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What Is Libertarianism?
Think about the choices you made this week. What you ate, what you read, who you spent time with, how you earned your money and what you did with it. Most of us take for granted that these decisions are ours to make. Libertarianism starts from that ordinary intuition and takes it seriously.
In one sentence
Libertarianism is the idea that each person has the right to live her life as she chooses, as long as she respects the equal right of others to do the same.
Everything else in the philosophy grows from there. The word can sound technical, or like something you would only hear in a political science class. It isn’t. The ideas behind it are some of the oldest and most practical in modern history, and many of the people who shaped them were women.
The core ideas
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You belong to yourself
Your life, your body and your mind are your own. Nobody else, including the government, has the right to decide how you should live, what you should believe or whom you should love. Libertarians often call this self-ownership.
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What you earn is yours
If you own yourself, you also own the fruits of your work: your wages, the business you build, the home you save for. Private property is not about greed. It is what lets people plan for the future, take risks and keep what they create.
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Cooperation works best when it is voluntary
Most of what makes life good comes from people working together freely: trading, hiring, founding businesses, starting book clubs, raising money for causes they care about. No single person knows enough to run a whole economy. Millions of people making their own decisions, each using what they know about their own lives, usually do much better.
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Government should be limited
Most libertarians believe government has a real job: protecting people from violence, theft and fraud, and enforcing contracts fairly. The trouble starts when it goes beyond that. So the question libertarians always ask is simple: is this really something that requires force, or can people solve it on their own?
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Tolerance is a principle, not a favor
You don’t have to approve of how other people live to accept their right to live that way. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of conscience exist precisely to protect the choices we disagree with.
Put together, these ideas can be summed up in a line often used to describe the philosophy: peaceful people should be left alone to pursue their own happiness.
Where the ideas come from
The word “libertarian” is fairly new. The ideas are not.
Click a date to learn more.
1689John Locke
Second Treatise of Government · 1689
The English philosopher argued that every person is born with natural rights to life, liberty and property. Governments, he said, exist to protect those rights, not to grant them, and a government that abuses them loses its legitimacy. The idea went on to shape the American Declaration of Independence.
“Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”
1776Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations · 1776
The Scottish thinker showed that ordinary people pursuing their own interests, through free and fair exchange, end up serving each other. No central authority needs to organize it. Smith also wrote a whole book on sympathy and moral feeling, which is a good reminder that his case for markets was never a case against caring for others.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
1792Mary Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman · 1792
At a time when women had almost no legal independence, Wollstonecraft argued that they are rational beings, just like men, and deserve the same education and the same chance to run their own lives. Her case for women’s freedom was, at its heart, a case for individual freedom.
“I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”
1850Frédéric Bastiat
The Law · 1850
The French writer asked a question we can all relate to: what happens when the law, which is supposed to protect us, is used to take from some people and give to others? The Law is short, clear and still one of the best introductions to these ideas.
“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”
1859J.S. and Harriet Mill
On Liberty · 1859
On Liberty gave us one of the clearest tests for when society may interfere with an individual’s choices: only to prevent harm to others. Mill wrote it with his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, and said in its dedication that the book belonged as much to her as to him.
“Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
1943The founding mothers
Lane · Paterson · Rand · 1943
In a single year, in the middle of a world war, three American women published books that would help launch the modern libertarian movement: Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand.
1944F.A. Hayek
The Road to Serfdom · 1944
The Austrian economist warned that giving the state control over economic life slowly erodes every other freedom, even when the planners mean well. No central planner can know what millions of people know about their own lives. Hayek later received the Nobel Prize in economics.
“The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
1955Dean Russell
Dean Russell · 1955
For most of this history, these thinkers called themselves liberals, in the original sense of the word: people who put liberty first. In the United States, by the 1950s, “liberal” had come to mean something quite different. So Dean Russell, a writer at the Foundation for Economic Education, proposed reviving an old word instead: libertarian. It stuck.
1980Milton and Rose Friedman
Free to Choose · 1980
With his wife and co-author, Rose Friedman, the American economist brought these ideas to millions of people through a bestselling book and a TV series of the same name, explaining in everyday language how economic freedom and personal freedom go together.
“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”
The founding mothers
The story of liberty is often told as a list of men. It shouldn’t be.
In 1943, in the middle of a world war and at a moment when many intellectuals believed the future belonged to planned economies, three American women published books that would help launch the modern libertarian movement. Isabel Paterson’s biographer, Stephen Cox, called them the “Libertarians of ’43.” Many writers since have called them the founding mothers of libertarianism.
Rose Wilder Lane
The Discovery of Freedom · 1943
The daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose grew up on the frontier that her mother’s Little House books made famous. As a young woman she was drawn to socialism, until she visited the Soviet Union and saw what it meant in practice. In The Discovery of Freedom, she told the history of humanity as a long struggle between people trying to run their own lives and authorities trying to control them.
“I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom.”
Isabel Paterson
The God of the Machine · 1943
Born in Canada, Isabel left school young and educated herself through reading. For 25 years she wrote a books column for the New York Herald Tribune, which she used to argue for individual liberty when that view was deeply unfashionable. In The God of the Machine, she compared a free society to an electrical circuit: energy flows when individuals are free to create and exchange, and the circuit breaks when power is concentrated in a few hands.
“To live, people must think, and to think, they must be free.”
Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead · 1943
Ayn grew up in Russia and watched the new Soviet state confiscate her family’s business after the 1917 revolution. She emigrated to the United States in 1926. The Fountainhead, a novel about an architect who refuses to compromise his work to please others, became a bestseller and, for millions of readers, a first encounter with the moral case for individualism. She admired Paterson’s book so much that she said it “could literally save the world.”
The three women didn’t agree on everything, and they argued as fiercely with each other as with their critics. But together they kept the ideas of liberty alive at a time when few others would, and they showed that these ideas could be told through history, philosophy and fiction, not just economics.
What libertarianism is not
“It’s just about money.”
Economic freedom matters, but it is one part of a larger picture. The same principle that defends your right to run a business also defends your right to speak your mind, practice your faith and make decisions about your own life.
“Libertarians don’t care about other people.”
Caring about people and wanting the government to do something are not the same thing. Libertarians believe that families, friends, neighbors, charities and communities are often better at helping people than distant bureaucracies, because they know the people they are helping. Freedom includes the freedom to be generous.
“It means no rules at all.”
Not at all. A free society depends on clear and fair rules: respect for other people’s rights, honest dealing, contracts that are kept. What libertarians question is the idea that more rules, made by fewer people, will lead to better lives.
“It belongs to the left or the right.”
It doesn’t fit neatly on either side. Libertarians tend to agree with the left on some personal freedoms and with the right on some economic ones, and they often disagree with both. The thread that ties their views together is consistency: freedom in every part of life.
Where to go next
If you want to keep reading, these are good places to start:
- The Law, Frédéric Bastiat (1850)
- On Liberty, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill (1859)
- The Discovery of Freedom, Rose Wilder Lane (1943)
- The God of the Machine, Isabel Paterson (1943)
- The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek (1944)
- Free to Choose, Milton and Rose Friedman (1980)
Ideas are better discussed than read alone
At LOLA, women in cities around the world meet to talk about books like these, share their own experiences and learn from each other. You don’t need to be an expert, and you don’t need to agree with everything. You just need to be curious.
Want to know where LOLA stands on specific issues? Read our LOLA Stances.
Sources
- What Is Libertarianism?, Libertarianism.org
- Where Does the Term “Libertarian” Come From, Anyway?, Foundation for Economic Education
- How Three Women Sought to Sway Americans Away from Socialism, Foundation for Economic Education
- The Founding Mothers of Libertarianism, Reason
- The Forgotten Legacy of Harriet Taylor Mill, Libertarianism.org
- Equal Rights: Mary Wollstonecraft, Libertarianism.org