Libertarian Economists

Libertarianism (from ; or from ) is a political philosophy that holds freedom, personal sovereignty, and liberty as primary values. Many libertarians believe that the concept of freedom is in accord with the Non-Aggression Principle, according to which each individual has the right to live as they choose, as long as they do not violate the rights of others by initiating force or fraud against them.

Libertarians advocate the expansion of individual autonomy and political self-determination, emphasizing the principles of equality before the law and the protection of civil rights, including the rights to freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of choice. They generally support individual liberty and oppose authority, state power, warfare, militarism and nationalism, but some libertarians diverge on the scope and nature of their opposition to existing economic and political systems.

Schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and non-state power. Different categorizations have been used to distinguish these various forms of libertarianism.Long, Joseph. W (1996). "Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class". ''Social Philosophy and Policy''. 15 (2): 310. "When I speak of 'libertarianism' ..I mean all three of these very different movements. It might be protested that LibCap ibertarian capitalism LibSoc ibertarian socialismand LibPop ibertarian populismare too different from one another to be treated as aspects of a single point of view. But they do share a common—or at least an overlapping—intellectual ancestry."Carlson, Jennifer D. (2012). "Libertarianism". In Miller, Wilburn R., ed. ''The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America''. London: SAGE Publications
p. 1006
. . "There exist three major camps in libertarian thought: right-libertarianism, socialist libertarianism, and left-libertarianism; the extent to which these represent distinct ideologies as opposed to variations on a theme is contested by scholars." Scholars have identified distinct libertarian perspectives on the nature of property and capital, typically delineating them along left–right or socialist–capitalist axes. Libertarianism has been broadly shaped by liberal ideas.

Overview

Etymology

The first recorded use of the term ''libertarian'' was in 1789, when William Belsham wrote about libertarianism in the context of metaphysics. As early as 1796, ''libertarian'' came to mean an advocate or defender of liberty, in the sense of a supporter of republicanism, when the London Packet printed on 12 February the following: "Lately marched out of the Prison at Bristol, 450 of the French Libertarians". It was again used in a republican sense in 1802 in a short piece critiquing a poem by " the author of Gebir" and has since been used politically.

The use of the term ''libertarian'' to describe a new set of political positions has been traced to the French cognate ''libertaire'', coined in a letter French libertarian communist Joseph Déjacque wrote to mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1857. Déjacque also used the term for his anarchist publication ''Le Libertaire, Journal du mouvement social'' (''Libertarian: Journal of Social Movement'') which was printed from 9 June 1858 to 4 February 1861 in New York City. Sébastien Faure, another French libertarian communist, began publishing a new ''Le Libertaire'' in the mid-1890s while France's Third Republic enacted the so-called villainous laws (''lois scélérates'') which banned anarchist publications in France. ''Libertarianism'' has frequently been used to refer to anarchism and libertarian socialism.Ward, Colin (2004)
''Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction''
. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 62. "For a century, anarchists have used the word 'libertarian' as a synonym for 'anarchist', both as a noun and an adjective. The celebrated anarchist journal ''Le Libertaire'' was founded in 1896. However, much more recently the word has been appropriated by various American free-market philosophers .."

In the United States, the term ''libertarian'' was popularized by the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker around the late 1870s and early 1880s. ''Libertarianism'' as a synonym for ''liberalism'' was popularized in May 1955 by writer Dean Russell, a colleague of Leonard Read and a classical liberal himself. Russell justified the choice of the term as follows:

Subsequently, many Americans with classical liberal beliefs began to describe themselves as ''libertarians''. One person who popularized the term ''libertarian'' in this sense was Murray Rothbard, who began publishing libertarian works in the 1960s. Rothbard described this modern use of the words overtly as a "capture" from his enemies, writing that "for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy. 'Libertarians' had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over".

In the 1970s, Robert Nozick