Summary of The Individualists By Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi : Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of The Individualists By Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi : Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism

 

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The Individualists is a groundbreaking study of libertarian thought, tracing its evolution from radical progressive ideology in the 1850s to its current crisis of identity. The movement's evolution is analyzed through six themes: private property, skepticism of authority, free markets, individualism, spontaneous order, and individual liberty. The book uncovers a wider, more diverse, and contentious history of libertarianism, which championed the poor and marginalized but often served the interests of the rich and powerful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Jul 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223894568

Willie M. Joseph

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This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi’s The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism designed to enrich your reading experience.

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Introduction

This book is a history of libertarian thought, focusing on the diverse history of libertarianism. It is written from a particular moment in time and addresses a particular set of priors in the minds of readers of the era. The book argues that libertarianism has a longer, wider, and more diverse history than is commonly believed. It was born in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth, and was first developed in Britain and France, only later making its way to the United States. Libertarians were known for advocating ideas such as private property, free markets, and individualism. However, what sets libertarians apart is the absolutism and systematicity with which they affirm the more gentle and compromising ideas of the classical liberals.

The birth of libertarian thinking in nineteenth-century America was relatively free of the socialist shadow, as socialist movements were mostly utopian and anarchistic, rather than revolutionary and statist. The first generation of American libertarians, however, could not merely coexist with socialist thinkers, as many early American libertarians enthusiastically identified as socialists. For the first American libertarians, the greatest enemy to liberty was not socialism but slavery.

On each continent, libertarianism's radicalism emerged and took shape as a reaction against a different set of threats to freedom. In Europe, libertarian principles were dispositionally illsuited to serve as mere defenses of the status quo. Libertarian principles entail that most existing political and economic institutions are deeply unjust. Libertarianism counsels not gradualist reform but a sweeping revolution, abolishing the system of welfare, returning unjustly acquired property, sweeping restrictions on freedoms of movement and labor, and embracing the wholesale upheaval of existing institutions and privileges. Libertarianism has a history of radical and reactionary elements, with some following the dictates of libertarian justice and others defending the status quo against change.

The tension between progressive and reactionary elements became evident in the twentieth-century United States, when the rise of international and expansionist socialism led many libertarians to align themselves with conservatives against their common threat. This shift in emphasis significantly shaped the way libertarianism is currently perceived.

The book is an intellectual history of libertarian ideas, not a philosophical defense. It focuses on the ideas and arguments of libertarians as they are found, rather than providing a thorough overview of classical liberalism or the Austrian, Virginia, and Chicago schools of economics. The book is structured around topics such as poverty, anarchism, and race relations, focusing on how libertarians of different eras took divergent paths from common principles.

The book's focus on topics rather than chronology allows for a more pluralist and idiosyncratic character of libertarian thinking. Libertarianism is best understood as a cluster concept, consisting of six key commitments: property rights, negative liberty, individualism, free markets, a skepticism of authority, and a belief in the explanatory and normative significance of spontaneous order.

Understanding libertarianism as an inherently flexible ideology helps explain why it has always contained a mixture of radical and reactionary elements. An emphasis on private property and skepticism of government power could be used by radical libertarians to argue that slavery is a uniquely grotesque violation of individual self-ownership, while later libertarians could defend Southern segregation against tyrannical attempts by the federal government to dismantle it.

The book introduces three