WEBVTT NOTE Gary Chartier: The Conscience of an Anarchist 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.000 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rickenbach. 2 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:24.000 If the libertarian tradition is going to endure and grow in both size and influence, it's necessary for younger libertarians to do two things. 3 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:28.000 First, they need to familiarize themselves with that tradition. 4 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:33.280 Second, and more fundamentally, they need to add to it. 5 00:00:33.280 --> 00:00:37.320 Enter Gary Chartier, Southern California law professor. 6 00:00:37.320 --> 00:00:41.720 Chartier was born in Southern California in 1966. 7 00:00:41.720 --> 00:00:46.280 He grew up in Riverside County out in the desert east of Los Angeles. 8 00:00:46.280 --> 00:00:52.360 And when he hit adolescence, along about the early 1980s, his reading about political economy 9 00:00:52.360 --> 00:00:55.520 convinced him that he was a libertarian. 10 00:00:55.520 --> 00:01:02.100 I was, in many ways, a fairly typical proto-libertarian of my generation, he wrote more than a quarter 11 00:01:02.100 --> 00:01:03.400 century later. 12 00:01:03.400 --> 00:01:09.960 I grew up with Goldwaterite parents, I liked computers, I read science fiction, I was socially 13 00:01:09.960 --> 00:01:16.360 awkward and I discovered the libertarian party, moving house recently I chanced on flyers 14 00:01:16.360 --> 00:01:23.280 for the 1980 Ed Clark campaign and the option of acquiring libertarian books by mail order. 15 00:01:23.280 --> 00:01:29.800 And perhaps what explains my receiving a 1984 form letter, something I also rediscovered 16 00:01:29.800 --> 00:01:36.360 recently, from Ron Paul, asking that I support the fledgling Mises Institute. 17 00:01:36.360 --> 00:01:41.800 Chartier recalls looking through the small print catalogue I'd requested from a libertarian 18 00:01:41.800 --> 00:01:47.240 bookseller and learning about the diverse array of stuff with which the libertarian world 19 00:01:47.240 --> 00:01:48.240 was filled. 20 00:01:48.240 --> 00:01:54.820 I'd already spent time with Volume 2 of Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty, obtained via 21 00:01:54.820 --> 00:02:02.080 interlibrary loan, now I ordered Volume 3, along with Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia 22 00:02:02.080 --> 00:02:05.560 and Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty. 23 00:02:05.560 --> 00:02:10.760 As Chartier remembers it, these books weren't the first libertarian texts I'd read. 24 00:02:10.760 --> 00:02:15.640 Perhaps a year or two before this, I'd spent time with Milton and Rose Friedman's Free 25 00:02:15.640 --> 00:02:21.800 to Choose, but I was delighted now to have a set of substantial libertarian books to read. 26 00:02:21.800 --> 00:02:27.880 Rothbard blew my mind. Nozick was a great intellectual workout, but by far the most 27 00:02:27.880 --> 00:02:34.280 difficult author I'd ever tried to read, and I started calling Hayek my favorite economist, 28 00:02:34.280 --> 00:02:40.440 a bit puzzlingly since I didn't know many other economists, and what I'd read by Hayek wasn't 29 00:02:40.440 --> 00:02:42.920 and Economics but Political Theory. 30 00:02:42.920 --> 00:02:47.380 I acquired a copy of the Constitution of Liberty soon after. 31 00:02:47.380 --> 00:02:52.040 By the end of the summer, after I graduated from high school, ignoring the sightseeing 32 00:02:52.040 --> 00:02:58.660 opportunities on a European trip, I'd finished Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus, and soon after 33 00:02:58.660 --> 00:03:00.960 I'd read Atlas Shrugged. 34 00:03:00.960 --> 00:03:04.620 Chartier never warmed Turan's work, however. 35 00:03:04.620 --> 00:03:10.740 He reports today that it didn't engage me emotionally, intellectually and imaginatively 36 00:03:10.740 --> 00:03:14.900 as Shea and Wilson, Rothbard and Hayek did. 37 00:03:14.900 --> 00:03:20.900 Looking back on my thinking in late adolescence, I'm struck by how much I imbibed from Rothbard 38 00:03:20.900 --> 00:03:23.980 even as I disagreed with him about some things. 39 00:03:23.980 --> 00:03:28.180 I don't detect the same kind of influence on Rand's part. 40 00:03:28.180 --> 00:03:33.340 Chartier's reading didn't stop now that he'd graduated from high school, however. 41 00:03:33.340 --> 00:03:38.740 He recalls now that within the first four months of my first regular college quarter, I was 42 00:03:38.740 --> 00:03:41.460 still thinking libertarian thoughts. 43 00:03:41.460 --> 00:03:48.140 I'd been reading in and around multiple rand books, including Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, 44 00:03:48.140 --> 00:03:53.860 Philosophy Who Needs It, An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, and Anthem. 45 00:03:53.860 --> 00:03:59.260 I'd apparently even checked James J. Martin's Men Against the State out of the university 46 00:03:59.260 --> 00:04:00.260 library. 47 00:04:00.260 --> 00:04:06.180 When I borrowed and read it in 2008, I discovered that the last person to check it out had been 48 00:04:06.180 --> 00:04:09.820 me, in 1984. 49 00:04:09.820 --> 00:04:14.280 But Chartier's love affair with libertarianism was about to end. 50 00:04:14.280 --> 00:04:19.140 It didn't really survive his undergraduate years, before it foundered on the shoals of 51 00:04:19.140 --> 00:04:20.760 his compassion. 52 00:04:20.760 --> 00:04:25.940 As he wrote years later, his downfall was a set of encounters with a number of authors, 53 00:04:25.940 --> 00:04:32.480 both Christian and secular, who placed great emphasis on negative responsibility, the notion 54 00:04:32.480 --> 00:04:38.440 that we are as responsible for events that occur as a result of our omissions, whether 55 00:04:38.440 --> 00:04:45.080 or not intended, as we are for events that occur as a result of our deliberate acts. 56 00:04:45.080 --> 00:04:49.940 It wasn't long before Chartier found himself confronting an impossible dilemma. 57 00:04:49.940 --> 00:05:09.440 Given other things I believed, he wrote, it seemed as if I was committed to believing that when I failed to provide resources to a poor person anywhere in the world, I was responsible for any harm she or he underwent, if the money I could have given her would likely have prevented it. 58 00:05:09.440 --> 00:05:17.440 Whenever someone died because I hadn't given her or him money, I was, on this view, a murderer. 59 00:05:17.440 --> 00:05:22.960 I was overwhelmed at the thought that I was responsible for everyone, for everything, 60 00:05:22.960 --> 00:05:29.920 that any time I wanted to spend money on myself, I would need to justify doing so in a way that made 61 00:05:29.920 --> 00:05:36.960 clear how the expenditure represented a net benefit to the world's poor. It's fair to say that this 62 00:05:36.960 --> 00:05:43.440 way of thinking was what pushed me over the edge into full-blown statism. If the state got involved 63 00:05:43.440 --> 00:06:09.080 Shartier finished up college majoring in history and political science, then went on to do 64 00:06:09.080 --> 00:06:14.300 do graduate work in Claremont, California and Cambridge, England, winding up with a 65 00:06:14.300 --> 00:06:20.740 Ph.D. in theology from Cambridge. Back in Southern California in the early 90s, he did 66 00:06:20.740 --> 00:06:26.380 a bit of adjunct teaching and served for a spell as editor of a small newspaper. He wrote 67 00:06:26.380 --> 00:06:32.340 scholarly articles for academic journals. He wrote newspaper editorials on public issues 68 00:06:32.340 --> 00:06:38.860 and controversies of the day. In all his writing at that time, he says now, he took the authority 69 00:06:38.860 --> 00:06:41.220 of the State for granted. 70 00:06:41.220 --> 00:06:44.460 In retrospect, he adds, I find this odd. 71 00:06:44.460 --> 00:06:50.460 I certainly knew that standard liberal defenses of state authority were unsuccessful. 72 00:06:50.460 --> 00:06:55.740 Was I willing to treat state authority as rooted in some kind of sacred mandate? 73 00:06:55.740 --> 00:07:01.700 But my theological position certainly didn't allow for arbitrary divine fiats to empower 74 00:07:01.700 --> 00:07:04.280 kings or presidents. 75 00:07:04.280 --> 00:07:10.440 It could be, Chartier speculates, that I identified reflexively with members of the political 76 00:07:10.440 --> 00:07:17.440 class, assumed that what I was doing was designed to guide them, and simply treated the institutions 77 00:07:17.440 --> 00:07:24.160 they oversaw as givens because I had instinctively adopted their point of view and wanted to 78 00:07:24.160 --> 00:07:25.400 be one of them. 79 00:07:25.400 --> 00:07:27.160 I'm still not sure. 80 00:07:27.160 --> 00:07:35.000 I'm quite sure it was not because I'd given any serious thought to justifying state authority. 81 00:07:35.000 --> 00:07:41.220 His confidence in state authority eroded rapidly in the first years of the new century, however, 82 00:07:41.220 --> 00:07:46.920 when he was finishing up his law degree at UCLA and George W. Bush was living in the White 83 00:07:46.920 --> 00:07:47.960 House. 84 00:07:47.960 --> 00:07:53.720 And by the time it had become clear that Barack Obama, whatever his campaign rhetoric might 85 00:07:53.720 --> 00:07:59.720 have seemed to imply, was in fact perfectly happy, as Chartier puts it, to be serving 86 00:07:59.720 --> 00:08:02.200 George W. Bush's third term. 87 00:08:02.200 --> 00:08:09.040 Well, by then, Chartier had long since concluded that he had been duped, or perhaps even had 88 00:08:09.040 --> 00:08:10.240 duped himself. 89 00:08:10.240 --> 00:08:16.560 I had opted for statism over anarchism without thinking clearly, he says today. 90 00:08:16.560 --> 00:08:22.040 I had operated reflexively on the assumption that a stateless society wouldn't be able 91 00:08:22.040 --> 00:08:44.880 So, after most of two decades as a statist, Gary Chartier is back among us. 92 00:08:44.880 --> 00:08:49.280 And characteristically, he's putting himself forward for some of the most ambitious among 93 00:08:49.280 --> 00:08:51.540 the jobs that need doing. 94 00:08:51.540 --> 00:08:55.480 He's volunteering for the heavy lifting, you might say. 95 00:08:55.480 --> 00:09:00.120 He's young, vigorous, energetic and newly committed to the cause. 96 00:09:00.120 --> 00:09:05.320 In evidence, I offer his latest book, The Conscience of an Anarchist, why it's time 97 00:09:05.320 --> 00:09:09.460 to say goodbye to the state and build a free society. 98 00:09:09.460 --> 00:09:15.180 This is a general introduction to libertarianism for a reader who is either entirely ignorant 99 00:09:15.180 --> 00:09:20.420 of the subject or in possession of only limited information regarding it. 100 00:09:20.420 --> 00:09:25.980 And it is high time, I say, that someone has published a new volume in that category. 101 00:09:25.980 --> 00:09:31.460 The last such general introduction that seems to have made any lasting impression was Mary 102 00:09:31.460 --> 00:09:40.220 Ruert's Healing Our World, and that first came out nearly 20 years ago, in 1992. 103 00:09:40.220 --> 00:09:45.400 It is, as I say, high time that a new contender should enter the field. 104 00:09:45.400 --> 00:09:50.300 It is useful to think about this, I believe, in the same way that we think about much revisionist 105 00:09:50.300 --> 00:09:51.300 History. 106 00:09:51.300 --> 00:09:59.120 The American historian Warren I. Cohen said back in 1967 that every generation of historians 107 00:09:59.120 --> 00:10:03.120 tends to give new interpretations to the past. 108 00:10:03.120 --> 00:10:09.680 Another American historian, Richard Hofstadter, echoed this theme in 1968 when he wrote in 109 00:10:09.680 --> 00:10:15.900 his book The Progressive Historians about what he called that perennial battle we wage 110 00:10:15.900 --> 00:10:17.880 with our elders. 111 00:10:17.880 --> 00:10:23.640 As Hofstadter saw it, if we are to have any new thoughts, if we are to have an intellectual 112 00:10:23.640 --> 00:10:30.200 identity of our own, we must make the effort to distinguish ourselves from those who preceded 113 00:10:30.200 --> 00:10:36.920 us, and perhaps preeminently from those to whom we once had the greatest indebtedness. 114 00:10:36.920 --> 00:10:42.720 Similarly, every generation of libertarians will tend to come up with a slightly different 115 00:10:42.720 --> 00:10:48.060 way of introducing the subject of individual liberty to outsiders. 116 00:10:48.060 --> 00:10:53.760 One generation's libertarian primer will differ from the preceding generations, and 117 00:10:53.760 --> 00:10:56.160 from the following generations. 118 00:10:56.160 --> 00:10:59.080 This is as it should be, as it must be. 119 00:10:59.080 --> 00:11:04.360 If we are to have any new thoughts, if we are to have an intellectual identity of our 120 00:11:04.360 --> 00:11:10.680 own, we must make the effort to distinguish ourselves from those who preceded us, and 121 00:11:10.680 --> 00:11:17.080 and perhaps preeminently from those to whom we once had the greatest indebtedness. 122 00:11:17.080 --> 00:11:22.120 So how does Gary Chartier's new libertarian primer distinguish itself? 123 00:11:22.120 --> 00:11:29.020 Well, first of all, it entirely eschews the word libertarian, the L-word, I guess you 124 00:11:29.020 --> 00:11:30.440 could call it. 125 00:11:30.440 --> 00:11:35.760 Look as you might through Chartier's text, you'll find not a single occurrence anywhere 126 00:11:35.760 --> 00:12:03.400 I really want this book to reach an audience of people for whom the word libertarian might 127 00:12:03.400 --> 00:12:32.480 The readers for whom the word libertarian might be a red flag, I asked Chartier, might these 128 00:12:32.480 --> 00:12:39.560 I would hope that this book would be of interest to frustrated constitutionalists and other 129 00:12:39.560 --> 00:12:42.480 folks who might think of themselves on the right, but I definitely wanted it to be a 130 00:12:42.480 --> 00:12:48.960 book that was accessible and comprehensible to the sort of principled status lefty who 131 00:12:48.960 --> 00:12:52.840 was increasingly frustrated with the Obama administration and wondered if there were 132 00:12:52.840 --> 00:12:53.840 alternatives. 133 00:12:53.840 --> 00:13:00.480 I chose my words, I hope, pretty carefully to not unnecessarily turn off that group of 134 00:13:00.480 --> 00:13:01.480 readers. 135 00:13:01.480 --> 00:13:10.480 The other way in which Chartier's conscience of an anarchist distinguishes itself is by eschewing all moral arguments for a free society. 136 00:13:10.480 --> 00:13:22.480 I've never been a consequentialist, Chartier wrote a couple of years ago in a blog post, but in fact his argument in the conscience of an anarchist is entirely consequentialist. 137 00:13:22.480 --> 00:13:29.480 The state should be abolished because of the consequences of tolerating such an institution in human society. 138 00:13:29.480 --> 00:13:37.480 Chartier stresses, however, that his reliance on a consequentialist argument on this occasion is purely strategic. 139 00:13:37.480 --> 00:13:46.480 It does not signal, he says, any general unwillingness on his part to argue for liberty from a natural rights perspective. 140 00:13:46.480 --> 00:13:54.480 Not in this book, no. I'm prepared to argue that at some length elsewhere, but it's definitely not, from a strategic point of view, what I want to argue here. 141 00:13:54.480 --> 00:13:59.480 Not because I want to argue against certain kinds of natural rights approaches. 142 00:13:59.480 --> 00:14:06.480 One of my ongoing academic interests is natural law theory and I work quite a bit in that area. 143 00:14:06.480 --> 00:14:13.480 But it seemed to me that for this book, that wasn't the most effective rhetorical tact to take. 144 00:14:13.480 --> 00:14:22.480 What I particularly didn't want to do in this book, so I certainly didn't want to scare off the principled status lefties, 145 00:14:22.480 --> 00:14:30.320 I also wanted this to be a book that anarchists of a pretty broad range of sorts could pick 146 00:14:30.320 --> 00:14:36.320 up and appreciate without thinking that by endorsing the book they were endorsing a particular 147 00:14:36.320 --> 00:14:40.680 position on the question what should a stateless society look like. 148 00:14:40.680 --> 00:14:49.080 I would like somebody who identifies with Kropotkin or Proudhon to pick up this book and say all 149 00:14:49.080 --> 00:14:50.640 of this seems right to me. 150 00:14:50.640 --> 00:14:54.960 Now I know this guy and I might well end up having an argument about what we'd want our 151 00:14:54.960 --> 00:14:59.940 stateless community to look like, but the substance of the book doesn't amount to a broadside 152 00:14:59.940 --> 00:15:00.940 against me. 153 00:15:00.940 --> 00:15:05.460 You know, I think that was pretty important to me in trying to shape the book. 154 00:15:05.460 --> 00:15:11.160 Not that there's anything new or original about avoiding moral arguments for liberty. 155 00:15:11.160 --> 00:15:16.720 This was the approach of David Friedman in The Machinery of Freedom in 1973. 156 00:15:16.720 --> 00:15:22.320 Or is there anything revolutionary about trying to sell libertarian ideas without using the 157 00:15:22.320 --> 00:15:23.520 L-word? 158 00:15:23.520 --> 00:15:30.000 Cy Leon gave a talk at the Libertarian Supper Club of Los Angeles back in the mid-1970s, 159 00:15:30.000 --> 00:15:35.240 more than 35 years ago, when Gary Chartier was maybe 8 years old. 160 00:15:35.240 --> 00:15:39.200 The talk was called, Why I Am Not a Libertarian. 161 00:15:39.200 --> 00:15:43.720 This was enough in and of itself to draw a sizable audience. 162 00:15:43.720 --> 00:15:50.280 After all, Cy Leon was Robert Lefebvre's heir apparent, a former Nathaniel Brandon Institute 163 00:15:50.280 --> 00:15:56.440 business representative who had joined Lefebvre at his freedom school in rural Colorado and 164 00:15:56.440 --> 00:16:02.140 then helped him move the operation to Southern California and reestablish it there. 165 00:16:02.140 --> 00:16:07.560 Cy Leon was the organizer of the League of Non-Voters and at least the putative author 166 00:16:07.560 --> 00:16:14.060 of a short book called None of the Above, which argued that if we must have elections, 167 00:16:14.060 --> 00:16:17.880 we ought to include none of the above on every ballot. 168 00:16:17.880 --> 00:16:24.320 And whenever none of the above wins, a new election would have to be held with new candidates. 169 00:16:24.320 --> 00:16:29.400 None of the candidates who had lost to none of the above would be allowed to run again. 170 00:16:29.400 --> 00:16:34.760 The book had actually been ghostwritten for Psy by George H. Smith, but it was an accurate 171 00:16:34.760 --> 00:16:38.440 account of Psy's thinking for all that. 172 00:16:38.440 --> 00:16:44.760 Psy Leon was also Harry Brown's advanceman, the man who set up Brown's speaking engagements 173 00:16:44.760 --> 00:16:49.980 nationwide, and Brown himself was about the most famous libertarian you could come up 174 00:16:49.980 --> 00:16:53.280 with in the Los Angeles of the mid-1970s. 175 00:16:53.280 --> 00:16:59.180 He was a local boy who had made good, more than good, really, with a best-selling libertarian 176 00:16:59.180 --> 00:17:03.760 book called How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. 177 00:17:03.760 --> 00:17:07.840 How could Cy Leon not be a libertarian? 178 00:17:07.840 --> 00:17:13.300 Cy's beef, as it turned out, was the libertarian party, which he feared was going to teach 179 00:17:13.300 --> 00:17:17.440 Americans that libertarians believed in the political process. 180 00:17:17.440 --> 00:17:22.800 Clearly, the term libertarian was going to have to be abandoned, as the term liberal 181 00:17:22.800 --> 00:17:25.260 had had to be abandoned earlier. 182 00:17:25.260 --> 00:17:31.780 Both terms had been hijacked by the enemies of individual liberty and were no longer usable. 183 00:17:31.780 --> 00:17:37.400 That was one man's judgment, a judgment made at a particular time and place, when a particular 184 00:17:37.400 --> 00:17:43.720 generation of libertarians was facing particular obstacles in its efforts to spread the word. 185 00:17:43.720 --> 00:17:49.560 The idea of abandoning the L-word didn't really catch on with the generation of libertarians 186 00:17:49.560 --> 00:17:54.640 it was aimed at, which happens to be my own generation of libertarians. 187 00:17:54.640 --> 00:18:00.320 Will more of the libertarians now in their teens and twenties see the matter differently? 188 00:18:00.320 --> 00:18:01.600 Time will tell. 189 00:18:01.600 --> 00:18:07.120 Time will also tell whether the young libertarians of today will find Chartier's consequentialist 190 00:18:07.120 --> 00:18:10.520 arguments against the state persuasive. 191 00:18:10.520 --> 00:18:12.440 They certainly seem so to me. 192 00:18:12.440 --> 00:18:19.520 I'm an anarchist, Chartier writes, because I believe there's no natural right to rule, 193 00:18:19.520 --> 00:18:26.320 because I believe the state lacks legitimacy, because I believe the state is unnecessary, 194 00:18:26.320 --> 00:18:32.120 Because the state tips the scales in favor of privileged elites and against ordinary 195 00:18:32.120 --> 00:18:33.120 people. 196 00:18:33.120 --> 00:18:35.560 Because the state tends to be destructive. 197 00:18:35.560 --> 00:18:41.520 It engages in war and plunder, and seems persistently to be involved in ratcheting up the level 198 00:18:41.520 --> 00:18:49.140 of violence and injustice across borders, which are, of course, themselves, state creations. 199 00:18:49.140 --> 00:18:54.800 Because the state restricts personal freedom as a way of maintaining order, benefiting 200 00:18:54.800 --> 00:19:19.960 There's nothing new here, of course. 201 00:19:19.960 --> 00:19:25.840 But the familiar insights and arguments are freshly formulated in a breezy, snappy, very 202 00:19:25.840 --> 00:19:30.280 readable style and with an admirable succinctness. 203 00:19:30.280 --> 00:19:35.320 Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty and David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom were 204 00:19:35.320 --> 00:19:41.600 the libertarian primers, the general introductions to libertarianism that captured the attention 205 00:19:41.600 --> 00:19:45.080 of my generation of libertarians. 206 00:19:45.080 --> 00:19:49.720 Students who are now in their teens and twenties could do far worse than to let their own 207 00:19:49.720 --> 00:19:55.240 attention be captured by Gary Chartier's conscience of an anarchist. 208 00:19:55.240 --> 00:19:56.440 This is Jeff Rigenbach.