Liberty and Equality

Saturday, January 31, 2009

The Mises Institute recently started selling editions of the book "Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Times".

Here is the description of the book: "Sometime in the 18th century, the word equality gained ground as a political ideal, but the idea was always vague. In this treatise, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn argues that it reduced to one simple and very dangerous idea: equality of political power as embodied in democracy. He marshals the strongest possible case that democratic equality is the very basis not of liberty, as is commonly believed, but the total state. He uses national socialism as his prime example. He further argues the old notion of government by law is upheld in old monarchies, restrained by a noble elite. Aristocracy, not democracy, gave us liberty. On his side in this argument, he includes the whole of the old liberal tradition, and offers overwhelming evidence for his case. In our times, war and totalitarianism do indeed sail under the democratic flag. This book, capable of overturning most of what you thought you knew about political systems, was first published in 1952. 403 pages."

A number of objections can be made against this description alone. For one thing, it seems erroneous to propose that liberty and equality are absolutely dichotomous, and it hardly is the case that the state-democratic notion of equality in political power is the only possible interpretation or definition of equality in political philosophy. So this description asserts some false assumptions. Furthermore, the idea that monarchies were based on liberty and were meaningfully "restrained by law", or that "artistocracy gave us liberty" is of course nonsense. This is simply romanticist historical revisionism. Why couldn't one oppose both aristocracy and contemporary democracy? Wouldn't the view that both artisocratic government and democratic government violate liberty make more sense and be consistent? It seems like the tendency of the Hoppeans is to act as if old order artistocracies and liberty go hand in hand, which makes no sense at all and doesn't seem to be consistent with libertarianism. So much focus is narrowly put into opposing modern democracy and socialism that aristocratic and monarchal states end up being conflated with libertarianism.

Posted by Brainpolice at 10:37 PM

Labels: Liberty; Equality