Wednesday, January 25, 2012

The Mundane Idea of Individual Liberty

If "ideological thinking" is to be defined as concerned with grand, comprehensive sociopolitical visions, which aim at assigning everyone a role in the all-encompassing "social organism", then libertarianism, with its basic, almost self-evident precepts, known to most of us since our sandbox days - keep your mitts to yourself, don't punch others, don't grab other people's stuff, live and let live - appears to be as non-ideological as any such precepts can be.

And, if "ideological thinking" is to defined as largely based on utopian fantasizing, then it seems to me that libertarianism qualifies as the voice of the most mundane and platitudinous common sense, consistent with our most ordinary notions of interpersonal decency. Incidentally, the same applies on the intellectual level to the school of positive economic theorizing that most libertarians subscribe to.

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