, “soyez anarchiste jusqu’au bout,” as “be an anarchist through and through” (Graham 2005). For Déjacque, being libertaire meant anarchism without exceptions, extended to women as well as men.

Déjacque then gave the word a public home. On 9 June 1858 he launched Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social in New York, publishing 27 issues until 4 February 1861 (Déjacque 1858–1861; Nettlau 1996). It was the first of many anarchist papers to carry the name. The title crossed back to Europe when Sébastien Faure founded a new Le Libertaire in France on 16 November 1895 (Michel and Nemeth). By then the word had also become a safer label. France’s 1893–94 “lois scélérates” had outlawed anarchist propaganda, and “libertaire” let anarchists publish under a less provocative name (Nettlau 1897). From there, libertaire and its equivalents became standard terms across the European anarchist and libertarian-socialist left.The two senses met head-on in the twentieth century. In May 1936, at its Zaragoza congress, Spain’s anarcho-syndicalist CNT adopted comunismo libertario as its program, two months before the civil war began (Holgate 1961). That was the old sense at its high point. In America, the new sense won. Writing around 1971, Murray Rothbard boasted that his side had “captured a crucial word from the enemy,” admitting that “libertarian” had long been a polite name for left-wing anarchists (Rothbard 2007). The same word now names opposing traditions, and which one a reader hears depends largely on which side of the Atlantic they stand.

Well, here I am on the left side of the Atlantic if you face True North thinking if Rothbard said it, it must be true and settled, I give up. I love that he was full of shit or dead wrong, because the term libertarian is now shared, which makes me even happier because Rothbard wasn’t one for sharing, or caring from what I can tell.

Do I want libertarian to mean left-libertarian and anarchist? Should there only be one term? I have come to be OK with it, and like it because I really want to get as far from the other wing as I can. To use a line from my favorite left-libertarian, Voltairine de Cleyre, “Names are indifferent to me; I am not afraid of bugaboos. Let it be so, then,…” left-libertarian or anarchist, and I get two for either one, what a bargain.

Is it worth fighting to keep the name “libertarian” for its original purveyors? At this juncture anarchism is still a bad word for many, Rothbard was right, but it’s a badge of honor for others, and it’s slowly becoming more acceptable, much like the word “atheism,” or “vegan,” which aren’t quite as taboo as they were only a decade ago. However, the media (or how the media portrays) black bloc, crimethInc, and antifa may do more harm than good when it comes to public perceptions, a label won’t change that.

Since the 70’s the co-opted libertarian designation has needed a prefix to distinguish left from right, or just what someone means when they say “libertarian.” The right-libs typically embrace laissez-faire “capitalism” and politics/government (albeit minimal), but the original or “real” libertarians embrace the anarcho-socialist tradition. What else could we call right-libertarians? Republitarians? Rightarians? (Ayn) Randians? Aynians? Randroids? Minarchists? Voluntaryists? The Alt-Lib Party? Reich-libertarians?

This site and many others continue to use “libertarianism” to refer to anarchism because of the name-game situation we have found ourselves in, where up is down and down is up. We even have to say left-anarchist now, of all the indignities, because some capitalists decided to use the word anarchist. It is a game some of us feel should not exist. Why should “real” libertarians (anarchists/left libertarians) cede? It’s not that left and right libertarians don’t have anything in common, as “every difference of opinion is not a difference in principle” (Thomas Jefferson). However, some details and core principles are certainly at odds, and ceding 170 years of history is hard to swallow.

It’s not clear that any of this is important really, and it’s not going away. Each camp can keep going about their lives as they have and sometimes stealing flags back or trying to burn them. It’s an identity politics of its own kind. Personally, “anarchist without adjectives” or “libertarian without adjectives” cuts to the crux of breaking the chains of authority and its bedfellows, and where libertarianous treads water. “Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order.” (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon). Agency is not a crime, or is it?

Libertarianous is a silly name for a website, but it’s not so easy to find open or unparked domain names anymore. Of course “ous,” turns nouns and verbs into adjectives that mean “full of” or “possessing the qualities of” or “more of.” Take that wrong-libertarians. It’s a fun conversation…”What political party do you vote for? Well, I’m not one to vote a party line, as a libertarianous I’m the anus that just likes to limit the damage of policies that ignore agency anyway, so that is my driver…”

Debating definitions and word origins and rightful ownership is an unproductive task, and not worth the time wasted above, but here we are, 170 years later, or 70 years after libertarian was coopted, or stolen. Which makes sense, I mean, theft is the crux of right-libertarianism as its political economy is based on the usury of capitalism, but I don’t digress…

Anarchy is Order, like a fractal in Chaos Theory, Order generated from the ‘Chaos’ of the many paths crossing to seek Order. If the paths are libertarian in nature they will shed minimal turbulence to disturb others and find order via liberty if they have also shed the fetters of Authority in their wake. Anarchism is more process and ethics than final solutions to land a monopoly in control of process and the outlook. The solution is in an evolution around moving forward as needed to preserve a better world with liberty or agency and justice in tow.

“Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader worship.” —Voltairine de Cleyre

“The real revolution is the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character. The only real emancipation is individual…” —Will Durant

“There is nothing intrinsically wrong about utopias, the problem is if you just have one of them, we need as many utopian visions as possible…” —David Graeber

Good luck on your journey. Leave us some breadcrumbs in your wake. 

Sources

Primary

Secondary

  • Graham, Robert, ed. Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Vol. 1. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005.
  • Graham, Robert. “Joseph Déjacque, the First Libertarian.” The Anarchist Library
  • Nettlau, Max. A Short History of Anarchism. London: Freedom Press, 1996, pp. 75–76.
  • Oxford English Dictionary, “libertarian, n. and adj.” Oxford University Press.
  • “Le Libertaire.” Wikipedia (for the 1895 Faure relaunch).
  • “libertarian.” Wiktionary (for Read and Russell).

Translations

  • Wilbur, Shawn P., trans. Joseph Déjacque, “Exchange,” from Le Libertaire No. 6 (21 September 1858). The Libertarian Labyrinth
  • Graham, Robert, ed. Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Vol. 1 (2005), which includes excerpts of the 1857 letter in English.

On French usage

  • “libertaire.” La langue française dictionary
  • “Libertarianisme” (French Wikipedia mirror) on libertarien and Lepage, 1978. areq.net. Verify against Lepage, Demain le capitalisme (1978).