Family Resemblance

Is Peter Thiel a Real Libertarian?

About a month ago, I published an essay here arguing that libertarianism is held together less by a shared philosophical core than by sociological anchors - institutions, friendships, formative texts - and that its internal disputes resist clean resolution because the tradition was never as philosophically coherent as libertarians have tended to assume. That piece, “The Myth of Libertarianism,” now has a companion piece out today at AIER’s The Daily Economy. It has also drawn two careful responses. The first, from David Gordon and Roger Bissell at the Mises Wire, argues that libertarianism has a fixed philosophical essence my piece denies. The second, from Chris Sciabarra at his Substack, accepts more of my framework but presses a harder question about its limits. The two replies come from different directions, and both deserve a serious answer.

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Gordon and Bissell argue that libertarianism really does have a fixed philosophical essence — “you own your justly-earned property and your body and your labor, and no one else may rightfully deprive you of it. The non-aggression principle reigns supreme and without exception.” Anyone who departs from this, on their view, is not really a libertarian at all.

Let me grant what’s true in this. The term “libertarian” isn’t infinitely elastic, and my piece did not claim it was. The label picks out a recognizable lineage, and definitional boundaries exist. But there is a deeper problem with their argument.

The problem is that their reply performs the very move my piece described. I argued that when libertarians disagree, the standard maneuver is to declare the other side not really libertarian and decline to engage their argument. Gordon and Bissell take precisely that maneuver and offer it as a refutation. They don’t engage the historical record showing the term “libertarian” used by anarcho-communists in the 1850s, by single-taxers and mutualists at the turn of the century, by Read and Rothbard and Friedman across the twentieth. They don’t engage the property rights disputes I laid out — between Spencer and Tucker on intellectual property, between George and Rothbard on land, between Tucker and Nozick on original appropriation — in which all parties accept self-ownership and the NAP and still reach opposite policy conclusions. They offer arguments for the boundary they prefer but decline to engage the disputes the boundary itself is meant to settle. As empirical confirmation of the original argument, it would be hard to improve on.

Gordon and Bissell do, however, raise several arguments that deserve direct engagement. The first is about the Lewis brothers’ framework itself. Tribes, they argue, hold together while their substantive positions shift; libertarianism is splintering rather than holding together, so the model doesn’t fit. But this misreads both the framework and the data. Conservatism is the Lewis brothers’ canonical example: conservatives went from free traders to protectionists, hawks to doves, opponents of federal power to its champions, all while continuing to call themselves conservatives. Tribal identification persists across radical shifts in substantive position. The libertarian case fits the pattern exactly. Bleeding-hearts and paleolibertarians, left-libertarians and neoreactionaries, open-borders absolutists and immigration restrictionists disagree with each other about almost every contested question of contemporary politics — and every one of them insists they are the real libertarians. That isn’t tribal fracture. It’s the persistence of tribal identification across radical substantive disagreement, which is exactly what the framework predicts.

Their second argument turns on a concession in my piece itself. I grant that libertarian principles “rule out the more extreme forms of state socialism,” and they argue that this is enough to establish a real essence — making my “no fixed essence” claim overstated. But the concession does less than they want it to. Principles that exclude the maximally extreme cases are not the same as principles that settle the contested ones, and the disputes my piece catalogues are not disputes about whether liberty matters. They are disputes among self-identified libertarians, all of whom accept the framing principles, about what those principles require in practice. An essence too thin to settle those disputes is just what my essay claims libertarian principles to be.

Their most philosophically substantive objection is that I have conflated two kinds of pluralism: Berlin’s pluralism about goods in personal ethics, which they accept, and political pluralism, which they take to license the state in balancing competing goods on behalf of individuals. But the pluralism my piece appeals to isn’t pluralism about goods in the Berlinian sense. It’s pluralism about how libertarian principles themselves should be applied, among people who all accept those principles. Tucker and Nozick are not disagreeing about how to balance liberty against welfare. They are disagreeing about what liberty itself requires. The charge of category confusion misfires.

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Chris Sciabarra’s response comes at my argument from a different direction, and I want to engage it at greater length. Sciabarra is among the most careful philosophers working in the libertarian tradition. His trilogy on dialectical libertarianism — culminating in Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism — is the most serious sustained attempt I know of to think about liberty in genuinely contextual, non-axiomatic terms. Anyone who wants to take the philosophical project of libertarianism seriously should read it. So I pay close attention when Sciabarra tells me my framework is missing something.

The first part of his response argues that I have misrepresented Ayn Rand as a deductive monist. He shows that Rand’s actual method is more contextual and dialectical than I suggested — that her concern with the cognitive effects of force depends on a broader integration of psychology, culture, and political institutions. The point is well taken, and Sciabarra knows Rand better than I do. I probably did misinterpret her, and his reading is more careful. Anyone who wants the deeper picture should read his Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.

The second and harder part of his response is more pointed. If my framework treats libertarianism as a tribe with sociological anchors rather than a doctrine with deductive content, what stops Peter Thiel — whose company builds the surveillance architecture for ICE deportations — from claiming the label? An ideology, Sciabarra argues, that cannot exclude figures whose actions directly contradict its supposed core commitments has been “emptied of meaning.”

This is a sharp critique. The right response, I think, is partly to accept Chris’s point and partly to refine it.

First, the acceptance. My framework is descriptive about how the term “libertarian” actually functions in the world, not normative about who counts as a real member of the tradition. I argued that “libertarianism” picks out a sociological lineage rather than a deductive philosophy, and that the disputes inside the lineage don’t admit of clean resolution by appeal to first principles. None of that licenses moral indifference about Thiel. The substantive case against what Palantir does — the surveillance state, the deportation infrastructure, the entrenchment of corporate-state collusion — is a case I’d make, and one any liberal worth the name should make. The framework doesn’t deliver Thiel’s exclusion from the libertarian tribe, but it also doesn’t deliver his inclusion. It simply observes that the term is doing less philosophical work than libertarians like Gordon and Bissell think it is doing, and concludes that we should be having the substantive arguments rather than the membership ones.

On the substantive arguments, Sciabarra and I agree. Our difference is methodological. Sciabarra thinks the label “libertarian” retains enough normative force that maintaining its boundaries against figures like Thiel matters. I think the term’s gatekeeping function distracts from the substantive work, and that the arguments worth having are about what freedom requires, not about whose claim to the label is legitimate.

Here is where the disagreement gets interesting. The case that distinguishes our approaches isn’t Thiel. On Thiel, the two frameworks converge on the same negative judgment: Sciabarra concludes that Thiel is not a libertarian; I conclude that Thiel is a libertarian whose actions are indefensible. The disapproval is shared even though its form is not. Where that difference in form starts to matter is the case of Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Hoppe is a self-identified libertarian with deep institutional standing in the tradition: books published by libertarian presses, decades of writing for libertarian journals, a major position at one of the field’s most prominent academic centers for libertarian thought. His substantive views, however, are exclusionary in ways that I and many other libertarians find deeply authoritarian — a stridently restrictionist view of immigration, a defense of the right of property owners to physically remove democrats and homosexuals from covenant communities, a politics that would license much of what Sciabarra and I would both strongly reject.

The question for Sciabarra is whether the framework he’s used to exclude Thiel from the libertarian tradition also excludes Hoppe. If it does, then Sciabarra has done what Gordon and Bissell did to bleeding-heart libertarians — used his own substantive judgments as the test for membership, and read out figures whose substantive judgments he disagrees with. If it doesn’t, then the framework doesn’t deliver the exclusions Sciabarra wants it to deliver. Either way, the dialectical procedure does not by itself produce the verdict. The substantive judgments that Sciabarra brings to the procedure do. And the substantive judgments are themselves contested among self-identified libertarians.

The deeper point is that Sciabarra’s focus on Thiel’s actions doesn’t really resolve the underlying problem. An action counts as non-libertarian only if its goals or consequences are non-libertarian, and that judgment is itself substantive. Sciabarra’s verdict on Thiel — that Palantir’s contracts with ICE undermine the conditions of freedom — rests on the prior judgment that mass deportation is an aggression against the deportees rather than an enforcement of citizens’ property rights, and that the surveillance architecture is an authoritarian project rather than a defensive one. I share both judgments. But neither is delivered by the dialectical procedure itself; both are substantive commitments about what freedom requires. Once we see that action-based evaluation is values-based evaluation in disguise, the structure of the Hoppe case is the same as the structure of the Thiel case. Whether Hoppe is in or out of the tradition turns on whether his substantive views are, and his substantive views are themselves the contested terrain.

This is not a knock-down argument against Sciabarra’s project. The dialectical framework, as he develops it in Total Freedom, is more careful and more substantive than the bare-axiom approach. It does real work in helping us think about how concrete actions interact with the broader institutional context of liberty. But on the question of who counts as a libertarian, I think the framework runs into the same difficulty mine does. The disputes about who is in the tradition are downstream of substantive disputes about what freedom requires, and the substantive disputes are themselves the live ones.

Where does this leave the disagreement? In a smaller place than the rhetoric suggests. Both Sciabarra and I are committed to having substantive arguments about what freedom requires rather than definitional arguments about who counts. Both of us think Thiel’s actions deserve criticism on substantive grounds. We disagree about whether the libertarian label retains enough normative force to be worth defending against figures who use it in bad faith. I think it doesn’t. Sciabarra thinks it does. Reasonable libertarians — and I count Sciabarra among the most thoughtful — can disagree about that.

Sciabarra ends Total Freedom with a line I would happily borrow: that any serious project of liberty “can only proceed with a deeper understanding of the context, the real social conditions that inhibit — or promote — those values necessary for the sustenance of a genuinely human existence.” That is the orientation I am trying to defend, and it is the orientation that the original piece was meant to encourage. The dispute isn’t about whether to ask the questions. It’s about what work the labels can still do once we are asking them.