Rationalism in Politics

The case for taking reality seriously

For those of you who haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend Tim Sandefur’s recent book, Freedom’s Furies, a delightful and edifying account of three of the most important and interesting women in libertarian intellectual history: Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand.

Each of these individuals was brilliant, creative, and - quite often - incredibly and destructively stubborn. Lane, for instance, once wrote in a letter to Ayn Rand about a time when Paterson had visited her home. The two women got into an argument about whether it was possible for rosebushes to grow in the shade of a tree. Paterson insisted that it was not. Lane then pointed to her yard, where a rosebush was, in fact, flourishing directly under a maple tree. Paterson, confronted by this conflict between the evidence of her senses and the logic of her own conviction, opted for the latter, and maintained that such a thing was clearly, flatly impossible.

The story reminded me of a reaction I had when I first read Ludwig von Mises’s book, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition. On the whole, I think it’s a fantastic book, showcasing Mises at his best: a champion of optimism, reason, and a universal reign of peace, cooperation, and freedom. At times, however, Mises evinces precisely the same sort of stubborn blindness to reality as Paterson. For instance, Mises insists that capitalism is the "only possible system of social organization." Socialism, he says, is impossible because of the now well-known economic calculation problem. And a mixed-economy, he argues, is likewise impossible because interventionist efforts will always be self-defeating and will require either more interventions (thus leading to socialism and collapse) or the repeal of all interventions (thus leading to capitalism). Since neither socialism nor interventionism is possible, capitalism is thus left as the last man standing.

But wait. What’s that under the tree outside your window? Oh, right. It’s a mixed economy. I don’t even need to know where in the world your economy exists in order to make this claim because basically every economy is a mixed economy. And, as far as I can tell, the fact that something actually exists is pretty conclusive proof that it is possible for it to exist.

What’s going on here? Paterson’s refusal to concede may have just been plain old stubbornness. But Mises’ problem seems to me something much worse: not (just) stubbornness, but rationalism.

In The Individualists, John Tomasi and I distinguish between rationalist and empiricist approaches to libertarianism. Rationalist approaches seek to ground libertarianism in axiomatic first principles like the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), and then derive concrete policy conclusions through a process of logical deduction. Empiricist approaches, in contrast, pay careful attention to how policies actually work, or fail to work.

There are a lot of problems with rationalist approaches. For starters, as Mises’ argument illustrates, they tend to blind you to reality. If the minimum wage is wrong because it violates the NAP, then it simply doesn’t matter whether it “works” or not. Empirical evidence about the effects of minimum wages on employment are irrelevant to the rationalist, and therefore not something worth devoting any considerable time to exploring. It’s thus not a coincidence that rationalist libertarians like Mises and Rand often come off as close-minded and uncurious. For the rationalist, questions of public policy are settled by appeal to first principles. Why waste your time arguing (or thinking) about a case that’s already closed?

Rationalist approaches are also unconvincing to most people, and quite properly so. Someone who argues that the child tax credit is wrong because “taxation is theft” is going to score points with the handful of other people who already believe that taxation is theft. But the only thing he’s going to convince everyone else of is that libertarians are nuts. If libertarianism logically implies that their favorite government program is immoral, they’re going to respond by rejecting the premise, not embracing the conclusion. Especially when the arguments offered for those foundational premises are so often terribly weak.

The alternative approach to libertarianism is nicely illustrated in David Schmidtz’s new book, Living Together: Inventing Moral Science. In it, Schmidtz rejects the idea that political philosophy should “aim to derive necessary truths from timeless axioms, ignoring ephemeral contingencies of time and place.” Rather, he argues, “theorizing about how to live [should] ask what has a history of demonstrably being organizing principles of actual thriving communities at their best.”

Schmidtz’s emphasis on history here suggests affinity with a certain strand of conservatism, such as that set forth by Michael Oakeshott in the essay from which the title of this post is borrowed. In deciding how to live together, we give a certain deference to evolved institutions simply because they have withstood the test of time. We might not fully understand why they work, and we might still justifiably believe that they can be improved in certain respects. But in thinking about what might be, we start with what is.

This conservative tendency can help counter the natural vice of empiricism - hubris. It’s easy for the clever empiricist to be fooled into believing that he can design his way out of any problem that arises, case by case. Last regulation didn’t work? No problem, here’s a new one to fix it! That one created problems of its own? OK, here’s another. In our quest to solve the immediate problem before us, we risk ignoring the cumulative effect of a the set of regulations a whole, each with its own unforeseen consequences. In this way, as Hayek rightly noted, the unchecked pursuit of expediency is actually, over time, quite inexpedient.

So every path has its pitfalls. But I’m convinced that if libertarianism is to become relevant again, it’s going to be - as a recent piece by Noah Smith argues - by engaging in the “long, hard, case-by-case slog” of looking at what works, and what doesn’t. Philosophy has a role to play in this process, particularly in helping us to get a clearer idea of what it means to work beyond the silly hedonic utilitarianism too often embraced by economists. But even that exercise can’t be done from the armchair. Figuring out what counts as a life well-lived, no less than figuring out what counts as a well-ordered society, is a task that starts by opening up your window, and looking out at the world.