Nearly forty years ago, as a student at New York University, I had the privilege of studying and interacting regularly with key figures in the traditions of both Austrian economics and Marxian social theory. Among the former were such scholars as Israel Kirzner, Mario Rizzo, Gerald O’Driscoll, Murray N. Rothbard, and Don Lavoie; among the latter were theorists in economics (James Becker), sociology (Wolf Heydebrand), and political philosophy (my doctoral dissertation adviser, Bertell Ollman).

What I learned at the time was that both traditions had utilized elements of a “dialectical” methodology, rooted in ancient Greek philosophy and first articulated as a theoretical approach in the works of Aristotle. Such dialectical methods emphasized that in our exploration of any problem, it was necessary to grasp that problem from different “points of view,” elucidating its interrelationships with other problems—all embedded in a larger system that developed over time. Understanding the wider context of a single problem by comprehending it from different vantage points and on different levels of generality would make transparent the relationships among diverse problems as both preconditions and effects of the system they jointly constituted.

While I would never claim to be the first “dialectical libertarian”—precisely because I have argued that a dialectical sensibility has informed the writings of many significant thinkers in the classical liberal and libertarian traditions throughout intellectual history—I was one of the first writers to identify explicitly these dialectical tendencies in those traditions; and, to my knowledge, I remain the first person to use the actual phrase “dialectical libertarianism” to name this paradigmatic methodological approach to the defense of liberty.

My usage of this phrase was met with resistance by colleagues on both the left and the right. There were colleagues who viewed Marxism as having a monopoly on—or a virtual identity with—dialectical method, and who dismissed my claims on the face of it. And there were colleagues who were aghast to see anybody connect a libertarian politics to a method that they decried as “Marxist,” and hence as anathema to the project for liberty. In a sense, critics from both the left and the right accepted the false premise that dialectics was an exclusively Marxist “construct.” The mere mention of the word “dialectics” conjured up images of the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” waltz typically associated with Hegel (even though that triad more appropriately belonged to Fichte) or the Marxist historical materialist dismissal of logic as a “bourgeois” prejudice. Indeed, some Marxists had argued that dialectics “transcended” logic, becoming a means of “resolving” actual logical (and hence, ontological) contradictions, thus showing that “A” and “non-A” were one and the same. (They seemed to have forgotten that even the law of noncontradiction contains a contextual proviso: a thing cannot be A and non-A at the same time and in the same respect.)

In modern and postmodern social theory, the terms of the discussion have clearly been shaped by the left. Marx himself had derided bourgeois theorists for putting forth a dogmatic, ahistorical, atomistic notion of human liberty that saw individuals as entirely separate from one another. Like Robinson Crusoe on a desert island, the individual depicted in the “Robinsonade” narrative of the bourgeois theorists is unrelated to other individuals and to any social or historical context. For the most part, unfortunately, Marx’s opponents in mainstream classical and neoclassical economics failed to challenge this critique of the atomistic theory of the individual. Even worse, their own static conceptions of perfect competition posited a rationalistic model of Economic Man in possession of perfect knowledge, a model that reflected the very “Robinsonade” narrative that Marx rejected.^[1]

But as Friedrich Hayek and others have pointed out, it was not unusual for the left to define the terms of scholarly discussion, for even the word “capitalism” was a product of the socialist conception of history (“History and Politics,” in Hayek 1954, 15). It took a major effort by twentieth-century Austrian thinkers—such as Hayek and his teacher, Ludwig von Mises—to provide a thorough reconceptualization of the market society and its foundations. As members of the Austrian tradition founded by Carl Menger, these thinkers viewed the market in dynamic, institutional, historical, and
contextual terms. And others in the libertarian intellectual tradition—Ayn Rand, for example—posited a version of “capitalism: the unknown ideal,” which refused to disconnect the defense of liberty from the identification of the larger context that made liberty possible.

And so, it became the self-conscious goal of my “Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy” to recapture dialectics, “the art of context-keeping,” by severing its connection to the left, and reclaiming its rightful place as a handmaiden of logic and an essential methodological tool that might help us to understand the various forces that undermine—or nourish—the possibility of human freedom.

Though some of my early essays (for example, Sciabarra 1987) focused on “the crisis of libertarian dualism”—the problems that were inherent in nondialectical, atomistic, utopian approaches to the defense of liberty—it wasn’t until the completion of my 1988 doctoral dissertation, “Toward a Radical Critique of Utopianism: Dialectics and Dualism in the Works of Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Karl Marx,” that the theoretical outline of my intellectual project became fully apparent. It is somewhat ironic that my work was nurtured under the mentorship of Marxist social theorist Bertell Ollman. Ollman had developed a deep appreciation for the work of many libertarian thinkers. He was a Volker Fellow who worked for Hayek at the University of Chicago in 1959–1960 and interacted with such libertarians as Murray Rothbard and Leonard Liggio in the Peace and Freedom Party throughout the 1960s in opposition to the war in Vietnam. And while few libertarians embraced the direction of my work, some thinkers, such as Don Lavoie, Douglas B. Rasmussen, and Douglas Den Uyl, who had embraced dialectical themes in their own work, provided me with enthusiastic support. Ultimately, the reframing of libertarian social theory as a dialectical project became one of the primary goals of my lifelong intellectual journey.

Marx, Hayek, and Utopia

The first book in my trilogy was Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, which was published in 1995 by the State University of New York Press. It had actually been slated for publication in 1989 by a West German press, Philosophia Verlag, but they went out of business, and the book’s publication was long delayed. Perhaps there is some symbolism in the fact of its delay—since there is no longer an East and West Germany to talk about!

The book built upon the Marx and Hayek portions of my dissertation and explored provocative parallels between the theoretician of “scientific socialism” and the Austrian “free market” economist, highlighting their surprisingly convergent critiques of utopianism and their mutual appreciation of context in defining the meaning of political radicalism.

For example, Hayek, in his emphasis on process and spontaneous order, enunciated a profoundly dialectical critique of utopianism. Hayek rejected both collectivist and atomist conceptions of the human being. For Hayek, since no human being can know everything there is to know about society, people cannot simply redesign it anew. Human beings are as much the creatures of their context as they are its creators. His rejection of utopian social planning is, at root, a repudiation of what he calls “constructivist” rationalism. The utopians rely on a “pretense of knowledge,” Hayek argued, in their attempts to construct a bridge from the current society to an ideal future one. Whereas the collectivists criticized bourgeois theorists for embracing “ahistorical” and “state of nature” arguments for capitalism, they themselves embraced an ahistorical, exaggerated sense of human possibility in their projections of an ideal communist society. Marx was critical of this “constructivism” in the works of the utopian socialists, but his own work succumbs to the same constructivist impulse. Implicit in his communist ideal is the presumption that human beings can achieve god-like control over society, as if from an Archimedean standpoint, virtually eliminating unintended social consequences such that every action brings about a known effect. Hayek (1973, 14) saw this as a “synoptic delusion,” an illusory belief that one can live in a world in which every action produces consistent and predictable outcomes. And, invariably, the quest for total knowledge becomes a quest for totalitarian control.

This Hayekian critique of nondialectical, utopian thinking is based on what Troy Camplin (2017) has characterized insightfully as “a blank slate view of the world.” In such a view, he writes,

Camplin’s insights are ultimately critical of any such approach even within libertarianism; it is simply not the case that we can create a new “libertarian man” or “libertarian woman”—for this completely acontextual, ahistorical view is a hallmark of utopian, rather than genuinely radical, social thought.

Whatever problems one might detect in Hayek’s various theories of social evolution (and I discuss these in Marx, Hayek, and Utopia), I believe that he contributes much to a dialectical libertarian social theory in his seminal work on the corrosive nature of government control, The Road to Serfdom. He does not focus on the one-dimensional economic effects of state regulation, but instead on the insidious, multidimensional effects of statism—how its consequences redound throughout a nexus of social relations: economic, political, and even social-psychological. In other words, Hayek analyzes statism not only as a politico-economic scourge, but as a phenomenon whose effects can be measured on different levels of generality and from different vantage points.

For Hayek, “the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people.” There is a social-psychological corruption at work, therefore, in which causes and effects become preconditions of one another, part of a system of mutually reinforcing processes. “The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives,” he writes (Hayek [1944] 1994, xxxix). This is a system, then, of mutual implications, of reciprocal connections between social psychology, culture, and politics:

Hayek understood that under advancing statism, culture tends to both promote and reflect those social practices that undermine individual self-responsibility. Likewise, a free society is one in which the culture tends to promote and reflect those social practices that require individual self-responsibility. For Hayek, political change is built on a slow and gradual change in cultural mores, traditions, and habits, which are often tacit; trying to impose such change, without the requisite cultural foundations, is doomed to failure. Moreover, Hayek argued, those cultural foundations are reflective of the historically specific circumstances of a particular time and place. Despite having often been derided as a conservative, Hayek embraced the essence of a radical, rather than a utopian, approach. “[W]e are bound all the time to question fundamentals,” he said; “it must be our privilege to be radical” (Hayek [1967] 1980, 130).

Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, the second book in my trilogy, was published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 1995 (and a second edition by that press in 2013). Russian Radical generated enormous controversy for its two novel claims: First, that Ayn Rand, like any individual, was born in a particular place and at a particular time. She came to intellectual maturity in the waning days of Silver Age Russian culture—a culture marked by Nietzschean themes and by the use of literature as a guide to revolutionary action. But it was also a culture imbued with a dialectical sensibility—taught by the professors of the courses she attended and the textbooks that she read as a student at the University of Petrograd, from which she graduated in 1924 (see especially Sciabarra [1995] 2013, part I, and appendices I, II, and III; 2017). And second, that this dialectical sensibility would come to thoroughly permeate her approach to radical libertarian social analysis.

Rand, of course, would not have self-identified as either a “dialectical” thinker or as a “libertarian,” since she typically linked the former term to the historical materialists she encountered in the Soviet Union and rejected the latter term because of its use by anarcho-capitalists, whose position on the nature and necessity of government she repudiated. But this is irrelevant.^[2]

In Russian Radical, I illustrate how Rand used dialectical tools not only throughout the structure of her philosophy (discussed in part II of the book, “The Revolt Against Dualism”), but also in the structure of her analysis of social problems (discussed in part III, “The Radical Rand”). By no means did Rand reject the law of noncontradiction or deny the existence of logically opposed, true alternatives (such as existence versus nonexistence, life versus death, good versus evil, and so forth). We can clearly see, however, that Rand regarded many dualities as “false alternatives” and that her dialectical revolt against dualism is a revolt against false alternatives. For Rand, such false alternatives are often variants of the mind-body dichotomy, which she rejects in all its manifestations: the spiritual versus the material, the analytic versus the synthetic, the rational versus the empirical, logic versus experience, reason versus emotion, morality versus prudence, theory versus practice, and so forth. Such false dichotomies obscure the essentially integrated nature of human being. Much the same can be said of Rand’s rejection of all the other false alternatives generated by modern philosophy, such as intrinsicism versus subjectivism in epistemology, classicism versus romanticism in aesthetics, deontologism versus consequentialism in ethics, and socialism versus fascism in politics.

But there is a subtlety in Rand’s analysis that some of her defenders and detractors often miss, for even when she identified “true” dichotomies—that is, those things and phenomena that she regarded as mutually exclusive and opposed—she provided a wider context for understanding their relationships. For example, when Rand spoke of the valid opposition of selfishness versus altruism, she repudiated conventional definitions of both selfishness (which involved the brute, uncaring sacrifice of others to oneself) and altruism (which involved the caring, benevolent sacrifice of oneself to others).

For Rand, the alternative could not be characterized simply as an opposition between “selfishness” and “altruism.” She sought to define the credo for a “new concept of egoism”—the subtitle to her book, The Virtue of Selfishness (Rand 1964a)—and this led her to reject the conventional concept of selfishness, epitomized, perhaps, by the “master” morality of Nietzsche, and the self-sacrifice or “slave” morality advocated by mystical and collectivist thinkers, such as Saint Augustine and Auguste Comte. She thus gave voice to what Robert Heilbroner ([1981] 1987) tells us about the master-slave relationship, something recognized by Aristotle and Hegel alike:

Thus, in The Fountainhead, Rand reveals how both “master” and “slave” morality require and imply one another. As she puts it: “A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends” (Rand [1943] 1993, 661), alluding to the fact that masters and slaves are in a mutually destructive relationship of codependency. For Rand, the truly independent man is neither master nor slave.

In Atlas Shrugged, however, Rand’s focus shifts to the relationships among individuals as manifested within a larger social system, developing over time toward the inexorable rupture of coercive, collectivist statism and to the discovery of a new, humane society that recognizes the sociality of each individual as something that is not in conflict with, but a natural, harmonious by-product of, genuine individualism. In the process, Rand shows vividly that human beings can flourish socially only in a system that recognizes individual reason and individual rights.

As she wrote in her preparatory notes for Atlas Shrugged (initially titled “The Strike”), the novel had to focus on this wider cluster of relationships to fully illustrate the social implications of her commitment to reason and to the virtue of rational self-interest:

This emphasis on analysis of the contextual totality as a cluster of relationships is crucial to Rand’s worldview. In the years after his 1968 break with Rand, Nathaniel Branden (1980) further clarified and extended this core notion—in opposition to those critics who saw the “atomistic” individual^[3] at the center of classical liberal and libertarian thought:

In Rand’s work and in the work of those influenced by her, atomism and disconnectedness fall by the wayside. The integration of mind and body, the essential connection between the spiritual and the material, is paramount. By the time Rand had authored Atlas Shrugged, she was emphasizing the need for shifts in vantage point and levels of generality—between the “Personal” and the “Social” (Rand, journal entry, 9 January 1954, in Harriman 1997, 653)—to elucidate different aspects of the objects under analysis. It is this kind of shift made explicit by Rand that inspired me to construct a model through which to display and interpret the structure, the dynamics, and especially the explanatory power of this form of wide-ranging contextual inquiry. This became the central guiding purpose of part III of Russian Radical.

The Tri-Level Model of Social Relations

Much like Hayek, Rand proclaimed herself a radical “in the proper sense of the word: ‘radical’ means ‘fundamental’” (“Conservatism: An Obituary,” in Rand 1967, 201). On this basis, Rand (1964b) wore the label as a term “of distinction . . . of honor, rather than something to hide or apologize for” (15).

I first proposed the Tri-Level Model of Social Relations in Russian Radical as a means of grasping the depth of Rand’s radical analysis of social problems (see Sciabarra [1995] 2013, 324–29, for example, which shows how this model is on display in Rand’s analysis of the problem of racism). But it was later in Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (Sciabarra 2000, 379–83), that I expanded on the model, elucidating the manner in which Rand shifts levels of generality and perspective, so as to grasp the systemic ways in which social problems develop over time. By consequence, only a comprehensive strategy can truly resolve social problems, given that their reciprocal causes and effects are to be found on each of those levels of generality that Rand’s approach makes transparent.

Though I provide below a diagrammatic presentation of the Tri-Level Model that focuses on Rand’s particular analysis (figure 1.1), I believe that this model can be helpful to any theorist working within a libertarian analytical framework. Indeed, libertarian theorists who disagree fundamentally with Rand’s premises and/or conclusions can separate the content of her analysis from the model and still use this model as a blueprint to develop their own dialectical-libertarian perspectives. The crucial point here is that despite my reconstruction of Rand’s approach as illustrative of the model’s usefulness, it can be employed by any theorist working in the classical liberal or libertarian traditions. It just compels such theorists to broaden their focus beyond strictly political and economic questions, because social relations of power (just as free social relations) are manifested on three distinct levels of generality, what I call “the Personal” (L1), “the Cultural” (L2), and “the Structural” (L3). These levels can only be abstracted and isolated for the purposes of analysis and can never be reified as wholes unto themselves. They are reciprocally related and are thus preconditions and effects of one another.

On Level 1 (L1), the Personal level of analysis, Rand analyzes social relations of power from the vantage point of individuals’ ethical, psychological, and “psycho-epistemological” practices—that is, the implicit (tacit) methods of awareness and other tacit factors that typically operate on a subconscious level of awareness (emotions, “sense of life,” and so forth), which often undermine self-responsibility and inculcate subservience or obedience to authority. On Level 2 (L2), the Cultural level of analysis, Rand analyzes social relations of power from the vantage point of linguistic, pedagogical, educational, aesthetic, and ideological factors that both reflect and bolster statist politics. On Level 3 (L3), the Structural level of analysis, Rand analyzes social relations of power from the vantage point of political and economic structures, processes, and institutions.

Each of these levels entails mutual implications; relations of power are both manifested in and perpetuated by personal, cultural, and structural dynamics. Most importantly, this tri-level model displays the broad outline of a dialectical libertarian strategy for social change, whether one accepts Rand’s specific applications of it or not. For in opposing the master-slave relationship in each of its manifestations, across each of the dimensions of the analytical model, Rand compels libertarians to aim for a nonexploitative society of independent equals who trade value for value. Indeed, by grouping the three levels into three distinct forms, we can illustrate how each level of generality provides us with a different analytical and strategic focus.^[4]

Focusing on the Cultural: L1–L2–L3

In this combination, the Personal (L1) and the Structural (L3) levels are placed in the background of Rand’s analysis, and the preconditions and effects of culture (L2) are made the central, primary factor of consideration. This has the advantage of bringing into focus the dominant cultural traditions and tacit practices that help to perpetuate the overall system of statism, which Rand fundamentally opposed.

But an exclusive focus on those dominant traditions and practices tends to lessen our regard for people’s abilities to alter their psycho-epistemological or ethical habits (L1). Additionally, this focus minimizes the importance of the statist political and economic structures (L3) that both perpetuate and require specific cultural practices identified by Rand as “mystic,” “altruist,” and “collectivist,” a cultural base bolstered by dominant ideologies that celebrate the anti-rational, the necessity of self-sacrifice, and the primacy of the group.

Rand thought it was crucially important to pay attention to cultural context in the struggle for social change. For example, it’s one of the reasons she rejected wars dedicated to so-called “nation-building,” in which the United States had “sacrificed thousands of American lives, and billions of dollars, to protect a primitive people who never had freedom, do not seek it, and, apparently, do not want it” (Rand 1972, 66). Rand had opposed U.S. entry into World War I and World War II, but it was this more specific assertion that Rand made in her opposition to the wars in Korea and Vietnam. One could only imagine how she would have reacted to U.S. attempts to graft “democracy” onto the Middle East, a region dominated by tribalism and theocratic fanaticism, antithetical to those cultural preconditions necessary for the sustenance of a free society.

Another crucially important aspect of culture that Rand focused on was education and the pedagogical techniques that dominated educational institutions. By their ability to stunt individual cognitive development, undermine conceptual and linguistic clarity, and inculcate obedience to authority, few institutions were more powerful in creating a subservient population.

Though Rand placed strong emphasis on the influence of culture in sustaining social relations of power, she was not a cultural determinist. She did not grant that culture was the sole factor determining historical destiny. Cultural contextualism was key to understanding how power relations are perpetuated, and how free institutions might be nourished in the struggle for social change, but Rand unequivocally rejected cultural determinism and its reactionary implications.

Focusing on the Personal: L2–L1–L3

In this combination, the Cultural (L2) and the Structural (L3) levels of analysis are placed in the background, and the preconditions and effects of the Personal (L1) are made the primary factor. This brings into focus the importance of those individual and interpersonal psycho-epistemological and ethical practices that perpetuate the irrational culture and politics that statism requires. It underscores Rand’s belief that individuals need to change themselves as a precondition of any attempt to change society. They need to practice rational virtues in pursuit of rational values—that is, rational actions in pursuit of rational goals. They need to engage in introspection, to articulate their thoughts, emotions, and actions, and to take responsibility for their own lives. Indeed, as Rand puts it, “anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today” (Rand 1975b, viii).

But an exclusive focus on the personal tends to shrink the importance of cultural and structural factors, which provide the context for, and have a powerful effect on, people’s abilities to be individuals. Certain cultural attitudes and practices are so deeply embedded in our lives, Rand suggests, that it is extremely difficult to call all of these into question at any given point. Moreover, Rand recognized that many individuals were put at a cognitive disadvantage, from elementary school through the institutions of higher learning, because of pedagogical practices that militated against individuals learning principles of efficient thinking, including proper methods of logical analysis, inductive reasoning, and contextual integration. (On these principles, see especially Branden 2017.) In essays such as “The Comprachicos” (in Rand 1975a, 187–239), she asserted that the educational system and its anticonceptual pedagogy tended to teach individuals how not to think, undermining their capacity to logically integrate and understand the real relations among things, events, and social problems, crippling their ability to act in a way that might radically transform for the better the society in which they live.

Likewise, certain political and economic realities often constrain and cripple our ability to act as individuals. Within statism, Rand argues, our ability to act as individuals is most constrained, since groups become the most important social unit in the shaping of public policy. This is not merely “identity politics” writ large: statism both requires and sustains tribalism of every sort. Or, as Rand put it, “the relationship is reciprocal”: Just as tribalism was a precondition of statism, so too was statism a reciprocally related cause of tribalism (“Racism” in Rand 1964a, 128).

Indeed, as statism grows, groups multiply along economic, ethnic, cultural, sexual, gender, ideological, and other lines, encompassing every aspect of human existence, reflecting a kind of “global balkanization” (“Global Balkanization” in Rand 1988, 123). Ultimately, what results is an internecine battle among warring pressure groups, leading to an “aristocracy of pull.” New Age–like thinkers who believe that all we need to do is “free ourselves first” and the rest will follow automatically, do not understand the organic unity of tribalism and statism. They often fall victim to Level 1 thinking, divorced from Levels 2 and 3.

The same dynamics are on display in the Randian literature on the nature of alienation, a subject that has been discussed primarily as a Level 1 issue by psychologists (see, for example, Stokols 1975, who views it as a “sequential-developmental” problem) and a Level 3 issue by Marxist theorists (see, for example, Ollman [1971] 1977, who views the problem as endemic to human life in capitalist society).^[5] Psychologist Nathaniel Branden, who, after his 1968 break with Rand, would be dubbed “the ‘father’ of the self-esteem movement” (Campbell and Sciabarra 2016, 1), specifically addressed the subject in an essay (“Alienation”) that first appeared in installments in The Objectivist Newsletter. It was reprinted as a chapter in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (in Rand 1967, 270–96) and was later revised and expanded in one of Branden’s most important post-Randian works, The Disowned Self (Branden [1971] 1978, 207–37).

Branden’s discussion of modern alienation focuses not just on the vast cultural expanses of modern alienation (Level 2), but especially on Level 1 (personal) and Level 3 (political-economic) factors that are mutually reinforcing in their implications:

In his later, revised version of this essay, which appeared as appendix B in The Disowned Self, Branden emphasizes the organic conjunction of the personal, cultural, and structural levels:

Focusing on the Structural: L1–L3–L2

In this combination, the Personal (L1) and the Cultural (L2) levels of analysis are placed in the background, and the preconditions and effects of political and economic structures, institutions, and processes become the primary factors to consider. For Rand, this perspective has the advantage of bringing into focus the dominant political and economic practices that help to perpetuate statism, or the “New Fascism” as she called it (“The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus” in Rand 1967). Rand draws much from her knowledge of Austrian economics in explaining the destructiveness of statist policies. Among these practices, one sees: regulations, which often benefit the industries being regulated, blocking entry into whole fields of economic endeavor and giving impetus to the growth of coercive monopolies; financial manipulation through the Federal Reserve System and other institutions, which are the driving force of the boom-bust cycle; taxation, which often redistributes wealth to entrenched businesses slurping at the public trough—a chief component of what, today, is conventionally referred to as “crony capitalism”; an expanding welfare state bureaucracy that keeps people in an endless cycle of poverty and dependency; and all the other prohibitions, laws, and guns that constrain us.

These constraints have global significance since a country’s statist domestic policy often extends into the sphere of foreign policy, providing the context for “pull-peddling” interventionism abroad (Sciabarra [1995] 2015, 315–23), the growth of the national security state, and ultimately, the pretext for wars (whether they be of the cold or hot variety, including those that grow out of protectionist or neomercantilist practices).

But an exclusive focus on these dominant political practices tends to shrink the importance of, and need for, individuals to alter their ethical or psycho-epistemological habits (Level 1). Such a focus also tends to obscure the importance of culture, which has a powerful effect on the kinds of politics and economics that are practiced (Level 2).

One of the most important criticisms that Rand levels against “anarcho-libertarians” is that they reify a Level 3 analysis, as if an attack on the state is all that is needed to liberate humanity. Such an attack is futile, in Rand’s view, in the absence of those personal and cultural practices that are essential to the sustenance of political freedom.

By tracing the implications of the tri-level model, we highlight the relational links that Rand sees among the various factors in society. Indeed, this is how she put the tools of a dialectical analysis to work. Each of her commentaries on the social problems of the day reveals the complex interrelationships among personal, cultural, and structural components of those problems. She subjects virtually every social problem to the same multidimensional analysis, rejecting all one-sided resolutions as context-dropping—that is, as partial and incomplete—if they do not identify important reciprocal relations or fundamental factors that generate more salient, but less basic manifestations. As a “radical for capitalism,” Rand (1961, 25) writes: “Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.” Rand (1962) argues further that: “A change in a country’s political ideas has to be preceded by a change in its cultural trends; a cultural movement is the necessary precondition of a political movement” (1).

Just as relations of power operate within psychological, psycho-epistemological, ethical, cultural, political, and economic dimensions, so too the struggle for freedom and individualism necessarily takes place within a certain constellation of psychological, psycho-epistemological, ethical, cultural, and structural factors.

This emphasis on the contextual totality is so central to Rand’s approach that Leonard Peikoff, one of Rand’s foremost orthodox interpreters, has argued that, methodologically, Hegel was right to say: “The True . . . is the Whole” (Peikoff 1991, 4). Peikoff argues that Rand’s systematized approach embodies this methodological principle. But Peikoff rightly adds that even though one could be correct about broad fundamental principles of method, one might also be operating with erroneous foundational premises, an improper approach to validation, faulty induction, incorrect identifications of historical data, or quasi-mystical conceptions of what the concretes are—such as Leibnizian monads, Hegelian Ideas, or the stages of economic production outlined in Marxian historical materialism. Hence, defending a dialectical libertarianism requires more than just a methodological commitment to understanding the analytical integrity of the whole.

Total Freedom:
Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism

The third and concluding book in my “Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy” was Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism, published in 2000 by Pennsylvania State University Press. Although each of these works can be read on its own terms, each remains an extension of the other, and together, the significance of each work becomes more apparent. In particular, Total Freedom attempts to answer many of the outstanding questions from the first two books in the trilogy.

In part I of Total Freedom, I offer a rereading of the history of dialectical thinking, a redefinition of dialectics as an indispensable tool for any defense of human liberty and a critique of those aspects of modern libertarianism that are decidedly undialectical and, hence, dangerously utopian in their implications.

I often refer to dialectics most concisely as “the art of context-keeping.” In part I of Total Freedom, however, I develop a much more refined definition of dialectics, viewing it as a species of the genus “methodological orientations” and comparing it with other such orientations (specifically, strict atomism, dualism, monism, and strict organicism). Because human beings are not omniscient, because none of us can see the “whole” as if from a “synoptic,” god-like perspective, it is only through a process of selective abstraction that we are able to piece together a more integrated understanding of the phenomenon before us—including an understanding of its antecedent conditions, interrelationships, and tendencies. In social theory, the object of our inquiry is society: social relations, institutions, and processes. Society is not some ineffable organism; it is a complex nexus of interrelated institutions and processes, of volitionally conscious, purposeful, interacting individuals—and the unintended consequences they generate. Understanding the complexities at work within any given society is a prerequisite for changing it.

In my reconstruction of the history of dialectics, which takes up the first three chapters of the book, I begin with the ancient Greeks. It is no accident that even Hegel, Marx, and Lenin celebrated Aristotle as the father of dialectics, the man whom Hegel ([1840] 1995, 130) himself called “the fountainhead” of dialectical inquiry. In works such as the Topics—the very first theoretical treatise on dialectics—Aristotle presented numerous techniques by which one might gain a more complete picture of an issue by varying one’s “point of view.” The Topics serves as a grand discussion of how shifts in one’s perspective can reveal different things about the objects of our inquiry and about the perspectives from which those objects are viewed. But examples of the use of dialectical techniques abound throughout the Aristotelian corpus.

In rereading the history of dialectical thinking, from the ancients to the postmodernists, I place special emphasis on the unheralded dialectical techniques used by classical liberal and libertarian thinkers such as Herbert Spencer, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, and Murray Rothbard. My finding of dialectical elements extends as well to contemporary libertarians as diverse as Roger E. Bissell, Douglas Den Uyl, Douglas Rasmussen, and Edward W. Younkins (who work within a neo-Aristotelian framework); Deirdre McCloskey (who has emphasized the importance of the rhetorical dimension in defense of liberty); Hans-Hermann Hoppe, G. B. Madison, and Stephan Kinsella (who offer variations on a dialogical or “estoppel” framework, as Kinsella calls it); Gerald O’Driscoll, Mario Rizzo, Don Lavoie, Peter Boettke, Steven Horwitz, David Prychitko, and Robert Higgs (each of whom has contributed to an Austrian resurgence with an emphasis on dynamics, drawing from schools of thought as different as Public Choice, the New Institutional Economics, and Hermeneutics); Jason Lee Byas, Kevin Carson, Gary Chartier, Billy Christmas, Nathan Goodman, and Roderick T. Long (who have been associated with left-libertarianism or left-market-anarchism); and scholars such as Robert L. Campbell, Troy Camplin, and John T. Welsh, whose work encompasses fields as diverse as psychology, evolutionary biology, aesthetics, political theory, and social science methodology. We are fortunate to be able to feature the contributions of many of these contemporary writers in this volume.

While many of these thinkers have long exhibited important aspects of a dialectical approach in their work, I certainly cannot claim credit for having fundamentally influenced the vast majority of these scholars. Rather, I view my own work as having made explicit the unacknowledged or implicit dialectical elements to be found in the work of classical liberal thinkers and many of my contemporaries in the libertarian intellectual tradition. Nevertheless, to the extent that my explicit articulation of a dialectical libertarian research program has influenced my contemporaries, I cannot claim any credit or responsibility for the diverse directions that it has taken over the past two decades. In this regard, I have always adopted a hermeneutical approach to my own work (and in my analysis of the work of others). As I wrote in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical:

The central lesson of this hermeneutical approach is that no concept or delineated theory—such as dialectics or the possibility of a dialectical libertarianism—is frozen in time. This makes a dialectical libertarianism all the more significant as a theoretical and strategic vision; it is not a sclerotic deduction of the implications of fixed axioms, but a living, viable research program that seeks to grasp the complexities of a wider systemic context over time—a context that might nourish or undermine the achievement of human freedom.

And, so, the question must be asked: Just how fruitful can any “dialectical libertarianism” be if thinkers united under that umbrella are as different from one another, in some respects, as Marx was from Mises? In truth, it is almost impossible not to find some form of dialectical analysis in the work of any thinker. No thinker can be totally nondialectical, just as no thinker can be totally illogical, for, as Aristotle himself noted, we are bound to find some dialectical and logical sensibility in virtually any person who thinks, “since the truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit” (Metaphysics 2.1.993b5–6 in Aristotle 1984, 1570)—or, in colloquial parlance: even a broken clock is correct twice a day!

I think the important issue is this: If the ideas of such thinkers differ fundamentally in content, whom can we identify as more faithful to a dialectical approach, and hence more radical in their social analysis? This is not a trivial question, because, as I outline in the first book of my “Dialectics and Liberty” trilogy, Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (Sciabarra 1995), dialectical thinking is identifiable with radical social theory, whereas nondialectical thinking leads to its opposite: utopian social theory. There is a fundamental distinction between dialectical, radical thinking and nondialectical, utopian thinking. As I write:

In the most dialectical aspects of his critique, Karl Marx recognized the pitfalls of utopian thinking, but because of fundamental flaws in his epistemology and in the premises of his social theory, he ultimately succumbed to those very pitfalls in his projection of a future communist society, whose utopian tenets can result in nothing but dystopian consequences. I discuss those flaws at length in both Marx, Hayek, and Utopia and Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism.

Marx provides us with a prime example of how a thinker can exemplify certain strengths of a dialectical analysis of social problems, while still failing to provide valid conclusions. Logical consistency and integrated thinking do not stand if they are built upon false premises. It is not without significance that Rand had named her very first Objectivist Newsletter column “Check Your Premises,” for without valid premises grounded in the facts of reality, whole systems of thought come crashing down regardless of the logical or dialectical dexterity of those who construct them.

Two different thinkers can look at the same (or similar) facts of reality and grasp some of the same issues at work in understanding a particular social problem and yet, because of differences in their theoretical premises, may arrive at fundamentally opposed solutions to those problems. For example, Marx’s understanding of the boom-bust cycle shows some remarkable similarities to the valid theories put forth by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, fathers of the modern Austrian school of economics (Sciabarra 1995, 76–79). Marx shares with his Austrian rivals an understanding of the political character of the business cycle, viewing the state and central banking as the fulcrum of the credit system and, hence, the source of the inflationary boom and its inexorable bust. But Marx views this as historically progressive, because it hastens the collapse of capitalism and the movement toward socialization of the means of production. By contrast, Mises saw the state-banking sector as a retrogressive institution grafted onto market relations, a product not of free-market “capitalism,” but of political economy in the fullest sense of the phrase (see especially Sciabarra 2000, 291–95). Mises argued that the dissolution of the state-banking nexus and the establishment of a full gold standard would end the boom-bust cycle along with its chaotic calculational and redistributive effects, clearing the way for the globally liberating processes of market forces.

I devote part II of Total Freedom to a full exegesis of the thought of Murray Rothbard, as a way of illustrating how thinkers can exhibit both dialectical and nondialectical elements in their work, with conflicting radical and utopian implications.^[6] At his most dialectical, Rothbard, following the Misesian approach, analyzes the subject of class dynamics and structural crisis from many vantage points and on several levels of generality (Sciabarra 2000, 267–307). Indeed, the very notion of a “state-banking nexus,” in Rothbard’s approach, is inherently dialectical, because it is both a precondition and effect of the institutions in their fundamental relationship, which defines the nature of both the modern state and the modern banking system. It makes possible the emergence of class conflict, domestic and foreign interventionism, and the boom-bust cycle. For Rothbard, the state cannot be what it is in the absence of its support of and/or from the banking system, and the banking system cannot be what it is in the absence of the state.

And yet, there is a fundamentally dualistic conception that animates Rothbard’s quest “for a new liberty” (Rothbard 1978)—specifically his view of the state and the market as dualistic adversaries, leading him to advocate the monistic absorption of the state’s functions into market activities (his notion of “anarcho-capitalism”). This doesn’t necessarily mean that a nondualistic anarchism is impossible (see, for example, Johnson 2008). But Rothbard’s focus is primarily a political one, a Structural focus, which does not pay enough attention to those Personal and Cultural prerequisites for the nurturing of a free society. In later years, he became more sensitive to those prerequisites for a libertarian social order; but in my view, his strategy for “Liberty Plus” (Rothbard 1990) raises more questions than it answers (Sciabarra 2000, 355–62).

In the final analysis, dialectical libertarianism forms the basis of a broad research program, within which there may be much theoretical diversity and varying strategic implications. The project seems daunting, for the invitation to large-scale theorizing might give the impression that one must analyze everything before one can change anything. But this specter of “analysis paralysis” is as much of an example of the “synoptic delusion” fallacy as is the notion of central planning. What is required is a more fully developed critique of the system that generates the social problems in our midst—and a corresponding vision for social change that resolves these problems at their root, in all their personal, cultural, and structural manifestations. A genuinely radical project beckons, one that integrates the explanatory power of libertarian social theory and the context-keeping orientation of dialectical method.

Notes

References

Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Volume Two. The revised Oxford translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Branden, Barbara. 2017. Think as if Your Life Depends on It: Principles of Efficient Thinking and Other Lectures. Foreword by Chris Matthew Sciabarra. Transcriber’s introduction by Roger E. Bissell. Print version published by CreateSpace. Kindle edition also available.

Branden, Nathaniel. [1971] 1978. The Disowned Self . New York: Bantam.

———. 1980. The Psychology of Romantic Love . New York: Bantam.

Burns, Jennifer. 2009. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. New York: Oxford University Press.

Campbell, Robert L. and Chris Matthew Sciabarra. 2016. Prologue to symposium: Nathaniel Branden: His work and legacy. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 16, nos. 1–2 (December): 1–14.

Camplin, Troy. 2017. After the avant-gardes. Review of After the Avant-Gardes: Reflections on the Future of the Fine Arts. Edited by Elizabeth Millan. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 17, no. 1 (July): 68–83.

Dallmayr, Fred R. and Thomas A. McCarthy, eds. 1977. Understanding and Social Inquiry. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Harriman, David, ed. 1997. Journals of Ayn Rand. Foreword by Leonard Peikoff. New York: Dutton.

Hayek, F. A. [1944] 1994. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———, ed. 1954. Capitalism and the Historians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. [1956] 1980. The dilemma of specialization. In Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. By F. A. Hayek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 122–32.

———. 1973. Law, Legislation, and Liberty—Volume I: Rules and Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. [1840] 1995. Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 2—Plato and the Platonists. Translated by E. S. Haldane. Introduction by Frederick C. Beiser. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Book Edition.

Heilbroner, Robert. [1981] 1987. The dialectical approach to philosophy. In Machan 1987, 2–18.

Heller, Anne C. 2009. Ayn Rand and the World She Made. New York: Doubleday / Nan A. Talese.

Johnson, Charles. 2008. Liberty, equality, solidarity: Toward a dialectical anarchism. In Long and Machan, 155–88.

Leube, Kurt R. and Albert H. Zlabinger, eds. 1984. The Political Economy of Freedom: Essays in Honor of F. A. Hayek. Munich: Philosophia Verlag.

Long, Roderick T. and Tibor R. Machan, eds. 2008. Anarchism/Minarchism: Is Government Part of a Free Country? Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Ashgate.

Machan, Tibor R., ed. 1987. The Main Debate: Communism versus Capitalism. New York: Random House.

Mises, Ludwig von. [1949] 1963. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Chicago: Henry Regnery.

Murray, Charles. 1995. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press.

Ollman, Bertell. [1971] 1977. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Peikoff, Leonard. 1991. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton.

Rand, Ayn. [1943] 1993. The Fountainhead. 50th anniversary edition. With a new afterword by Leonard Peikoff. New York: Signet.

———. 1961. For the New Intellectual. New York: New American Library.

———. 1962. Check your premises: Choose your issues. The Objectivist Newsletter 1, no. 1 (January): 1, 4.

———. [1962] 1967. Conservatism: An obituary. In Rand 1967, 192–201.

———. 1964a. The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. New York: New American Library.

———. 1964b. Alvin Toffler’s Playboy interview with Ayn Rand: A candid conversation with the fountainhead of “Objectivism.” The Objectivist (March). Reprint.

———. 1967. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: New American Library.

———. 1972. The Shanghai gesture, part III. The Ayn Rand Letter 1, no. 15 (24 April): 65–68.

———. 1975a. The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Rev. ed. New York: New American Library.

———. 1975b. The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature. 2nd rev. edition. New York: New American Library.

———. 1982. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: New American Library.

———. 1988. The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought. Edited and with additional essays by Leonard Peikoff. New York: New American Library.

Rothbard, Murray N. 1978. For a New Liberty. Rev. ed. New York: Collier Books.

———. 1990. Why paleo? Rothbard-Rockwell Report 1, no. 2.

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. 1987. The crisis of libertarian dualism. Critical Review 1, no. 4 (Fall): 86–99.

———. 1988. Toward a Radical Critique of Utopianism: Dialectics and Dualism in the Works of Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Karl Marx. Ph.D. diss. New York University.

———. 1995. Marx, Hayek, and Utopia. Albany: State University of New York Press.

———. [1995] 2013. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. 2nd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

———. 2000. Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

———. 2017. Reply to the critics of Russian Radical 2.0: The dialectical Rand. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 17, no. 2 (December): 321–57.

Stokols, Daniel. 1975. Toward a psychological theory of alienation. Psychological Review 82, no. 1: 26–44.

To be fair, even though economists such as Mises and Rothbard have used the Robinson Crusoe metaphor in describing what Mises ([1949] 1963, 194) called the “autistic exchange” of the “isolated hunter who kills an animal for his own consumption,” the heterodox approach of the Austrian tradition focuses its prime attention on the dynamics of real-world factors, epitomized in its emphasis on time, uncertainty, and imperfect knowledge—and the function of the price structure in a market process of rivalrous competition that drives entrepreneurial discovery and innovation.

There is evidence in the Branden Biographical Interviews that Rand did use the term “dialectical” in a nonpejorative sense as a way of describing her approach—in contrast to the extreme rationalism that she identified in the thought of architect Frank Lloyd Wright (Interview #13). Contrary to my own transcription of that interview, it appears, however, that Rand’s use of the word reflected correspondence with Martin Lean, a professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College. (This is according to Gregory Salmieri, who revealed this in personal correspondence with me.) Here was my initial transcription of the relevant section of the interview, where Rand contrasted her approach with that of Wright:

his approach to ideas was: the Truth with a capital T, and you know what that means. It’s not quite my approach. In other words, he would not be what we call “dialectical.” . . . In other words, he would not be a precise definer or intellectual philosophical conversationalist; he would be the emotional philosophical genius who would talk about the meaning of Life, with a capital L. . . . (Branden Biographical Interview #13, 26 February 1961; transcription and emphasis mine)

Having examined a transcript from the Ayn Rand Archives, Salmieri tells me that Rand actually states: “In other words, he would not be what Lean would call ‘dialectical.’” Regardless, it is clear that Rand, at the very least, referenced the word from Lean who saw it as an apt description of her approach in that specific context. See Sciabarra 2017, 338–39 (some of the material in the current section being derived from this essay). Similarly, there is evidence that she did identify her politics as “libertarian” in the Old Right sense (Burns 2009, 48–49), even though she came to reject libertarianism in later years, especially in the aftermath of her encounters with the Circle Bastiat, led by Murray Rothbard (182–84). Also see Heller 2009, 295–303.

So wedded was Rand to the concept of mind-body integration that she rejected the very notion of the “atomistic” as an “anti-euphemism,” a way of denigrating individualism by identifying it with a “scattered, broken up, disintegrated” conception of human being. See “How to Read (and Not to Write)” in Rand 1988, 131.

These three levels of generality can accommodate other aspects of social research that are beyond the scope of this chapter. For example, this tri-level model is very relevant for those who have argued, along the lines of Charles Murray (1994), about the relative impact of genetic, biological, and environmental factors shaping the cognitive and emotional capacities of individuals or certain groups of individuals—and how this might affect social relations of power. Even if one accepts Murray’s highly contentious thesis, which, he argues, bears on “intelligence and class structure in American life,” it is still necessary to subject the evidence he offers (or any evidence to the contrary) to the rigor demanded by this tri-level analysis.

To take another example from our own volume, see Troy Camplin’s essay “Aesthetics, Ritual, Property, and Fish: A Dialectical Approach to the Evolutionary Foundations of Property,” which examines the impact of genetics, deep evolutionary psychology, and ritual in the genesis of private property. Camplin offers a truly broad, complex, and highly dialectical context to consider, but it is one that the proposed tri-level model easily incorporates insofar as it enables us to grasp the implications of the analysis for each of the levels of generality that the model highlights. The point here is that the tri-level model does not offer canned answers; it offers, instead, different lenses by which to draw out the full implications of the evidentiary support for any research that bears on social relations of power—or of freedom.

Special thanks to Ryan Neugebauer for alerting me to the essay by Stokals (1975). I should also take this opportunity to thank Ryan, as well as Nick Manley, and my co-editors, Roger E. Bissell and Edward W. Younkins, for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. The usual caveats apply.

Part II of Total Freedom was also drawn from a portion of my doctoral dissertation (Sciabarra 1988, 79–299).

Chapter 2

Freedom and Flourishing

Edward W. Younkins

Toward a Synthesis of Traditions and Disciplines

Philosophy provides the conceptual framework necessary to understand man’s behavior.^[1] To survive a person must perceive the world, comprehend it, and act upon it. To survive and flourish, a man must recognize that nature has its own imperatives. He needs to have viable, sound, and proper conceptions of man’s nature, knowledge, values, and action. He must recognize that there is a natural law that derives from the nature of man and the world and that is discoverable through the use of reason.

By combining elements found in the writings of Aristotle, Austrian economists, the Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand, neo-Aristotelian, classical liberal philosophers of human flourishing, and those from other disciplines, we can reframe the argument for a free society into a consistent, reality-based whole whose explanatory power is greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, the Austrian, value-free, praxeological defense of capitalism and the moral and political arguments of Aristotle, Rand, the neo-Aristotelians, and others can be brought together in a libertarian synthesis of great promise, a powerful argument for a free society in which individuals have the opportunity to flourish and to be happy. In particular, it will be argued that Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian theories of morality and human flourishing are compatible with Objectivist teachings about the nature of reality and man’s distinguishing characteristics of reason and free will, and with Austrian ideas about value theory, decision making, action, and social cooperation.

Neo-Aristotelian classical liberals have provided the model for the approach taken in this chapter, modifying aspects of Aristotle’s political and economic philosophy and combining them with classical liberal and Austrian political and economic thought. Although these thinkers do not agree on every detail, they tend to include, and agree upon, most of the following features in their writings: metaphysical and epistemological realism; an identifiable human nature (i.e., essentialism), the moral and rational nature of man; the existence and importance of rationality, practical reason, free will, and free choice; agent causality; a natural teleology of human flourishing or self-perfection; the possibility of ethical knowledge; a eudaimonistic theory of virtue ethics; individualism; natural law and natural rights; the natural sociality of man with the implied importance of civil society and subsidiarity; a political theory emphasizing freedom, pluralism, diversity, and the limited nature of the state; and praxeology as a tool for deriving objective economic principles and the logical implications of such principles. A conceptual framework will be presented that integrates these ideas along with those of a number of contemporary philosophers, economists, political scientists, positive psychologists, and others.

Freedom, Flourishing, and Dialectics

A dialectical approach is useful in advancing our knowledge of freedom and flourishing. Dialectics may be viewed as a method of analysis, a model of inquiry, a meta-methodological orientation or meta-theoretical foundation that emphasizes context-sensitivity in its approach to any object of study. An Aristotelian dialectical approach attempts to grasp the full context and to understand the whole through differential vantage points and levels of generality. Stressing the totality of systems and dynamic connections, the dialectical thinker makes every possible effort to see interconnections between and among seemingly disparate branches of knowledge. This is done by first shifting viewpoints on any object of study in order to illuminate different aspects of it and then combining the various perspectives in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the full context of the object of study. This approach allows us to recognize the dynamic interrelationships between the personal, political, historical, psychological, ethical, cultural, economic, and so on (Sciabarra 2000).

Because no field is totally independent of any other field, there are really no discrete branches of knowledge, only cognition in which subjects are separated for purposes of study. Examining an object of study from a variety of alternative contexts, vantage points, and disciplinary areas can aid the investigation of reality. In a complex world, there is the need to bring together insights and methodologies from a variety of disciplines, which can mutually enrich and inspire one another. Dialectics calls for an inclusive, transdisciplinary approach to the study of freedom, flourishing, and happiness. An open-system realism combines approaches and disciplines and promotes critical exchange, mutual engagement, pluralism, and methodological toleration. Scholars are needed whose systematic project is to integrate disciplines and to discover the unity of intellectual frameworks beyond disciplinary perspectives. Context-keeping individuals are needed to investigate from a variety of perspectives and at different levels of generality to make connections among seemingly disparate disciplines in order to illustrate the unity of knowledge. Synthesists are needed to build links and collaborative unity across artificially disjointed disciplines. Philosophers, economists, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and neuroscientists are at the forefront of modern research on freedom, flourishing, and happiness. They need to work together on an integrative yet open model. Such a study of well-being requires attention to personal, demographic, economic, political, cultural, historical, psychological, biological, and other factors.

Because of the nature of reality, it is impossible to totally separate subjects when analyzing a phenomenon. Disciplinary boundaries are blurred and permeable and mere artifacts of scholarship, and do not reflect actual divisions in reality. Boundaries blur, fields intersect and overlap, and connections are amplified as integration becomes the goal of education. Of course, for purposes of specialization, it is essential to keep in mind the context and vantage point from which an object is being studied; but in the end, we need to reintegrate the results of such study with the rest of our total knowledge of reality. Although we do have to subdivide reality in order to study an aspect of it, we need to reintegrate at the end of our analysis with the added new knowledge. Abstraction requires integration, and differentiation necessitates a consideration of unity. Because a paradigm’s consistency with reality is all that matters, it is legitimate to take a selective approach with respect to existing philosophical positions (e.g., Aristotelianism, the school of Austrian economics, and Objectivism), to extract what is true from their writings, and to use it as the basis for a better integration and a deeper understanding. Such is the case in the study of human flourishing and happiness and the type of society that would make these possible.

What follows here is a brief attempt, relying heavily on logic, dialectics, and common sense, to formulate ideas about freedom and flourishing, and to relate them logically to other ideas and to the facts of reality. Because the rules of logic are determined by the facts of reality, logic is in a sense not only epistemological but also ontological. Furthermore, even though there are differences between these ideas and the identity of the things that they are about, the ideas themselves are derived from and about reality. However, because my concern as a system-builder is with truth as an integrated whole, this inquiry does not extend beyond a systemic level. It provides an outline of the essentials of a worldview, leaving it to philosophers, economists, and others to fill in the details and to evaluate, critique, revise, refine, and extend my proposed systematic framework.

The Nature of Man and the World

A proper political and economic philosophy must be based on the nature of man and the universe. Our goal is to have a paradigm that appeals to and reflects reality as an independent ontological order—a paradigm in which the views of reality, human nature, knowledge, values, action, and society make up an integrated whole. Such a paradigm will help people to understand the world and to survive and flourish in it. Once this knowledge is gained, we can then ascertain the role the state should have. Because necessary prescriptions are embedded in the nature of things and are discoverable through observation, logic, and a rational epistemology, what is required is philosophical realism in the secular natural law tradition. Natural law can provide man with a framework of the nature of human society and with general and universal principles (see d’Entreves 1951; Finnis 1980; Gierke 1957) that will permit the construction of the best political regime.

A proper philosophy must appeal to the objective nature of human beings and other entities in the world. There is a world of objective reality that exists, and it has a determinate nature that is intelligible. Because reality establishes the conditions for objectivity (see Buchanan 1962; Gilson 1986; Miller 1995; Pols 1992) and will not yield to permit a person’s subjective desires, realism is a necessary, instrumental means for a person’s success in the world.

There is a human nature, and because each individual has a specific identity as a human being, we can say that there are particular things and actions that are appropriate to him and for him. It is man’s nature to be a metaphysically unique self,^[2] volitionally conscious, rational, and purposive. Possessing reason and free will, each individual has the capacity and responsibility to discern and use proper means to attain his truly valuable ends, to actualize his potential to be a flourishing, individual human being and to be morally efficacious. One’s entire life can be viewed as a project or overall goal that is subject to continual evaluation. A person has the responsibility to discover his individual strengths and virtues and what is good for himself through a process of moral development, to choose wisely his aims and aspirations within the changing circumstances of his life, and to perfect himself by fulfilling the potentialities that make him who he is.

Morality is an essential functional component of one’s existence as an individual human being. Moral knowledge is possible and can be derived from the facts of reality including human nature. Possessing rationality and free will, a person needs a proper moral code to aid him in making objective decisions and in acting on those decisions in his efforts to attain his true self-interest. Morality and self-interest are inextricably interrelated. Morality is concerned with rationally determining what best contributes to a person’s own flourishing and happiness.

An individual’s flourishing is teleological, consisting in the fulfillment of his unique set of potentialities to be a mature human being. Each person has an innate, unchosen potentiality for his mature state along with the obligation to attempt to actualize that potentiality. Each person is responsible to discern and to live according to his daimon (i.e., true self), which includes his aptitudes, talents, and so on. This involves a process of progressive development, unfolding, or actualization in which a man attains goals that are in some way inherent in his nature as an individual human being. What constitutes a person’s daimon at a given point in time is a function of his endowments, circumstances, latent powers, interests, talents, and his history of choices, actions, and accomplishments. We could say that the fulfillment of one’s daimon is not static or fixed. An individual uses his practical rationality to assess himself and to work on his life in accordance with the objective standard of his flourishing as a singular human person. He can increase his generative potential to attain his own flourishing. A person is able to critique what he has done in the past and can change what he does with respect to the future development of his potentialities. Possessing free will, a man can adjust his actions in response to feedback that he has received.

Flourishing is a successful state of life, and happiness is a positive state of consciousness that flows from, or accompanies, a flourishing life. The legitimate function of every human person is to live capably, excellently, and happily. This involves an ethic of aspiration toward one’s objective well-being that is actively attained and maintained. A person should aspire to what is best for him, taking into account his given potentialities, abilities, and interests. Limits for self-fulfillment are set by reality including the type of being that we are and our individual characteristics.

In their work on second wave positive psychology, Lomas and Ivtzan (2016) have pointed out the fundamentally dialectical nature of well-being. Working from a Hegelian dialectical perspective, they explain that flourishing involves a complex and dynamic interplay of positive and negative experiences. A flourishing life consists of plural and oftentimes conflicting values. There is a dynamic interplay or tension between interacting elements or forces. They have identified five key dichotomies: optimism vs. pessimism, self-esteem vs. humility, freedom vs. restriction, forgiveness vs. anger, and happiness vs. sadness. They have identified the following principles: (1) The principle of appraisal, which states that it can be difficult to categorize specific phenomena as either positive or negative; (2) The principle of co-
valence, which says that many experiences involve a complex, intertwined blend of positive and negative elements; and (3) The principle of complementarity, which states that flourishing itself involves an intellectual dialectic, balance, and harmonization between positive and negative aspects of living (i.e., a dynamic harmonization of dichotomous states). Although individuals should strive to maximize the positive in their lives, it is true that we are all faced with certain, negative, involuntary aspects of life, and that there is virtue and merit to dealing with, and attempting to overcome, those negative aspects.

Throughout history, philosophers, political thinkers, novelists, poets, theologians and others have opined about the nature of, and sources of, happiness. It is important to study and evaluate notions of happiness as they have developed over time in a variety of cultural contexts. Not only does such an endeavor highlight the difficulty in defining happiness, it also identifies many potential sources of happiness such as freedom, virtue, luck, pleasure, the anticipation of heaven, work, and family life. There are considerable cultural and historical variations with respect to ideas of, and attitudes toward happiness. Over time, happiness could supply an adaptive advantage. Being “happy” makes people more fit and better attuned to their surrounding environment, more energetic, more social, and better able to survive. Both culture and evolution have played key roles in positive adaptation. Over time, mechanisms evolved that produced happiness and encouraged friendship, kinship, cooperation, mating, and coalition building. There have been cultural and historical variations in concepts of happiness. In antiquity, emphasis was on luck and good fortune. Now the emphasis is on active personal control. There has been a change from a non-agentic view of happiness to an agentic self-determinative view of happiness as an achievement. The idea of happiness has been conceived of in various ways across cultures and nations (see McMahon 2005; Kesibir and Diener 2008; Staley 2018; Stearns 2012; Buss 2000; and Oishi et al. 2013).

Rationality is the foundational means to the end of human flourishing. Rationality is necessary to effect the appropriate means to a person’s ends and to integrate them. To be rational, a man must be committed to reality, truth, and logic. Not solely instrumental with respect to a person’s flourishing, rationality can also be viewed as partially constitutive of his flourishing. Rational introspection by a specific individual can enable him to determine the type of life that he should be leading.

Practical wisdom, an aspect of rationality, involves the ability to discern the relevant and important aspects of one’s circumstances in order to make the most proper response to them. The use of practical wisdom (or prudence) can only take place through self-direction or human agency (Den Uyl 1991). An individual requires practical wisdom to contend with the specifics, contingencies, and circumstances of one’s life. Practical wisdom is needed to guide oneself regarding the progressive fulfillment of one’s own potential to flourish. A prerequisite for one’s flourishing is self-direction or autonomy. Human flourishing requires self-direction and practical wisdom.

A proper political and economic philosophy demands an account of man’s nature as determined by reason. Man is a rational agent with a free and self-determinative will who is capable of deliberation and choice. A human being has metaphysical liberty and can therefore initiate, by his mental activity, much of what he does in life. Thinking is not automatic, but human beings can use their free will to focus, to think, and to initiate. It follows that human beings can make choices about right and wrong, that they are self-responsible to do the right thing, and that they require a private domain that others must respect. The idea of metaphysical freedom is connected to responsibility and the related notions of virtues, vices, and human flourishing. It follows that mutual non-interference is primary regarding both freedom and the demands of moral virtues. Mutual non-interference is a required condition for both a free society and for a virtuous society.

Natural Rights

As explained by neo-Aristotelian and post-Randian philosophers Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, natural rights are metanormative principles that regulate the conditions under which moral conduct and human flourishing can take place. The individual right to liberty secures the possibility of self-direction in a social context. To secure individuals’ natural rights, men must seek to establish the structural political conditions that protect that possibility. Each person must be accorded a secure moral space over which he has freedom to act and to pursue his personal flourishing. Individual human flourishing is the standard underpinning the assessment that a goal is rational and should be sought. A person is a moral agent whose project it is to excel at being the particular human being that he is (Rasmussen and Den Uyl 2005; Den Uyl and Rasmussen 2016).

Human flourishing must be achieved through a person’s own efforts. Each person has reason and free will and the capacity to initiate conduct that will enhance or inhibit his flourishing. Rationality, the cardinal virtue for human flourishing, can only gain expression when a man has responsibility for his own choices. A person’s flourishing depends upon his cognition at a conceptual level. Individuals must be free to discern, select, and pursue their own goals and to form their own groups and associations. Each person must be free to choose to initiate the mental processes of focusing and thinking on becoming the best person he can be in the context of his own existence.

Natural rights are universal, are good for human beings in general, and are based on the common attributes of human beings. As political principles, they are general and uniform and establish proper rules of social interaction. Once they are secured, what is good for the life of each man in his individual instantiation becomes a possibility. The notions of morality and human flourishing apply only to individual human beings whose telos it is to develop their virtues and potentialities in accordance with their facticity.

Natural rights provide a moral minimum of human dignity that is found in the individual human capacity for self-reflection and self-directedness. In order to have the opportunity to flourish and be happy, natural rights must be respected and protected. A metanormative system of negative rights that provide a context of self-directedness can be derived from a proper conception of human nature. Such a system of rights allows for value pluralism and for a variety of approaches to living one’s life. A conception of negative rights emphasizes where one individual’s life begins and another individual’s life ends. A political and legal order that protects natural rights is a necessary precondition for individual self-direction and for the possibility that human flourishing can take place in a social context.

There is an important interrelationship and complementarity between the ideas of natural rights and human flourishing—which together comprise a two-level ethics.^[3] At a metanormative level, rights protect people’s liberty to pursue (or not to pursue) their own good. They simply regulate the conditions under which moral conduct may (or may not) occur. In turn, what is good for the life of each individual person is found in the realm of personal virtue, morality, and flourishing. The ideas of natural rights and human flourishing describe different but related sides of what it means to be a human being. Together they provide a rational ethical framework.

The only enforceable limits on one’s actions are other people’s rights. We must recognize other individuals as purposive beings with ends of their own choosing. It would be contradictory to advocate my own rights and not to recognize the rights of other individuals. If a person does not acknowledge the rights of others, then he cannot declare that his own rights are valid. Each individual is thus permitted and limited in both the private and social spheres with respect to the types of actions in which he can engage.

A proper political and legal system is not totally separated from the realm of ethics based on the nature of man and the world. However, ethics are not all of one kind or at the same level. Some directly prescribe moral conduct and others regulate the conditions under which moral conduct may occur. A political and legal system regulates such conditions and should be concerned only with rights as universal metanormative principles and not with the promotion of personal virtue, morality, or flourishing. Political life is properly concerned solely with peace and security. Such a distinction between politics and morality makes great sense. It follows that the minimal state is only concerned with justice in a metanormative sense—not as a personal virtue.

Austrian Economics and Objectivism:
A Comparison

Both economics and ethics are concerned with human choice and human action. Human action, the subject of both economics and morality, is the common denominator and the link between economic principles and moral principles. Both economic law and moral law are derived from natural law. Because truth is consistent, it follows that economics and morality are inextricably related parts of one indivisible body of knowledge. Because natural law regulates the affairs of men, it is the task of both economists and philosophers to discover the natural order and to adhere to it. There is an intimate connection between economic science and an objective, normative framework for understanding human life.

Ayn Rand has demonstrated that metaphysics and epistemology are inextricably connected. She explains that knowledge is based on the observation of reality and that, to gain objective knowledge, a person must use the methods of induction, deduction, and integration. Induction and deduction are complementary and go hand-in-hand. Because concepts refer to facts, knowledge has a base in reality and it is possible to derive valid concepts using the rules of logic—a person is able to define objective principles to guide his cognitive processes. It follows that conclusions reached through the proper application of reason are objective. Rand maintains that it is possible to gain objective knowledge of both facts and values. People have the capacity to determine what is in their own best interest and to act on such determination. Thinking is self-produced and human beings can will and initiate behavior.

Human beings can think but thinking is not automatic. A person must use his free will to focus and to use his rational consciousness. A man knows he has volition through the act of introspection. He can introspectively observe that he can choose to focus his consciousness or not. A man’s distinctiveness from other living species is his ability to initiate an act of consciousness. Free will is critical to human existence and human flourishing (see Boyle, Grisez, and Tollefsen 1976; Branden 1974; Machan 1998, 17–30; Rand 1964, 1–25).

People value because they have needs as living, conditional entities. The predominant value theory among Austrian thinkers is Ludwig von Mises’s subjectivist approach. This approach takes personal values as given and assumes that individuals have different motivations and prefer different things (Mises [1933] 2003, 155–85; [1949] 1963, 1–142). By contrast, some Austrians follow Carl Menger, the father of Austrian economics, in agreeing with Ayn Rand that the ultimate standard of value is the life of the valuer and that objective values support man’s life and originate in a relationship between man and his survival requirements. This approach sees value as a relational and objective quality dependent on the subject, the object, and the context involved (Menger [1871] 1981; [1883] 1985). Objective values depend upon both a person’s humanity and his individuality. Each person has the potential to use his unique attributes and talents in his efforts to do well at living his own individual life. It is possible for a person to pursue objective values that are consonant with his own rational self-interest.

Powell and Candela (2014) have written about parallel insights in the Austrian School and in the Aristotelian ethical tradition (e.g., Ayn Rand’s Objectivist ethics). Entrepreneurship in the Austrian School and practical wisdom in the Aristotelian tradition both emphasize a process of discovery that is both self-directed and contingent on particular knowledge. Human flourishing or happiness is seen as the ultimate value, and practical wisdom is viewed as both a moral virtue and an intellectual virtue. Practical wisdom is a process of moral discovery, and self-interest is guided by virtuous activity. Liberty, a necessary condition for human flourishing, protects the possibility of human flourishing. Peaceful social cooperation exists within a framework in which people are free to act on specific knowledge both for wealth creation and for moral self-direction. The authors explain that practical wisdom is an entrepreneurial discovery process, mainly of ourselves, but also of our relations with others. Austrian economics and the Aristotelian ethical tradition provide complementary insights into the primacy of human action in promoting wealth creation, virtue, and human flourishing.

In their 2016 book, The Perfectionist Turn: From Metanorms to Metaethics, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen have a chapter titled, “The Entrepreneur as Moral Hero.” In this chapter, they discuss the creativity of human beings both in producing wealth and in making moral character, two activities that are parts of a flourishing life. Both of these projects require openness and alertness to new opportunities in the midst of changing circumstances across multiple dimensions of one’s life. In general, it can be said that both entrepreneurship and ethics apply to virtually any type of human activity. Both entrepreneurship and moral action involve an insightful and evaluational approach to living one’s life. The goal of both is integrity of action. Profit making can be a legitimate form of ethical expression. As acting agents, entrepreneurs should be concerned with the universal ethical question of what type of life one should pursue for oneself. As ethical agents, they must decide how they should change the world to achieve that same goal. Discovery and evaluation are key concepts in both ethics and entrepreneurship. Success in the market can be related to success in living one’s life. “Ethical wealth, like economic wealth, will be a function of the degree to which individuals take it upon themselves to produce good lives” (Den Uyl and Rasmussen 2016, 441).

Production, the means to gaining one’s material values, metaphysically precedes their distribution, exchange, and consumption. To survive and flourish, people must produce what is required for their existence. Economic goods and services must be produced before they can be consumed. Consumption follows production, and production (i.e., supply) is the source of consumption (i.e., demand). Productiveness is a virtue. Individuals tend to be productive and to flourish when they practice the related virtues of rationality and self-interest.

Reason applied to the production of material goods illustrates the inextricable connection between a man’s mind and his survival and flourishing. Productiveness, a responsibility of every moral person, comprises an important existential component of virtuousness. Austrians argue that, given the political-legal end of peace and prosperity sought by classical liberals, private property in the means of production is the only mechanism available to facilitate peaceful social cooperation in the division of labor.

Austrian praxeological economics (i.e., the study of human action in a market context) has been used to make a value-free case for liberty. This economic science deals with abstract principles and general rules that must be applied if a society is to have optimal production and economic well-being. Misesian praxeology consists of a body of logically deduced, inexorable laws beginning with the axiom that each person acts purposefully. Mises was off base with his neo-Kantian epistemology, which views human action as a category of the human mind. Fortunately, Murray Rothbard demonstrated how the action axiom could be derived using induction and a natural law approach (see especially Rothbard 1957; 1971; 1976).

Austrian Economics and Objectivism:
Their Compatibility

Although Misesian economists hold that values are subjective, and Objectivists argue that values are objective, these claims are not incompatible because they are not really claims about the same things. They exist at different levels or spheres of analysis. The methodological value-subjectivity of the Austrians complements the Randian sense of objectivity. The level of objective values dealing with personal flourishing transcends the level of subjective value preferences.

The value-freedom (or value-neutrality) and value-subjectivity of the Austrians have a different function or purpose than does Objectivism’s emphasis on objective values. On the one hand, the Austrian emphasis is on the value-neutrality of the economist as a scientific observer of a person acting to attain his “subjective” (i.e., personally estimated) values. On the other hand, the philosophy of Objectivism is concerned with values for an acting individual moral agent himself.

There is a distinction between methodological subjectivism and philosophical subjectivism. Whereas Austrians are methodological subjectivists in their economics, this does not imply or necessitate that they are moral relativists as individuals.

Denis (2008) explains that the Austrian school of economics, one of the major components of my proposed starting-point paradigm, is characterized by an implicit dialectical methodology. He observes that Austrian economists make process primary and that process is the essence of dialectics. The orientation of Austrian economics is toward contextual analysis of the systemic and dynamic relationship of the components within the totality. It follows that dynamism, time, history, transition, pluralism, toleration, and mutual engagement are of the essence.

Austrian economics is thus an excellent way of looking at “social science methodology” with respect to the appraisal of means but not of ends. Misesian praxeology therefore must be augmented. Its value-free economics is not sufficient to establish a total case for liberty. A systematic, reality-based ethical system must be discovered to firmly establish the argument for individual liberty. Natural law provides the groundwork for such a theory, and both Objectivism and the Aristotelian idea of human flourishing are based on natural law ideas.

Austrian economics and Objectivism agree on the significance of the ideas of human action and values. The Austrians explain that a person acts when he prefers the way he thinks things will be if he acts compared to the way he thinks things will be if he fails to act. Austrian economics is descriptive and deals with the logical analysis of the ability of selected actions (i.e., means) to achieve chosen ends. Whether or not these ends are truly objectively valuable is not the concern of the praxeological economist when he is acting in his capacity as an economist. There is another realm of values that views value in terms of objective values and correct preferences and actions. Rand’s Objectivism is concerned with this other sphere and thus prescribes what human beings ought to value and act to attain.

Austrian economists contend that values are subjective and Objectivists maintain that values are objective. These claims can be seen as compatible because they are not claims about the same phenomena. These two senses of value are complementary and compatible. The Austrians view actions from the perspective of a neutral examiner of the actions, and Objectivists suggest values and actions for an acting human being as a moral agent himself. The Austrian economist does not force his own value judgments on the personal values and actions of the human beings that he is studying. Operating from a different perspective, Objectivists maintain that there are objective values that stem from a man’s relationship to other existents in the world. For the Objectivist, the purpose of ethics is to live a flourishing and happy life by recognizing and responding to the significance of human action.

It is possible for these two schools of thought to be combined into an integrated framework. At a descriptive level, the Austrian idea of demonstrated preference agrees with Rand’s account of value as something that a person acts to gain and/or keep. Of course, Rand moves from an initial descriptive notion of value to a normative perspective on value that includes the idea that a legitimate or objective value serves one’s life. The second, deeper view of value provides an objective standard to evaluate the use of one’s free will.

An ethical system must be developed and defended in order to establish the case for a free society. An Aristotelian ethics of naturalism states that moral matters are matters of fact and that morally good conduct is that which enables the individual agent to make the best possible progress toward achieving his self-perfection and happiness. According to Rand, happiness relates to a person’s success as a unique, rational human being possessing free will. We have free choice and the capacity to initiate our own actions in a way that enhances or hinders our flourishing as human beings. See the following diagram (figure 2.1) of what an Austrian-Objectivist synthesis might look like.

An Integrated Framework

Source: Younkins

Human Sociality

A human being’s flourishing requires the rational use of his individual human potentialities, including his talents, abilities, and virtues, in the pursuit of his freely and rationally chosen values and goals. A social life conducive to human flourishing depends upon cultivation of the moral virtues. An action is considered to be proper if it leads to the flourishing of the person performing the action. A person’s flourishing leads to his happiness. Each person is responsible for voluntarily choosing, creating, and entering relationships in civil society that contribute toward his flourishing. Civil society, a spontaneous order, is based on voluntary participation and is made up of natural and voluntary associations such as families, private businesses, voluntary unions, churches, clubs, charities, and so on. The related notions of subsidiarity and of a pluralistic society spring from the reality of human nature.

Long ago, Aristotle observed that social life and social cooperation in a community are essential conditions for one’s flourishing. Today, it is generally held that a person’s social networks have strong effects on a person’s well-being. Mediating institutions such as charitable societies, fraternal organizations, churches, clubs, and so on, provide individuals and communities with valuable interaction networks. Most people hold memberships in a number of value-providing associations. It follows that civil society is important to the pursuit and attainment of our individual ends.

A person’s moral maturation requires a life with others. Benevolence, kindness, friendship, and charitable actions can be expressions of one’s self-perfection. Relational goals are perfections of a person’s capacity for cooperation and are particular manifestations of that capacity. The obligation for pro-social other-directed actions is that the benefactor owes it to himself. Sociality is essential to a man’s attempt to live well. Benefaction (i.e., charity) can be viewed as an expression and specific manifestation of one’s capacity for social cooperation (Den Uyl 1993).

The interpersonal realm is integral to a well-lived life. We love our friends, and we appreciate their potential to advance our well-being. Friendship and love have an egoistic basis in a person’s love for, and pride in, himself. The well-being of a person who is a value to another individual increases that individual’s own ability to flourish and to be happy. The fundamental reason for performing other-regarding actions is to enhance one’s own well-being. Other people’s interests can be viewed as contributive to, or interrelated with, one’s own interests, as evidenced in the case of production and free trade. It can be said that a person’s authentic self-interest cannot conflict with the self-interests of other people. Of course, it is possible to derive pleasure (i.e., experience “fellow feeling”) from observing others deriving pleasure.

Needs, Values, and Goals

People are born with physical, philosophical, and psychological needs specific to them as individual human beings. Human beings have needs embedded in their nature. We could say that value arises only to the extent that something satisfies an objective human need. The term “value” implies the personal importance or significance of an activity or object. Self-interest refers to the objective needs of a flourishing human life. Values promote and constitute one’s life and happiness. They have a metaphysical foundation in the nature of reality. There is an inextricable connection between values and natural facts. A value relationship exists due to the nature of a living being and the nature of other existents in the world. Something in the world can be a potential value to a specific man even though he does not view it as valuable or even if he is not aware of its existence (Rasmussen 2006).

A flourishing life, including the happiness that accompanies it, is a person’s ultimate value. Everything else in life is aspired to because of this chief value. All of a man’s other values are instrumental and/or constitutive of the ultimate value. Means that serve the end of a flourishing life can be part of that end. Constitutive values, such as a productive career, friendships, and so on, are not simply means to a flourishing life but are also vital parts of such a life.

In order to flourish and to be happy, each man must select values, place them in a hierarchy, and strive to attain them. A person must experience many aspects of reality in order to discover values that are proper for him and that interest and inspire him. This active learning process highlights the exploratory nature of individual human interests and values. A person decides to live a particular type of life because he sees the value of it. He should select and pursue specific meaningful values that are metaphysically appropriate for him. He needs to identify the positive relationships in which things exist in relationship to his life. The meaning of particular projects in a person’s life is a function of his individuality.

Human beings are goal-directed. Goals are specific forms of values. Values provide a strategic underpinning for a person’s goal-setting activities. They supply meaning and purpose to a person’s goals. We could say that goals depict values as related to particular states of affair. Because not all goals are equally valid, a person needs to examine the values underlying his goals. It is important to realize that goals are not isolated from one another. A person should strive to create a rational system of goals aimed at his flourishing and happiness (Locke 2002).

Goods and Virtues

Human flourishing is related to a number of general or conventional goods and virtues that provide structure but not specific direction or content with respect to living one’s life. Because there is a wide diversity of human beings, it follows that a flourishing life is not universally the same. Generic or basic goods such as knowledge, health, physical pursuits, and friendships need to be integrated in various measures, and the virtues need to be applied in specific circumstances (Den Uyl 1991, 213; Rasmussen 1999, 6).

Each person needs to consider a variety of values, goods, and virtues in order to determine the relationship among them that will best achieve his flourishing as an individual human being. This requires rational insight into the particular and the contingent. Reason is the basic means used by human beings to create the values necessary for life and to interrelate and integrate goods and virtues into their lives. Virtues may be viewed as a set of fundamental principles that a rational person uses to guide the long-term course of his life.

Virtues and goods are the means to values; and the virtues, goods, and values together enable human beings to attain their flourishing and happiness. In fact, we could say that the virtuous life is both a means to, and a constitutive part of, a flourishing and happy life. Virtues must be applied, although differentially, by each individual in his task of human flourishing. The pursuit of one’s flourishing is driven by reason and reason requires the consistent practice of the virtues. Such a “virtue ethics” is agent-centered, agent-based, agent-relative, and contextual. Choosing and making the proper response—in particular, concrete circumstances—is the concern of moral living. A person must identify and abide by rational principles if he is to flourish. The major virtues provide these rational principles.

Virtues can be viewed as principles of action that promote the flourishing of an individual who, by following them, engages in consistent actions that are in alignment with practical rationality. Virtuous actions enable a person to gain (and to keep) the values he pursues. The virtues are required for one’s practical efficacy and happiness. Of course, virtue, by itself, is not enough to guarantee practical efficacy. A person also needs to have the relevant skills, resources, and so on. The fundamental virtue is rationality and the other virtues are particular expressions of that basic virtue. The virtues are both instrumental to, and a constitutive part of, an agent’s flourishing. They are valuable, not merely as means to flourishing, but also as partial realizations of it. Virtuous action begins with the ability to discern the aspects of a situation that are the most relevant and that fit the circumstances at hand. A man needs to possess the ability to decide which virtues are required in a particular situation and the optimal way of applying them. Virtuous actions tend to foster further virtuous actions. Applying the virtues is heavily dependent upon the context of a situation. People tend to take pleasure in virtuous actions—affect is related closely to virtue especially when one’s emotions are properly aligned with his rationality.

Rand (1964) makes a powerful case that the rational pursuit of one’s flourishing requires the consistent practice of seven essential virtues—rationality, honesty, independence, justice, integrity, productiveness, and pride (see also Smith 2006). She saw rationality as the master virtue and the other six virtues as derivative from the primary virtue. Some scholars have pointed out that Rand did not specifically discuss the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom—that is, prudence (Rasmussen 2010). It is likely that she considered practical wisdom as part of rationality. Others have suggested that her version of virtue ethics might be improved by including positive qualities such as benevolence, kindness, generosity, charity, tolerance, civility, empathy, and so on in her prescription for moral perfection (Kelley [1996] 2003).

Not included in Rand’s list of major virtues is the virtue of benevolence. Although she did not include benevolence in her list, it is apparent that she considered this quality as an important aspect of individual human experience depending upon one’s circumstances and hierarchy of values (Branden 1962). Benevolence, as a basic way of human flourishing, can be seen as a rational goal and as a matter of justice. In her novels, Rand’s heroes are almost always appropriately benevolent, and her villains fail to demonstrate goodwill toward others.

Virtuous activity advances the individual’s good and is guided by reason in the identification of, deliberation upon, and choice of ends and means. People should take virtuous actions in alignment with their objective values. A person must use his practical wisdom to examine and judge the context of a situation before freely choosing to exercise virtuous action. Deliberation itself is an action aimed at an end. The final end of the actions of a human being is his own flourishing life. People are capable of taking self-directed, deliberate, reasoned, and planned actions directed by a notion of an ultimate end. Of course, they can choose to act and live in a variety of ways that are not conducive to a flourishing life.

Flow, Self-Esteem, and Emotions

Rationality is a normative principle that plays a key role with respect to a teleological notion of happiness. Happiness is possible only to a rational man whose interests consist in achieving what is of value to him. A rational agent needs to correctly understand, desire, and strive to attain his objective values in his efforts to live a flourishing and happy life. Such a man employs his practical reason to identify and select his needs, values, goals, and means, and the focus of his resources and efforts.

Happiness depends upon on the successful achievement of one’s personal flourishing. A person tends to experience happiness when he attains his self-interest but not when he fails to do so. More than a state of mind or a feeling, happiness has both cognitive and affective dimensions that combine to provide the indication or evaluation of a flourishing life. In addition, happiness is related to the concepts of flow and self-esteem.

Flow is a focused, experiential involvement in meaningful activities. A person is apt to be in a psychological state of flow when he is engaged in meaningful, self-controlled, and goal-related activities. Flow involves focused immersion in an activity, lack of self-consciousness, and the merging of awareness and action. A man is in the flow state when he is vitally engaged in enjoyable, purposeful activities that offer him scope. Flow experiences involve both differentiation (i.e., the movement toward uniqueness) and integration (i.e., the feeling of unity with other people) (see Csikszentmihalyi 1990; 1997).

Self-esteem is an agent’s apprehension and appreciation of his adequacy and competence to deal with his environment. Self-esteem refers to a person’s legitimate attitude of self-affirmation. Self-esteem is connected to a sense of agency and control of one’s environment. A person with self-esteem tends to be competent, optimistic, and virtuous, and to have self-respect. A person who does not practice the virtues (such as rationality, honesty, justice, and so on) is not likely to possess self-esteem. Virtuous action leads to self-respect and self-esteem (Branden [1969] 2001; Lyubomirsky, Tkach, and Dimatteo 2006).

Emotions (i.e., feelings related to one’s cognitive processes) are connected to a person’s well-being and happiness. To a certain degree, emotions reflect specific kinds of habitual and subconscious value judgments. Emotions can be appropriate or inappropriate for a person in a particular occasion. Emotions are tools of recognition that direct a person’s attention to aspects of the world and of himself. It is up to an individual to employ his practical reason to determine whether or not the emotion being experienced is a justified one. As a being of volitional consciousness, a man can make a reasoned choice with respect to his actions. Emotions can direct and motivate a person but they do not determine what he does. One’s emotions can be correct or incorrect. It follows that each person should attempt to properly align his emotions with his rational thinking.

It is important for emotions, as evaluations of objects and occurrences in the world, to be appropriate or correct. Emotions can make a positive contribution to one’s flourishing if they are based on true and objective appraisals of the value of various objects and events that have occurred. Emotions are relevant to an individual’s normative thought and actions according to the correctness of the evaluations that they embody.

Emotions are an important part of one’s life experience and are relevant to one’s moral character. A case can be made that many emotions are the products of a person’s judgments of value as integrated by his subconscious mind. Such emotions stem from a person’s values and estimates, which, in turn, depend upon his knowledge. They are about personally meaningful values and circumstances. These emotions are directed by one’s chosen values. It follows that a change in one’s values can bring about a change in one’s emotions. Emotions can encourage or discourage goal-directed actions. Correctly interpreted positive emotions can be indicators that we have located objective values. Such emotions both signal and promote a person’s optimal functioning and flourishing. Justified positive emotions are fundamental conditions of human existence. We could say that emotional and psychological well-being is a crucial part of human flourishing (see especially Rand 1964, 30–32; de Sousa 1990, xv–xvii).

Happiness occurs to the extent that one leads a flourishing life. We could say that happiness is an emergent effect of living a good life. Happiness has both cognitive and affective dimensions and depends upon the degree to which a person responds realistically, morally, and efficaciously to his life circumstances. Successful people tend to be happy people who continue to intentionally seek new, not-yet-attained goals. There are various degrees of personal growth, development, and happiness. A person can be happy and still strive to be even happier. Happiness is an issue of living a particular type of life. It is not just a case of having positive feelings. However, happiness is related to emotion-laden experiences such as flow and self-esteem.

To aid the reader, the following diagram (figure 2.2) depicts the interrelationship among the various components of the motivation-happiness process as described above.

The Motivation-Happiness Process

Source: Younkins

Toward an Integrated Framework of
Freedom and Flourishing

Our goal is to develop a sound paradigm or system in which the views of reality, knowledge, human nature, flourishing, happiness, virtues, values, society, and so on make up an integrated whole, a paradigm that has internal consistency among its components. The neo-Aristotelian, classical liberal synthesis proposed in this chapter can be viewed as a starting point or skeletal foundation for such a paradigm. The paradigm will grow and evolve as scholars from a variety of disciplines and perspectives engage, question, critique, interpret, revise, and extend its ideas. The neo-Aristotelian approach and/or its components are currently being studied and developed by many modern-day thinkers. As such, it should be seen as a vibrant, living, systematic framework that aims at the truth.

By properly integrating insights gleaned throughout history, we have reframed the argument for a free society and elucidated a theory of the best political regime on the basis of man, human action, and society. This natural-law-based paradigm upholds each man’s sovereignty, moral space, and natural rights and accords each person a moral space and natural rights. It holds that men require a social and political structure that recognizes natural rights and permits each person a moral space over which he has freedom to act and pursue his personal flourishing. Specifically, it consists of (1) an objective, realistic, natural-law-oriented metaphysics; (2) a natural rights theory based on the nature of man and the world; (3) an objective epistemology that describes essences or concepts as epistemologically contextual and relational rather than as metaphysical; (4) a biocentric theory of value; (5) praxeology as a tool for understanding how people cooperate and compete and for deducing universal principles of economics; and (6) an ethic of human flourishing based on reason, free will, and individuality. The following is a diagram of the paradigm (figure 2.3).

Freedom and Flourishing in a Free Society

Source: Younkins

Of course, there are a great many coercive challenges, encroachments, and constraints that have inhibited the establishment of a society based on the natural liberty of the individual and the realities of the human condition. By nature, these barriers tend to be philosophical, cultural, economic, and political. Some of the strongest attacks on, and impediments to, a free society include: collectivist philosophies, cultural relativism, communitarianism, environmentalism, public education, taxation, protectionism, antitrust laws, government regulation, and monetary inflation.

Many practical steps need to be taken. These include: (1) privatizing government property, programs, and functions such as education; (2) reducing and ultimately abolishing income and inheritance taxes; (3) establishing freedom of production and trade by abolishing labor, licensure, antitrust, zoning, and other laws and regulations; (4) instituting gold as money; (5) eliminating Social Security, Medicare, public welfare, and public hospitals; (6) separating government from science and the humanities, including an end to all government involvement in education; (7) ending business subsidies; (8) allowing free trade by eliminating tariffs, quotas, and other protectionist measures; (9) ceasing to be the world’s policeman; (10) eliminating government agencies; and so on.

As discussed by Sciabarra (2000), attaining social change is a complex, nonlinear, interlocking process. He explains that the battle against statism is simultaneously personal, cultural, and structural and that these factors are reciprocally reinforcing preconditions and effects of one another. Advocates for a free society need an effective strategy that recognizes the dynamic relationships among these levels if they are to make progress in their quest for such a society. The crusade for freedom is multidimensional; change cannot occur just on the structural (political-economic) level; it must filter through these various interconnected levels. It is necessary to recognize the dynamic relationships among the parts in the given context of the larger society that is the object of our study. Such a holistic, systems, or dialectical methodological approach or perspective emphasizes interconnections, relationships, and contextual knowledge.

As activists for freedom, individuals must work to bring about a cultural renaissance to countermand the trends in today’s culture that threaten individual liberty. We need to be concerned with, and to analyze, particular cultural, institutional, social, psycho-epistemological, and historical conditions of freedom and social order. It is essential to discover how these conditions can be changed in order to move toward the establishment of a free society. It will be easier to establish a minimal state in a culture in which people prize freedom, objectivity, achievement, and personal happiness. To do so, we must work to change individuals’ cultural assumptions. There are reciprocal causes and effects between culture and the attitudinal and behavioral changes of individuals. It is essential to advance rational ideas throughout all aspects of our culture—education, commerce, science, art, media, politics, and so on. We need to promote a culture of reason and individualism and a sense of life oriented to production, innovation, material prosperity, great art and music, self-responsibility, happiness, and so on. To reach our goal will require many small but meaningful changes in our culture.

Individuals and private mediating institutions must take the lead in promoting a culture of liberty and virtue in which reason and independent thinking are highly valued. This can be done by example and through moral discourse, education, art and literature, praise and blame, and so on. All of this must be done without contradicting the nonaggression principle which provides a metanormative floor of basic morality for individual lives and societies.

People need to understand both the necessity for objective conceptual foundations (as articulated in this chapter) and the need for cultural prerequisites for the establishment of a free society. Freedom cannot be successfully defended when severed from its broader requisite conditions.

A classical liberal social order allows people to be free to pursue their own ends and to associate with those they choose. Individuals are able to be self-directed and to express their diverse interests, values, and life goals once their rights are secured and protected. The desirability, legitimation, or justification of a minimal state that protects and defends freedom and diversity does not depend upon the existence of a particular type of moral-cultural order. Such a political order is objectively based on the nature of human beings who need a protected moral sphere for the possibility of self-direction. A political philosophy is not a philosophy of life.

Although a political order of metanorms is not necessarily coincidental with, nor dependent upon, a particular moral-cultural system, the establishment and support of such a political order would be easier to bring about if there were widely shared beliefs and articulations with respect to its underpinning political principles as well as with certain moral principles. There is the need for education, persuasion, and conversion. It follows that we should work as individuals, and in concert with others, to build a freedom-friendly culture of moral and virtuous people who strive to create a good life, to flourish, and to be happy.

The paradigm presented in this chapter can be revised, refined, extended, and enhanced by scholars working from a dialectical perspective. Eschewing ontological boundary assumptions, they would endeavor to see the whole rather than disciplinary parts. New ideas will emerge from transdisciplinarians working from a variety of alternative contexts, vantage points, and disciplinary areas. A holistic, inclusive, and open-ended approach appreciates knowledge that exists between, across, and beyond individual disciplines. There is a need to bring together insights and methodologies from a variety of disciplines and perspectives. This involves thinking systemically, looking for connections between components of knowledge, and aspiring to understand the nature and unity of reality.

Notes

References

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———. 1974. Free will, moral responsibility, and the law. In Machan 1974, 419–44.

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Den Uyl, Douglas J. and Douglas B. Rasmussen. 2016. The Perfectionist Turn: From Metanorms to Metaethics. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.

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de Sousa, Ronald. 1990. The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Lomas, Tim and Itai Ivtzan. 2016. Second wave positive psychology: Exploring the positive-negative dialectics of wellbeing. Journal of Happiness Studies 17: 1753–68.

Lyubomirsky, Sonja, Chris Tkach, and M. Robin Dimatteo. 2006. What are the differences between happiness and self-esteem? Social Indicators Research 78: 363–404.

Machan, Tibor R., ed. 1974. The Libertarian Alternative. Chicago: Nelson Hall.

———. 1989. Individuals and their Rights. LaSalle, IL: Open Court.

———. 1990. Capitalism and Individualism. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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Mack, Eric. 1998a. On the fit between egoism and rights. Reason Papers 23 (Fall): 3–21.

———. 1998b. Deontic restrictions are not agent-relative restrictions. Social Philosophy and Policy 15, No. 2: 61–83.

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———. [1883] 1985. Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics. Translated by Francis J. Nock. New York: New York University Press.

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Rand, Ayn. 1964. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library.

Rasmussen, Douglas J. 1999. Human flourishing and the appeal to human nature. Social Philosophy and Policy 16, no.1 (Winter): 1–43.

———. 2006. Regarding choice and the foundation of morality. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7, no. 2 (Spring): 301–28.

———. 2010. Why Ayn Rand? Answers and some questions for discussion. In What’s Living & Dead in Ayn Rand’s Moral and Political Thought. Symposium. Cato Unbound: A Journal of Debate (18 January). Online at: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/01/18/douglas-b-rasmussen/why-ayn-rand-answers-some-questions-discussion.

Rasmussen, Douglas B. and Douglas J. Den Uyl. 2005. Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Rothbard, Murray N. 1957. In defense of extreme apriorism. Southern Economic Journal (January): 314–20.

———. 1971. Ludwig von Mises and the paradigm for our age. Modern Age (Fall): 370–79.

———. 1976. Praxeology: The methodology of Austrian economics. In Dolan 1976, 19–39.

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. 2000. Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Smith, Tara. 2006. Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics New York: Cambridge University Press.

Snyder, C. R. and Shane J. Lopez, eds. 2002. Handbook of Positive Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Staley, Oliver. 2018. What is the evolutionary purpose of happiness? Quartz (18 April): 1–7. Online at: https://qz.com/930860/what-is-the-purpose-of-happiness/.

Stearns, Peter N. 2012. The history of happiness. Harvard Business Review 90 (January–February): 104–9.

I wish to thank several people for helping me to clarify the ideas that appear in this chapter. I am extremely grateful to the following individuals for their useful comments, observations, and suggestions: Roger E. Bissell, Samuel Bostaph, Rosolino Candela, Douglas J. Den Uyl, Felix Livingston, Stephen Hicks, Jerry Kirkpatrick, Douglas B. Rasmussen, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Aeon Skoble, Gennady Stolyarov, Kathleen Touchstone, and Leonidas Zelmanovitz.

For an elucidation of the idea of individualism, see Machan 1989; 1990.

In his various writings, Eric Mack has explained that there is a distinctive correspondence between the doctrines of human flourishing and natural rights and that endorsing human flourishing makes it rationally necessary to also endorse natural rights. For example, see Mack 1998a and 1998b.

Chapter 3

The Unchained Dialectic and the Renewal of Libertarian Inquiry

John F. Welsh

The Case for a New Dialogue

Every philosophic system that gains a significant number of adherents eventually faces two interrelated dilemmas. The first concerns the extent to which it can tolerate interpretation, critique, and deviation from its original concepts and principles. If it is too exclusive, demanding rigorous intellectual purity, it runs the risk of appealing to too few persons. If it is too inclusive, it runs the risk of undermining its intellectual core and its identity as a distinct point of view. The second dilemma concerns how amenable it is to change in response to new circumstances. If it is too rigid, it loses the relevance and appeal it might have. If it is too open to change, it runs the risk of infinite malleability and, again, an abandonment of its intellectual core. Political philosophies frequently bring these dilemmas into sharp focus, since their ability to affect the course of events is dependent, in the first instance, on the need to attract diverse adherents while maintaining a core of important concepts and principles.

Contemporary libertarian theory and its attendant political movement, such as it is, are largely rooted in the basic concepts and principles of classical liberalism, Objectivism, and praxeology, in varying degrees. These philosophic orientations informed contemporary libertarian scholarship and political activism in the United States effectively since the 1950s. However, libertarian scholarship and its political movement are at a point where a rethinking of their philosophic foundations is warranted. Should libertarian scholarship be content to continue as a restatement and application of the basic elements of classical liberalism, Objectivism, and Austrian-school economics? Should its political movement be satisfied with its status as a tiny, eccentric “third party” in American politics? Or should the basic elements of libertarianism be reexamined in a fundamental way, possibly including new ideas and strategies that may help reinvigorate both thought and practice, thereby changing the nature of libertarianism itself?

One of the shortcomings of libertarian theory is that its major luminaries have largely ignored the anti-statist and individualist elements of dialectical methods and theory. Conversely, since the early writings of Marx, dialecticians have marginalized, through neglect and repression, the anti-statist and individualist elements in their own intellectual tradition. While the reasons for this mutual neglect are largely rooted in the history of political and intellectual warfare, it is worthwhile to explore how libertarian thought and practice might benefit from an engagement with facets of the dialectical tradition.

A volume dedicated to the “dialectics of liberty” provides a wonderful opportunity to explore not only the interstices at which dialectical and libertarian theory overlap, but how the two might enhance each other for the benefit of advocacy for individual freedom, free markets, and minimal government. Arguably, the most significant contribution of Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s scholarship is his forceful and compelling opening of new theoretical and methodological vistas in classical liberal, Objectivist, and praxeological analysis, a feat that he accomplished through his analysis of the philosophic foundations of libertarianism. Sciabarra not only uncovered the application of dialectics in the work of Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard; he also revealed how dialectics can supplement and reinvigorate libertarianism. Most importantly, Sciabarra provided an outline of how dialectical methodology can redirect and enhance libertarian scholarship and practice by reconnecting the vision of individual liberty with the dialectical tradition in social and political thought (1995; [1995] 2013; 2000).

In Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism, Sciabarra outlines a philosophic perspective that seeks the mutual influence of the core concepts of libertarianism and dialectical research methods. Total Freedom develops many of the ideas that Sciabarra initially presented in his earlier studies: Marx, Hayek, and Utopia and Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. One of Sciabarra’s arguments is that there are some important points at which dialectical and libertarian theory converge. Total Freedom is particularly eloquent and insightful on the point that dialectical methodology does not, by necessity, produce the collectivist and statist notions attributed to Hegel and Marx. In fact, if the understanding of dialectics is traced back to the philosophic projects of Socrates, through Plato, and Aristotle, the potential interaction between dialectics and libertarianism becomes much more apparent. In Sciabarra’s formulation, the full range of dialectical analysis certainly includes the analysis of antagonisms between nations, races, and social classes; but it can be expanded to include conflicts between market and state, cultural values and social practices, and self and other. Sciabarra reveals this expanded interpretation of both dialectics and libertarianism through his extensive discussions of Hayek, Rand, and Rothbard.

Sciabarra is not just interested in a dialectical interpretation of Hayek, Rand, and Rothbard, but in examining how dialectical thought can help promote individualist and libertarian ideas. He believes that there is a dialectical foundation to the thought of Hayek, Rand, and Rothbard, in spite of their dramatic differences with earlier dialectical thinkers. Sciabarra argues that dialectical social theory should be freed from its Marxian fetters and applied to the understanding and promotion of individual liberty. Not only is his understanding of libertarian literature intellectually solid, but he also has a firm grasp of the important elements of dialectical thought. Among other things, he eschews the crude “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” formula, which was never a part of the writings of Hegel or Marx, in favor of the identification of specific concepts that delineate dialectical methods of inquiry, such as the critique of ideology and the articulation of a specifically libertarian concept of totality, history, and contradiction (1995, 4–5). Sciabarra articulates a dialectical libertarianism as a distinct political perspective that aspires to be every bit as comprehensive in its depiction of sovereignty, conflict, and change.

The dialectics of liberty is a very helpful framework for developing a critique of political thought and practice, particularly as it promotes individualist and libertarian critiques of domination, marginalization, and alienation. Dialectical theory is strong in its understanding and critique of conflict, contradiction, exploitation, and alienation, while libertarianism is strong in its understanding of individual freedom, free markets, and the problems generated by governmental intervention in social life. Both traditions purport to be philosophies of freedom. Both assign liberty a central role in philosophy and politics. And both critique ideologies that subordinate individuals to the state and collectivities. An optimal outcome of a dialectical libertarian critique of politics is a vision of individuality and society freed of domination and the collectivist reduction of persons to abstract, manipulative categories. The dialectical libertarian vision of the individual bears a significant resemblance to Hegel’s concept of the “free subject,” which is conceived as self-conscious self-determination (Schacht 1977, 289–90; Marcuse [1956] 1968, 238–43). A dialogue between dialectics and libertarianism offers a great opportunity for the articulation of a social theory that envisions individuality freed from domination by the state and the collective.

First, it potentially expands our understanding of classical liberalism, Objectivism, and Austrian economics. It brings into high resolution existing dialectical elements in the thought of major libertarian thinkers, such as Frederick Hayek, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard. Further, it suggests how dialectics can enhance libertarian thought, reframing elements of Objectivism, praxeology, and classical liberalism.

Second, it can rescue dialectical methods from the authoritarian and collectivist political movements that appropriated dialectics as their own since the middle of the nineteenth century. An important beginning in an authentic dialogue between dialectics and libertarianism is the identification of libertarian ideas and concepts in the writings of theorists associated with the dialectical tradition. If we are interested in a meaningful dialogue between the two theoretical traditions, and if the search for dialectical elements in the thought of libertarian thinkers is important, then it is also important to search for libertarian concepts in the thought of the writers associated with the dialectical tradition. Thus, it is helpful to identify the antistatist and individualist elements in Hegel’s dialectic that had a direct influence on thinkers such as Max Stirner and Mikhail Bakunin.

Third, we can begin to articulate a set of ideas for social inquiry that might constitute an authentic interaction of libertarian thought and dialectics. At the outset, we might acknowledge a common ground between the two traditions: the promotion of the emancipated individual, or the free subject. Among other things, this means the liberation of persons from the constraints imposed by authoritarian, collectivist regimes, as well the liberation of persons from the constraints imposed by predatory economic organizations. We might ask, what kind of liberation is it that purports to emancipate persons from authoritarian governments only to subordinate them to the structures of predatory economic organizations? Conversely, we might ask, what kind of liberation is it that purports to emancipate persons from predatory economic organizations only to subordinate them to authoritarian, collectivist movements and governments? Perhaps more importantly, a dialectical libertarianism potentially provides the best theoretical perspective from which to critique the dominant social formation of our time: state capitalism, which can be described as the fusion of the coercive power of governments with the economic goals of large corporations.

While it is important to explore dialectics from a libertarian standpoint, it is equally important to explore libertarianism from a dialectical viewpoint. An authentic dialogue between the two traditions entails an equal dose of scrutiny and criticism. Neither orientation should emerge from the dialogue unchanged. Any dialogue that results in the subsumption of one tradition within the other falls short of a meaningful interaction. Each has something to learn from the other. This chapter considers dialectical philosophy to be a critical philosophy. It examines how some expressions of dialectics might contribute to renewal in libertarian philosophy.

Two Dimensions of Dialectical Critique

Surveys of social theory generally reflect the domination of social science by empiricist and qualitative methodologies that fail to describe their emergence from and effect on macro-level, socio-historical contexts (Martindale 1960; Habermas 1971). The frequent outcome of the domination of these methods is that the critical dimensions of social and political thought are rarely the priority in their discourse about social, economic, and political formations. There are important reasons for offering a critique and alternative to the philosophic foundations of social and political thought, including libertarianism. The two main questions a dialectical examination of libertarianism should pose are:

What does libertarianism consider to be valid and reliable knowledge about individuality and society? Specifically, to what extent does libertarian theory agree that a goal of inquiry is the attainment of a correspondence of thought with external objects?
To what extent does it consider individuals and groups to be the active creators of their social and political environment? Specifically, to what extent does it adopt the position that individuality and society are largely Substance and not Subject?

The notion that social inquiry seeks to establish a correspondence between concept and object is an important element of classical liberalism, Objectivism, and praxeology. The ontological notion that individuality and society are Substance and not Subject is evident in the emphasis on conformity with natural law and an externally defined concept of reason in all three points of view (Rand 1979; Rothbard 1973).

The distinction between Substance and Subject is useful in the analysis of both theory and practice because it sharpens the antagonism between a concept of persons as passive respondents to dictates in their social relations, versus a concept of persons as active, thoughtful producers of their own thoughts and actions, as well as the broader context in which they think and act. The content and methodological approach in much of libertarian theory is diametrically opposed to the concept of individuality and society as Subject since the process of inquiry is routinely conceived as either the deduction of observations or axiomatic statements based on a set of invariant concepts and principles, or as the gathering of data according to empiricist canons of the knowledge process. In both cases, the domain assumption is that human reality is an inert “out there,” and the goal of the knowledge process is its application by policymakers and administrative elites to fix the array of conflicts and contradictions in culture, polity, and economy. Because society and individuality are conceived as Substance and not Subject, the implementation of an appropriate methodological canon in any particular inquiry is thought to produce a correspondence between concept and object, thought and fact, theory and practice.

The epistemological foundation of contemporary libertarian thought tends to entail an important ontological assumption about culture, polity, and economy. Most significantly, it promotes a somewhat mechanistic concept of the social world, rendering it understandable only through scientific models that entail a cause and effect view of nature, individuality, and society. While all three foundational perspectives of libertarianism want freedom of the will, their view of reason dictates that social action must be subordinate to, or in conformity with, the constraints of natural law and invariant economic facts. The basic ontological concept of classical liberalism, Objectivism, and praxeology suggests that social relations can be externally transformed by the scholarly, policy, and managerial elites who possess special knowledge about the reality of culture, polity, and economy in the modern world. True, all three points of view want free markets to govern social relations. In some cases, however, the free exchange of ideas is itself governed by an externally defined standard of reason. On occasion, this theoretical contradiction produces organizational difficulties. Hence, Rothbard (1987) appropriately skewered the Ayn Rand cult and David Kelley (2000) too appealed for “truth and tolerance” in Objectivism.

Opposed to the correspondence theory of truth and an externally defined concept of social action is a philosophy of liberation that maintains that human freedom, construed as self-conscious self-determination, is the goal of inquiry into culture, polity, and economy. It is important to contrast the basic elements of dialectical thought with the prevailing methodologies of libertarian theory in order to appreciate how dialectics might contribute to libertarianism. The goal is not to create a fusion of dialectics and libertarianism, but to understand how the two might interact, or how dialectics might become a philosophic element within libertarianism. The product of this chapter is an articulation of five ideas that might constitute the beginning of such an understanding. As such, they are intended to augment and expand existing scholarship on dialectical libertarianism.^[1]

Making a Theoretical Break

Critical social thought generally insists on an epistemological break with more traditional social theories and methodological approaches. Critical social theory can be defined in part by the theorist’s understanding of his/her partisanship in the knowledge process. Critical approaches reject the value-neutral and presumed objective methodological approaches that seek scientific certainty. They do so by affirming the interactive, dialectical relationship between knowledge and society, perception and conception, and the subjective and the objective. In dialectical thought, the observer’s object of cognition, such as individuality or society, is transformed from a thing-in-itself to a thing-for-itself. In contrast to the argument that inquiry is only an academic effort that somehow exists external to its objects of cognition, dialectical approaches adopt the perspective that social theory and research are intellectual definitions of reality that help to structure our understanding of the action of persons, groups, and organizations.

From a dialectical standpoint, culture, polity, and economy are what they are, to a degree, because of what scholarly inquiry says about them. They are what they are, to a degree, by how they are defined by cultural, managerial, and scientific elites. Intellectual definitions of reality promulgated by scholars and other elites have a socially self-fulfilling character to them if they attract political and organizational power. Libertarian theory and research, thus, must be understood as socially situated vocabularies of motive that lay the groundwork for social and political action, whether in the service of prevailing political and economic arrangements or in opposition to them (Mills 1940). The emancipatory interest in libertarian inquiry suggests that political theories are not only emergent from specific socio-historical milieu, but also function as either affirmations or critiques of them. Scholarly knowledge has a socio-historical base, and it participates in either the legitimation or transformation of the social base.

The critical form of inquiry contributes to emancipatory interests in human knowledge because it affirms the notion that human beings must participate as self-conscious, self-determining agents in the construction of the social world they inhabit. Otherwise, the resulting social formations lose their human and social character. The emancipatory thrust of libertarian analysis is particularly important in circumstances where obstacles to full individual liberty are erected and defended through coercion and ideological social control. The political expression of dialectical libertarianism is to transform authoritarian and collectivist social relationships into fully participatory, fully consensual relationships.

The empiricist and qualitative influences in social science are major forms of ideological legitimation for the social formations and cultural representations of state power and the collectivist relationships imposed by advanced capitalism (Welsh 1986). The critical, emancipatory approach offered by dialectical libertarianism seeks the delegitimation of exploitative organizational relationships, exclusionist managerial practices, and organizational goals that reinforce asymmetrical power and exchange relationships. The scholarly task of the dialectics of liberty is to critique those forms of libertarian research that eschew dialectics and emphasize empiricist and qualitative methodologies. The political task of the dialectics of liberty is to challenge the authoritarian and collectivist social formations that other political theories seek to defend. The dialectical form of libertarian inquiry rejects the necessity of all forms of domination that are putatively grounded in nature, reason, or history. Instead, it seeks to understand processes of conflict, contradiction, change, and emancipation. The goal of dialectical libertarianism is not the discovery of an inert “out there,” or conformity with externally constructed notions of “reason” or “nature.” The goal is to critique the obstacles to individual liberty, and promote efforts to overcome them. Dialectical libertarianism interprets culture, polity, and economy through the lens of the self-conscious self-determining human being.

Dialectical libertarianism potentially augments the self-knowledge of individuals and encourages their full participation in the social world they inhabit, just as it militates against coercion and all forms of ideological social control. A major contribution of Sciabarra’s work on the “dialectics of liberty” is the revelation that there are more paths toward individual liberty than those offered by the orthodox expressions of classical liberalism, Objectivism, and praxeology. An important next step in the continued development of dialectical libertarianism is directing attention to elements of dialectical thought that can help expand the theoretical boundaries of libertarianism.

Conflict and Contradiction

Despite their important differences, classical liberalism, Objectivism, and praxeology all share a commitment to scientific certainty. The goal of inquiry in these perspectives is the establishment of a correspondence between thought and the external object. Objectivism, praxeology, and the think-tank libertarians assert a correspondence of their theoretical canon with the external world. However, it is one thing to commit to scientific certainty and quite another to demonstrate the same. The three perspectives share the same epistemological problem that haunts empiricism, logical positivism, and all qualitative forms of inquiry: how does the percept become the concept? How do we know that the concept is a clear, undistorted reflection of its external referent? How do we know with certainty that the “out there” gets “in here” in a clear and undistorted manner? How do we know with certainty that we have discovered a correspondence between the subjective and the objective?

Immanuel Kant was arguably the most important philosopher who intended to bridge the gap between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, to overcome the alienation of the thing-in-itself and the thing-as-experience. Kant was profoundly repulsed by the epistemological conclusions of the empiricism of classical liberalism, especially the skepticism of David Hume. Kant could not accept the empiricist route to knowledge or its belief that scientific determinism is compatible with personal freedom. John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and the empiricists who followed them, all insisted that human actions are subsumable under general scientific laws, no less than natural events. Kant, on the other hand, maintained that there is in human individuals a faculty capable of initiating a new causal series of events in the world. To his credit, Kant also challenged the belief that the same methodological principles used to study the natural world apply to the social world as well.

Kant made concessions to the empiricists by arguing that scientific certainty was possible, but he distanced himself from them in fundamental ways. In so doing, he laid a philosophic foundation for the separation of the noumenal and phenomenal worlds. For Kant, necessity, determinacy, and scientific certainty are found in only the phenomenal realm, whereas freedom, human agency, and ethical behavior are found in only the noumenal realm (Kant [1787] 1998a). The attempt to save both science and religion, necessity and freedom, means that science can know nothing about human freedom or human values ([1788] 1998b). Moreover, for Kant, ethics and politics can never be grounded in anything better than the good intentions of individual human beings. Thus, pure and practical reason are forever separated in Kant’s thought.

Kant’s separation of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds earned him the enmity of libertarians who explore such matters (Peikoff [1982] 1993; 1991). But stigmatizing Kant as the bugaboo of libertarian philosophy accomplishes very little. The alienation of noumena and phenomena, reason and freedom are not abolished by excommunicating Kant’s work from philosophic discourse. An alternative viewpoint suggests that Kant should not be discarded, but should be studied for the clarity with which he understood the problems of method and the search for scientific certainty. Kant intimates that the alienation of reason and freedom, the separation of the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, may be a problem in social life as well as in philosophy. Kant is not the final word, but merely a point of departure for the modern study of dialectics. If a direct, determinant, and corresponding relationship between the noumenal and the phenomenal is a fiction, then what are the possible forms of a relationship between the two?

Immanent critique is one of the core ideas of critical, dialectical inquiry. Immanent critique is usually associated with thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Georg Lukacs ([1923] 1972), and Herbert Marcuse (1964). It has also been used as an analytical tool by Mikhail Bakunin, Max Stirner, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and other individualist and libertarian writers (Welsh 2008; 2010). Immanent critique assists scholars in the critique of social formations by first identifying what a social formation holds itself to be, and then contrasting this image with evidence of what the social formation is, or what it is becoming (Antonio 1981). For instance, in the first volume of Capital, the only one completed in his lifetime, Marx argued that the presumed reciprocity between labor and capital was negated by the structural tendencies of exchange relationships toward the concentration and centralization of wealth and power. For Marx, the arguments advanced by the classical economists that there is a fair exchange between labor and capital under capitalist forms of commodity production were contradicted by the prevailing forms of exploitation and asymmetrical power relations.

Immanent critique is a tool that can be applied by a variety of theoretical perspectives to critique oppressive social movements and formations. Max Stirner ([1844] 1986; Stepelevich 1985; Welsh 2010) used it with tremendous insight in his critiques of classical liberalism, early socialism and communism, and the humanism of Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer. Rand, Rothbard, and Albert Jay Nock used it with great effect in their critiques of racism and other forms of domination (Nock [1935] 1959; Welsh 2008; 2010).

A significant example of its use in opposition to Marxism was developed by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin ([1873] 1990; Welsh 1980). Bakunin studied Hegel’s dialectics and was a libertarian enemy of the nascent Marxist movement. While Marx and his followers intended to emancipate the working class through democratic participation, his philosophy and organization worked directly against the working class. Bakunin noted that the Communist Manifesto includes a foreboding statement that ensures that bourgeois intellectuals are necessary to guide the worker’s movement in the proper historical direction; that is, the creation of a “worker’s state” led by bourgeois intellectuals is the intended goal of Marxist philosophy and political practice (Marx and Engels [1848] 2007). Further, the hierarchical structure and authoritarian operation of the First International Workingmen’s Association was anything but democratic and emancipatory. From Bakunin’s point of view, Marxism was a contradictory philosophy and movement from its inception; the philosophy itself contained internal contradictions that stood in sharp contrast to professed goals of the organizations and political parties it fostered. Bakunin was able to unmask the false presentations of this major political movement by contrasting the professed goals with evidence of the in-itself reality. There was no mysticism or mystery in Bakunin’s predictions that Marxism would create violent, oppressive regimes that engendered new forms of economic exploitation. Bakunin’s application of immanent critique revealed merely that something was wrong from the beginning. As such, it is one of history’s sharpest critiques of Marxism (Welsh 1980, 144).

Through its focus on the relationship of the individual to the state and social collectivities, dialectical libertarianism functions to contrast what a social formation says about itself with evidence about its structure and performance. As Antonio (1981) says, “Immanent critique attacks social reality from its own standpoint, but at the same time criticizes the standpoint from the perspective of historical context” (338). The antagonism between the ideology of the social formation and its performance is expressed in the first instance as a method of social analysis, but it has a political content as well; the ideal becomes a tool to attack the real. Marx and Bakunin, but also Rand and Rothbard, knew that the prevailing ideas of any historical period legitimate the power and wealth of dominant social categories. In advanced state capitalist societies, dominant ideas are generated and promulgated by political, scientific, academic, and cultural elites with the intent of promoting discipline and conformity. The emancipatory goals of libertarian inquiry are advanced by contrasting the prevailing ideas with evidence about the culture, polity, and economy of a social formation. If contradictions are discovered between the prevailing ideas and the in-itself reality, these help illuminate the oppressive, exploitative dimensions of a social formation.

Summation and Transcendence

One of the crucial contributions of Raya Dunayevskaya to social theory is the notion of an “unchained dialectic.” Dunayevskaya rejects the Marxist and conservative mythologies that Hegel was either a bourgeois philosopher who justified economic exploitation or a godless revolutionary who wanted to unleash the worst elements of the French Revolution on the entirety of Europe. In her studies of dialectics, Dunayevskaya demonstrated that there is no terminus to the historical process, either in social thought or social life. Not only does her argument shatter any claim that philosophic or social systems can ever be closed, it destroys the Kantian idea that pure and practical reason can be separated forever. Her books Philosophy and Revolution (1973) and The Power of Negativity (2002) are essential reading for understanding Hegel’s importance in social thought, largely due to her argument that Hegel sought to counter Kant’s methodology through his concept of the Absolute. She argued that we must explore Hegel’s idea of the Absolute or we fail to understand his concept of dialectic and to appreciate what he has to offer social theory. While Hegel was deeply concerned with the issues Kant expressed so clearly, his philosophy can be viewed as a summation and transcendence of both empiricist and Kantian traditions. From this perspective, Hegel’s unchained dialectic makes him a philosopher of liberation and an important source of ideas for the dialectics of liberty.

In his notion of the Absolute Idea, Hegel reveals himself to be an enemy of epistemologies that reinforce the correspondence notion of truth and ontologies that reduce individuality and society to Substance. Kant declined to speak about the link between pure reason and individual freedom. But Hegel, whose intellectual point of departure was the French Revolution, insisted that pure reason and individual freedom must be addressed as a totality. For Hegel, the test of social knowledge is its contribution to human freedom, which to him meant that the human being is a self-conscious self-determining agent. Nothing is more central to Hegel’s philosophy than his concept of freedom. The young Hegel was deeply concerned about the relationship between the state and the individual. In one of his earliest essays, he commented, “every State must treat free men as cogs in a machine. And this it ought not to do; so it must stop” (Hegel [1796–97] quoted in Lichtheim 1967, 36). He referred to “freedom realized” as the absolute aim of the progress of humanity. His political thought is a discussion of freedom as the appropriate content of political thought and the goal of politics is to make freedom actual (Avineri 1974; Dunayevskaya 1973; Schacht 1977).

Freedom is also the central concept in his philosophy of history: “World history is progress of the consciousness of freedom” (Hegel [1837] 1956, 24). Freedom is the defining quality of the foundational philosophic category, the “Notion.” The “Notion” is the principle of freedom, the power of substance self-realized, the concept of the individual as the free subject. Marxists, conservatives, and critical theorists typically abort their analyses prior to the “Doctrine of the Notion,” the threshold of Hegel’s concept of the Absolute. Scholars who fail to work through the Doctrine of the Notion arriving at the Absolutes still operate within the Kantian separation of reason and freedom, knowledge and humanity, pure and practical reason. This realization helps us to understand why Marcuse could applaud the student, black and women radicals of the 1960s and 1970s, but could not reconcile his enthusiasm with the one-dimensionality thesis, which declared that such self-conscious, self-determining opposition was impossible in advanced, industrial societies (Marcuse 1964). It also helps explain how Rothbard, writing in the same period, could applaud these forms of rebellion, but lament the failure of the rebels to act with adequate knowledge of libertarian concepts and values (1966a; 1966b; 1967). The problem is that theorists frequently believe that they have a special ability to theorize above and outside history and society. This belief is a Kantian separation between pure and practical reason, mental and manual labor, not the interaction of the two. A dialectical foundation for social thought challenges such Kantian antinomies.

In the Science of Logic ([1812] 2002) and in the first volume of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences ([1817] 1991), Hegel distinguishes his concept of the Absolute from that of other philosophers and proves himself to be an enemy of methodological systems. For Hegel, the Absolute Idea refers neither to any end of the historical process nor is it any particular reference to God or the Prussian state. It is a summation of what has transpired historically, both in philosophy and society. It is a ground for a new beginning. The Science of Logic spends 250 pages separating Hegel’s dialectic of thought and practice from that of Kant. But the great divide between Kant and Hegel is revealed only in the last chapter of this work.

The reader who expects the continued separation of thought and practice is in for a real shock. The final chapter of the Science of Logic reveals that the Absolute Idea is actually the interaction of theory and practice or the opposition of the Theoretical Idea and the Practical Idea. Each of these by itself is one-sided. Neither can pass beyond the antagonism on its own. The notion of the Absolute Idea refutes the prejudice that Hegel’s dialectic is about the resolution or end of all contradictions. The Absolute Idea contains the highest opposition within itself: the antagonism between theory and practice, philosophy and life. “Absolute Idea alone is Being, imperishable Life, self-knowing Truth and the whole of Truth.” However, the argument does not stop here, but returns to the concept of self-conscious self-determination, which is both the method and goal of his philosophy. Philosophy, for Hegel, is the voice of self-determination, the Idea of freedom. The Absolute is the dialectic ([1812] 2002, 824).

Hegel’s political thought is erroneously and unfairly characterized as an uncritical defense of the Prussian state, in large part, because it contains a lengthy and elaborate description of many of the layers of government and the ideology that was developed for them subsequent to the French Revolution (Hassner 1971). Hegel’s political thought develops many critical dimensions of the Absolute Idea in the realms of social and political formations. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel presents an “oblique critique” of the Prussian state, as well as a discussion of the relationship between inquiry and existing regimes (Avineri 1974, 115–16). In the preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel presents the famous statement that appears to equate the rational and the actual, inquiry and existence: “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” ([1821] 1952, 10). This epigram is erroneously presumed to be the shorthand summary of Hegel’s conservatism. It is thought that the epigram is merely a statement that existing social and political formations are rational because they exist or because they are the result of some inexorable historical development. The unacceptable implication of this interpretation, particularly for libertarians, is that it is irrational to challenge or critique the state. The indefensible interpretation suggests that Hegel is an absolute enemy of individual freedom, free markets, and minimal government.

This interpretation “jumps the gun” quite a bit. Hegel goes on to say that the “great thing” is to understand the “great wealth of forms, shapes, and appearances” that “actuality” takes once the Idea of freedom enters social discourse. The idea of freedom is such a powerful force that it ensures that the form of society and polity at any historical period is indeterminate. The preface is not only an argument in favor of historical indeterminacy; it is a critique of any form of philosophic or scientific certainty.

Whatever happens, every individual is the child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its own contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age. (11)

Since the possible forms of society, economy, and polity are infinite, philosophic and scientific certainty are impossible. History is limitless, therefore, inquiry is limited (Avineri 1974, 115–31).

Hegel’s political thought is not a conservative capitulation to the status quo. It is an important message for libertarians about the role of political critique. Philosophy and scientific inquiry cannot overleap the contemporary world. Moreover, the task of inquiry is to appreciate the infinite wealth of forms, shapes, and appearances of the social world. Thus, the dialectical role of libertarian inquiry is to tell existing social and political formations that their time is up. Philosophy is being apprehended in its own time, that is, social life understood in its context. The scholarly understanding and interpretation of a social formation tells the world that its historical period is over. Hegel’s unchained dialectic is an intellectual subversion of political authority and any pretense of philosophic or scientific certainty.

Hegel viewed Kant’s philosophy as a summation of philosophic development to that point in history. However, the continued development of academic philosophy was not his primary interest. His point of departure was the French Revolution. The purpose of his work was understanding and promoting freedom in individuality and in society: the reconstruction of social life as Subject not Substance. The goal of historical development in Hegel’s thought was not a defense of the Prussian state; it was the idea that history, philosophy, and inquiry always remain open. This is a conception that we do not know all that we need to know about either method or the social relations of the world we inhabit. New forms of oppression and new forms of liberation are always possible. Thus, we cannot know the totality of history or society. It is insufficient for libertarian inquiry to be constrained by the elaboration of axiomatic statements, or the uncritical application of received methods to new or evolving political or economic problems. Libertarianism needs more than empirical observations and deductive philosophic systems. It must be more than the uncritical application of the concepts and principles outlined by the luminaries of Objectivism, praxeology, and classical liberalism.

Based on the foregoing, an initial set of ideas for a libertarianism informed by the unchained dialectic might include the following:

Libertarianism is a philosophy of liberation. It is not constrained by a commitment to philosophic or scientific certainty.
Libertarianism disputes the idea that the human sciences must be identical in their assumptions and procedures to the natural sciences. Indeterminacy, spontaneity, and freedom are inherent in human action. Individuality and society are Subject not Substance.
Libertarianism views social reality in historical and processual terms. Society, economy, and polity are in flux, constantly challenged and potentially changing. There is no terminus to the historical process, nor is there any finitude to the forms that society, economy, and polity take.
Libertarian analysis takes force and fraud as a point of departure. Existing social formations are largely the outcome of the (a) the asymmetrical exercise of political and economic power and (b) ideological social control.
Libertarianism maintains a focus on the conflicts and antagonisms in theory and society. Prevailing theoretical perspectives and social formations are often replete with internal tensions that render them open to critique and modification.

A next step for the “dialectics of liberty” might be the characterization of existing libertarian literature as a summation that provides a foundation for a new beginning. This means casting a critical eye toward the internal contradictions of systems of thought, the sociohistorical context in which they arose, and the social formations they promote. Similarly, the “dialectics of liberty” can view existing social and political formations as both a summation and a foundation for transcendence. Perhaps the most important methodological challenge is to identify, understand, and learn from those forms of human action that aspire to self-conscious self-determination.

Notes

References

Antonio, Robert J. 1981. Immanent critique as the core of critical theory: Its origins and development in Hegel, Marx, and contemporary thought. British Journal of Sociology 32 (Fall): 330–45.

Avineri, Shlomo. 1974. Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bakunin, Mikhail. [1873] 1990. Statism and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dunayevskaya, Raya. 1973. Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao. New York: Delacorte Press.

———. 2002. The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press.

Hassner, Pierre. 1971. Georg W. F. Hegel. In Strauss and Cropsey 1987, 732–60.

Hegel, G. W. F. [1796–97] 1998. Erstes systemprogramme des deutschen Idealismus. Translated in Lichtheim 1967, 36.

———. [1812] 2002. Science of Logic. New York: Routledge.

———. [1817] 1991. The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Vol. One. London: Hackett Publishing.

———. [1821] 1952. Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. [1837] 1956. Philosophy of History. New York: Dover Publications.

Kant, Immanuel. [1787] 1998a. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. [1788] 1998b. Critique of Practical Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kelley, David. 2000. The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration in Objectivism. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Lichtheim, George. 1967. Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study. New York: Praeger.

Lukacs, Georg. [1923] 1972. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced, Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press.

———. [1956] 1968. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Boston: Beacon Press.

Martindale, Don. 1960. The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. [1848] 2007. The Communist Manifesto. Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishers.

McIntire, Alasdair. 1977. Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays. Fort Wayne, IN: University of Norte Dame Press.

Mills, C. W. 1940. Situated actions and vocabularies of motive. American Sociological Review 5 no. 6: 904–13.

Nock, Albert J. [1935] 1959. Our Enemy, the State. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Publishers.

Peikoff, Leonard. [1982] 1993. The Ominous Parallels. New York: Penguin.

———. 1991. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Penguin.

Rand, Ayn. 1979. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. New York: Penguin.

Rothbard, Murray. [1962] 2001. Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles. Auburn, AL: The Ludwig von Mises Institute.

———. 1966a. The Irish revolution. Left and Right 2, no. 2: 3–7.

———. 1966b. Black, white, and Polish: The cry for power. Left and Right 2, no. 3: 11–14.

———. 1967. The black revolution. Left and Right 3, no. 3: 7–17.

———. 1973. Individualism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. San Francisco: Cato Institute.

———. 1987. The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult. Port Townsend, WA: Liberty Publishing.

Schacht, Richard. 1977. Hegel on freedom. In McIntire 1977, 289–328.

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. 1995. Marx, Hayek and Utopia. Albany: State University of New York.

———. [1995] 2013. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. 2nd ed. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

———. 2000. Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Stepelevich, Lawrence. 1985. Max Stirner as Hegelian. Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (April–June): 597–614.

Stirner, Max. [1844] 1986. The Ego and Its Own. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Strauss, Leo and Joseph Cropsey. 1987. History of Political Philosophy. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Welsh, John F. 1980. Revolutionary subjectivity and the crisis of Marxist sociology. Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology 8, no. 2: 143–49.

———. 1986. Reification and the dialectic of social life. Quarterly Journal of Ideology 10 (Spring): 12–23.

———. 2008. After Multiculturalism: The Politics of Race and the Dialectics of Liberty. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

———. 2010. Max Stirner’s Dialectical Egoism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

It is not within the scope of this chapter to provide a detailed critique of the philosophic foundations of libertarianism beyond what I provide here. The discussion in this chapter constitutes an initial statement. Many questions remain, but attentive readers will have a sense of the direction such a critique will take. Further, as the discussion indicates, it is not my intention to outline a form of libertarianism that is entirely grounded in Hegel’s philosophy. There are aspects of Hegel’s thought that can be very helpful in a dialectical reconstruction of libertarianism. I discuss these ideas in the last section of this chapter. My overarching purpose is to outline the five suggestions for thinking about the “dialectics of liberty,” which appear at the end of the chapter. Interested readers can find additional detail in my books on libertarianism and race (Welsh 2008) and Max Stirner (Welsh 2010).

Chapter 4

Whence Natural Rights?

Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen

We have spent some time over the last three decades developing a natural rights approach on which to ground the defense of individual liberty, which is an essential feature of both modern libertarianism and traditional classical liberalism. In our previous two books, Norms of Liberty (2005) and The Perfectionist Turn (2016), we presented that approach in terms of rights considered as “metanorms,” and we offered an individualist-perfectionist approach to ethics that would support the natural rights tradition more generally. In addition to laying out our frameworks, we endeavored throughout to show how they can be employed both as alternative political and ethical theories and as a basis for critically assessing other political and ethical approaches.

Thus, we have further found it necessary to compare and contrast our approach with more traditional defenses of liberalism, as well as to note how our own version of human flourishing compares with both traditional and contemporary descriptions of natural law ethics. This required us to not only critically evaluate other theoretical perspectives, but also to consider criticisms launched from opposing perspectives, all of which entailed a great deal of rubbing shoulders with thinkers ancient and modern, from Aristotle and Aquinas to Locke, Kant, and Spinoza and on down to numerous more recent philosophers such as John Gray, Isaiah Berlin, Henry Veatch, Alasdair
MacIntyre, John Rawls, Stephen Darwall, Mark LeBar, Gerald Gaus, Julia Annas, Amartya Sen, and Martha Nussbaum.

We have made an effort to defend natural rights grounded in a neo-Aristotelian framework of human flourishing. As we have found in our research, however, numerous advocates of individual liberty do not believe in, or in the necessity of providing, such a foundation. We note with Lindsey (2017) that there has been in recent years a noticeable falling away in the willingness of those defending liberalism or libertarianism to do so in terms of natural rights. Nozick (1974) laid out the terms of discussion, saying that “[i]ndividuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do” (ix). However, a shift of the focus of political philosophy from natural rights to other concerns was signaled some time ago by Kukathas (2003) who, while at least ostensively comfortable with the notions of individualism and rights, also stated that “the primary question of politics is not about justice or rights, but about power, who may have it, and what may be done with it” (7). Both Schmidtz (2006) and Tomasi (2012), whose book titles indicate more of a focus on justice and fairness, respectively, than on rights or liberty, have indexes that contain one or more entries for “property rights,” but no entries for either “natural rights” or “rights.” The theorizing by Levy (2015) is essentially devoid of anything resembling natural rights, and Huemer (2017) rejects natural rights in favor of “libertarian intuitionism” as a justification for libertarian political institutions. Most recently, Brennan (2018) dispenses with the traditional natural rights foundation, preferring to speak instead of Nozick in terms of his libertarian theory of justice. Finally, there is the view, ably expressed by Zwolinsky, that natural rights—at least in its libertarian form—leads to absurd and counter-intuitive conclusions.

What explains the exodus by these authors from the natural rights justification for classical liberalism and libertarianism? Does the reason for this abandonment of traditional natural rights theory in favor of some kind of non-natural rights approach lie entirely on the natural rights side? Is there something lacking in traditional natural rights theory that leads these thinkers to abandon it for some kind of non-natural rights approach? Is looking to social science and empirical analysis a more realistic way of supporting liberalism and libertarianism than the seeming abstractionist character of natural rights? There is no question that there is always room for improvement in both the explication and the justification of natural rights theory—and doing so is an important part of our task.

As we see it, however, a central reason for modern political theory’s apparent abandonment of natural rights theory may be a consequence of the widespread rejection of cognitive realism and an accompanying “turn” toward constructivism. This is the modern rationalist notion that philosophical principles are constructions of thought rather than discoveries from an independently existing reality. This view leads either to a kind of rationalism or empiricism that forces one into either a defense of so called “ideal theory” or its rejection. We believe that classical realism offers a way out of this sort of choice. This is why our next book is entitled: The Realist Turn: Beyond Constructivism.

We support this proposed “realist turn” by considering a number of related or competing perspectives and discuss and evaluate various objections made by detractors of substantial and cognitive realism. The idea is that it is not only possible to have classical realism ground natural rights and a eudaimonistic ethics, but that it best serves such ends among alternatives. This is because classical realism is an alternative to the rationalist and empiricist directions that have been with us since early modernity. And it is necessary to avoid the Charybdis and Scylla of rationalist constructivism and empiricism because going in either direction involves either the loss of principle or the loss of reality. Natural rights, as its name implies, is dependent on a viable concept of nature that seems to us only supportable through classical realism.

References

Brennan, Jason. 2018. Libertarianism after Nozick. Philosophy Compass 13, no. 2 (February). Online at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17479991/2018/13/2.

Den Uyl, Douglas J. and Douglas B. Rasmussen. 2016. The Perfectionist Turn: From Metanorms to Metaethics. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.

Huemer, Michael. 2017. An ethical intuitionist case for libertarianism. (3 January). Online at: https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/ethical-intuitionist-case-libertarianism.

Kukathas, Chandran. 2003. The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Levy, Jacob T. 2015. Rationalism, Pluralism, & Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lindsey, Brink. 2017. The poverty of natural rights libertarianism. Online at: https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/poverty-natural-rights-libertarianism.

Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.

Rasmussen, Douglas B. and Douglas J. Den Uyl. 2005. Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Schmidtz, David. 2006. Elements of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tomasi, John. 2012. Free Market Fairness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 5

Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights

Stephan Kinsella

Classical liberals and libertarians believe that individuals have rights, even if there is debate about just why we have them or how this can be proved. Robert Nozick opened his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) with the assertion: “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)” (ix). Yet, he did not offer a proof of this assertion, for which he has drawn criticism. It is commonly assumed that Nozick’s argument is not complete until a proof of rights is offered.^[1] Other theorists have offered, over the years, various reasons—utilitarian, natural law, pragmatic, and the like—why we should respect others’ rights, why we should recognize that individuals have certain rights.^[2]

For instance, an economic case can be made for respecting the liberty of others. Given that you are a decent person and generally value your fellow man and wish everyone to live a satisfying life, you will tend to be in favor of the free market and liberty, at least if you understand basic economic principles. But the success of arguments such as these depends on other people accepting particular premises, such as valuing the general well-being of others, without which the argument is incomplete. Skeptics can always deny the validity of the premises even if they cannot refute free-market economics.

There can be no doubt that a rigorous argument for individual rights would be useful. In recent years, interest has been increasing in rationalist, dialectical, or dialogical rights theories or related theories, some of which promise to provide fruitful and unassailable defenses of individual rights. These arguments typically examine the implicit claims that are necessarily presupposed by action or discourse. They then proceed deductively or conventionally from these core premises, or axioms, to establish certain apodictally true conclusions. Several such arguments are discussed below.

Argumentation Ethics

Let us first discuss Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s (1989) path-breaking argumentation ethics defense of libertarian rights, most fully elaborated in his A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics, hereinafter TSC.^[3] Hoppe shows that basic rights are implied in the activity of argumentation itself, so that anyone asserting any claim about anything necessarily presupposes the validity of rights. Hoppe first notes that any truth at all (including norms such as individual rights to life, liberty, and property) that one would wish to discuss, deny, or affirm, will be brought up in the course of an argumentation, that is to say, will be brought up in dialogue. If participants in argumentation necessarily accept particular truths, including norms, in order to engage in argumentation, they could never challenge these norms in an argument without thereby engaging in a performative contradiction. This would establish these norms as literally incontestable truths.

Hoppe establishes self-ownership by pointing out that argumentation, as a form of action, implies the use of the scarce resources of one’s body. One must have control over, or own, this scarce resource in order to engage in meaningful discourse. This is because argumentation is, by its very nature, a conflict-free way of interacting, since it is an attempt to find what the truth is, to establish truth, to persuade or be persuaded by the force of words alone. If one is threatened into accepting the statements or truth-claims of another, this does not tend to get at the truth, which is undeniably a goal of argumentation or discourse. Thus, anyone engaging in argumentation implicitly presupposes the right of self-ownership of other participants in the argument, for otherwise the other would not be able to consider freely and accept or reject the proposed argument. Only as long as there is at least an implicit recognition of each individual’s property right in his or her own body can true argumentation take place. When this right is not recognized, the activity is no longer argumentation, but threat, mere naked aggression, or plain physical fighting. Thus, anyone who denies that rights exist contradicts himself since, by his very engaging in the cooperative and conflict-free activity of argumentation, he necessarily recognizes the right of his listener to be free to listen, think, and decide. That is, any participant in discourse presupposes the non-aggression axiom, the libertarian view that one may not initiate force against others.

Thus, according to Hoppe, anyone who would ever deny the ethics underlying the free market is already, by his very engaging in the civilized activity of discourse, presupposing the very ethics that he is challenging. This is a powerful argument because, instead of seeking to persuade someone to accept a new position, it points out to him a position that he already maintains, a position that he necessarily maintains. Opponents of liberty undercut their own position as soon as they begin to state it.

Hoppe then extends his case for self-ownership to external resources, to show that property rights in external scarce resources, in addition to self-ownership rights, are also presupposed by discourse. As he argues, the body is “the prototype of a scarce good for the use of which property rights, that is, rights of exclusive ownership, somehow have to be established, in order to avoid clashes” (Hoppe 1989, 19). As Hoppe explains,

The compatibility of this principle with that of nonaggression can be demonstrated by means of an argumentum a contrario. First, it should be noted that if no one had the right to acquire and control anything except his own body . . . then we would all cease to exist and the problem of the justification of normative statements . . . simply would not exist. The existence of this problem is only possible because we are alive, and our existence is due to the fact that we do not, indeed cannot, accept a norm outlawing property in other scarce goods next and in addition to that of one’s physical body. Hence, the right to acquire such goods must be assumed to exist. (161)

Next, Hoppe argues that the only ownership rule that is compatible with self-ownership and the presuppositions of discourse is the Lockean original-
appropriation rule (160–69). Hoppe’s basic point here is that self-ownership rights are established just because one’s body is itself a scarce resource, so other scarce resources must be similarly ownable.^[4]

Looked at from another angle, participants in argumentation indisputably need to use and control the scarce resources in the world to survive; otherwise, they would perish. But because their scarcity makes conflict over the uses of resources possible, only norms that determine the proper ownership can avoid conflict over these scarce goods. That such norms are valuable cannot be denied, because anyone who is alive in the world and participating in the practical activity of argumentation cannot deny the value of being able to control scarce resources and the value of avoiding conflicts over such scarce resources.

So no one could ever deny that norms for determining the ownership of scarce goods are useful for allowing conflict-free exploitation of such resources. But, as Hoppe points out, there are only two fundamental alternatives for acquiring rights in unowned property: (1) by doing something with things with which no one else had ever done anything before, that is, the Lockean concept of mixing of labor, or homesteading; or (2) simply by verbal declaration or decree. However, a rule that allows property to be owned by mere verbal declaration cannot serve to avoid conflicts, since any number of people could at any time assert conflicting claims of ownership of a particular scarce resource. Only the first alternative, that of Lockean homesteading, establishes an objective (or, as Hoppe calls it, intersubjectively ascertainable) link between a particular person and a particular scarce resource, and thus no one can deny the Lockean right to homestead unowned resources.^[5]

Estoppel

Another rationalist-oriented justification of rights is an argument I developed based on the common-law concept of estoppel.^[6] As Cataldo et al. (1980) state: “The word estoppel means ‘not permitted to deny.’ If A makes a statement of fact that B relies on in some substantial way, A will not be permitted to deny it (that is, A will be estopped), if the effect of A’s denial would be to injure the party who relies on it (479).”^[7] Thus, under the traditional legal principle of estoppel, a person may be prevented, or estopped, from maintaining something (for example in court) inconsistent with his previous conduct or statements. For instance, if a father promises his daughter that he will pay her college tuition for her, and the daughter relies on this promise to her detriment, for example by enrolling in college and becoming obligated to the college for her tuition, then she may be able to recover some of her expenses from her father, even if his original promise is not enforceable as a normal contract (for example, because there was no consideration).^[8] The father would be estopped from denying that a contract was formed, even though, technically, one was not.

Drawing on this legal terminology and concept, the approach I advance may be termed “dialogical” estoppel, or simply estoppel. The estoppel principle shows that an aggressor contradicts himself if he objects to others’ enforcement of their rights. Thus, unlike Hoppe’s argumentation ethics approach, which focuses on presuppositions of discourse in general, and which shows that any participant in discourse contradicts himself if he denies these presuppositions, the estoppel theory focuses on the discourse between an aggressor and his victim about punishment of the aggressor and seeks to show that the aggressor contradicts himself if he objects to his punishment.

What would it mean to have a right? Whatever else rights might be, certainly it is the case that rights are legitimately enforceable; that is, one who is physically able to enforce his right may not be prevented from doing so. In short, having a right allows one to legitimately punish the violator of the right or to legitimately use force to prevent another from violating the right. The only way one could be said not to have a right would be if the attempt to punish a violator of the right is for some reason unjustifiable. But clearly this problem itself can arise only when the alleged criminal objects to being punished, for if criminals consented to punishment, we would not face the problem of justifying punishing them.^[9]

The estoppel argument contends that we have rights just because no aggressor could ever meaningfully object to being punished. Thus, if the only potential obstacle to having a legitimately enforceable right is the unconsenting criminal, and if he is estopped from objecting to his punishment, then the right may be said to exist, or be justified, since, in effect, the criminal cannot deny this.

So why is this the case? Why is a criminal estopped in this manner? Consider: if B is a violent aggressor, such as a murderer or rapist, how could he not consent to any punishment that A, the victim (or the victim’s agent), attempts to inflict? To object to his punishment, B must engage in discourse with A; he must at least temporarily adopt the stance of a peaceful, civilized person trying to persuade A, through the use of reason and consistent, universalizable principles, to provide reasons as to why A should not punish him. But to do this, B must in essence claim that A should not use force against him (B), and to do this B must claim that it is wrong, or unjustifiable, to use force. But since he has initiated force, he has admitted that (he believes that) it is proper to use force, and B would contradict himself if he were to claim the opposite. Since contradictions are always false and since an undeniable goal of discourse is to establish truth, such contradictions are ruled out of bounds in discourse, since they cannot tend to establish truth. Thus, B is estopped from making this contradictory assertion, and is therefore unable to object to his punishment.

Under the estoppel theory, then, we may enforce our rights against violent aggressors, since they cannot object to the enforcement of rights without self-contradiction.^[10]

Rights-skepticism

A third rationalist type of rights argument concerns the very nature of rights themselves and shows how any rights-skeptic contradicts himself whenever he denies that rights exist. It is similar to the estoppel approach outlined above, although the discourse under examination need not involve an aggressor. Instead, this argument focuses on rights-skeptics who deny the existence of rights, rather than on actual criminals who object to being punished in particular instances for a given crime.

If any right at all exists, it is a right of A to have or do X without B’s preventing it; and, therefore, A can legitimately use force against B to enforce the right.^[11] A is concerned with the enforceability of his right to X, and this enforceability is all that A requires in order to be secure in his right to X. For a rights-skeptic meaningfully to challenge A’s asserted right, the skeptic must challenge the enforceability of the right, instead of merely challenging the existence of the right. Nothing less will do. If the skeptic does not deny that A’s proposed enforcement of his purported right is legitimate, then the skeptic has not denied A’s right to X, because what it means to have a right is to be able to legitimately enforce it. If the skeptic maintains, then, that A has no right to X, indeed, no rights at all since there are no rights, the skeptic must also maintain that A’s enforcement of his purported right to X is not justified.

But the problem faced by the skeptic here is that he assumes that enforcement—that is, the use of force—requires justification. A, however, cares not that the rights-skeptic merely challenges A’s use of force against B. The rights-skeptic must do more than express his preference that A not enforce his right against B, for such an expression does not attack the legitimacy of A’s enforcing his right against B. The only way for the skeptic meaningfully to challenge A’s enforcement action is to acknowledge that B may use force to prevent A’s (illegitimate) enforcement action. And here the rights-skeptic (perversely) undercuts his own position, because by recognizing the legitimacy of B’s use of force against A, the rights-skeptic effectively attributes rights to B himself, the right not to have unjustifiable force used against him. In short, for anyone to meaningfully maintain that A has no rights against B on the grounds that no rights exist, he must effectively attribute rights to B so that B may defend himself against A’s purportedly unwarranted enforcement action.

More common-sensically, this demonstration points out the inconsistency on the part of a rights-skeptic who engages in discourse about the propriety of rights at all. If there are no rights, then there is no such thing as the justifiable or legitimate use of force, but neither is there such a thing as the unjust use of force. But if there is no unjust use of force, what is it, exactly, that a rights-skeptic is concerned about? If individuals delude themselves into thinking that they have natural rights, and, acting on this assumption, go about enforcing these rights as if they are true, the skeptic has no grounds to complain. To the extent the skeptic complains about people enforcing these illusory rights, he begins to attribute rights to those having force used against them. Any rights-skeptic can only shut up, because he contradicts himself the moment he objects to others’ acting as if they have rights.^[12]

Other Rationalist-related Theories

In addition to the three approaches outlined above, other arguments, which also point out the inherent presuppositions of discourse or action, are briefly discussed below.

G. B. Madison and Argumentation Ethics-related theorists

One approach that is similar to Hoppe’s argumentation ethic is that of philosopher G. B. Madison. Madison (1986) argues that

the various values defended by liberalism are not arbitrary, a matter of mere personal preference, nor do they derive from some natural law. . . . Rather, they are nothing less and nothing more than what could be called the operative presuppositions or intrinsic features and demands of communicative rationality itself. In other words, they are values that are implicitly recognized and affirmed by everyone by the very fact of their engaging in communicative reason. This amounts to saying that no one can rationally deny them without at the same time denying reason, without self-contradiction, without in fact abandoning all attempts to persuade the other and to reach agreement. (266)

These implicitly recognized values include a renunciation of the legitimacy of violence. Thus, “it is absolutely impossible for anyone who claims to be rational, which is to say human, outrightly to defend violence” (267).^[13] Madison continues,

[Paul] Ricoeur^[14] writes: “. . . violence is the opposite of discourse. . . . Violence is always the interruption of discourse: discourse is always the interruption of violence.” That violence is the opposite of discourse means that it can never justify itself—and is therefore not justifiable—for only through discourse can anything be justified. As the theory of rational argumentation and discussion, liberalism amounts, therefore, to a rejection of power politics. (267 and 274 n.37)

Madison, like Hoppe, argues that the fact-value gap can be bridged by an appeal to the nature of discourse. “[T]he notion of universal human rights and liberties is not an . . . arbitrary value, a matter of mere personal preference. . . . On the contrary, it is nothing less and nothing more than the operative presupposition or intrinsic feature and demand of communicative rationality itself” (269). In a sense, notes Madison, Thomas Jefferson was not so far off in calling our rights “self-evident.”

The general thrust of Madison’s argument seems sound, although it is not as consistent or fully developed as Hoppe’s argumentation ethics. While Hoppe shows that the nonaggression principle (i.e., self-ownership plus the right to homestead) itself is directly implied by any discourse or argumentation, Madison’s train of logic seems more muddled. For instance, he argues that, because discourse has “priority” over violence, this validates the Kantian claim that people ought to be treated as ends rather than means, which is the principle of human dignity. The principle of freedom from coercion then follows from the principle of human dignity. Madison does not specify in any more detail than this the hard-core libertarian principles that can be derived from such an approach,^[15] although, to be fair, Madison stresses that his remarks are intended only “to indicate the way in which liberalism must seek to” defend the values it advocates (269–70).

Frank van Dun (1986) similarly suggests that part of “the ethics of dialogue” is that we ought to respect the “dialogical rights of others—their right to speak or not to speak, to listen or not to listen, to use their own judgment” (24).^[16] Van Dun argues that “principles of private property and uncoerced exchange” (28) are also presupposed by participants in discourse. Jeremy Shearmur (1988, 47) also proposes that a Habermasian argument may be developed to justify individual property rights and other classical liberal principles, although this argument is different in approach from that of Hoppe, Madison, van Dun, and is, in my view, much weaker, at least in its current stage of development.^[17]

Other theories that are briefly worth mentioning here include Paul Chevigny’s theory (1980, 157–94) that the nature of discourse may be used to defend the right to free speech;^[18] and Tibor Machan’s view (1996, 45–55) that discourse in general and political dialogue in particular rest on individualist prerequisites or presuppositions.

Murray Rothbard (1988), who was very enthusiastic about Hoppe’s argumentation ethics, was also hopeful that Hoppe’s argumentation ethics or axiomatic approach could be further extended. As Rothbard stated, “[a] future research program for Hoppe and other libertarian philosophers would be (a) to see how far axiomatics can be extended into other spheres of ethics, or (b) to see if and how this axiomatic could be integrated into the standard natural law approach” (45).^[19] The various perspectives of Hoppe, Madison, van Dun, and others on a similar theme indicate that Rothbard may indeed be correct that this type of rationalist thinking can be further extended in libertarian or ethical theory.^[20]

Crocker’s Moral Estoppel theory

In a theory bearing some resemblance to the estoppel theory discussed above, law professor Lawrence Crocker (1992) proposes the use of “moral estoppel” in preventing a criminal from asserting the unfairness of being punished in certain situations. Crocker’s theory, while interesting, is not rigorous, and Crocker does not seem to realize the implications of estoppel for justifying only the libertarian conception of rights. Rather than focusing on the reciprocity between the force used in punishment and the force of an aggressive act by a wrongdoer, Crocker claims that a person who has “treated another person or the society at large in a fashion that the criminal law prohibits” is “morally estopped” from asserting that his punishment would be unfair (1067). However, Crocker’s use of estoppel is too vague and imprecise, for just because one has violated a criminal law does not mean that one has committed the aggression that is necessary to estop him from complaining about punishment. A breached law must first be legitimate (just) for Crocker’s assumption to hold, but as the estoppel theory indicates, a law is legitimate only if it prohibits aggression. Crocker’s theory seems to assume that any law is valid, even those that do not prohibit the initiation of force.

Pilon and Gewirth on the Principle of Generic Consistency

Another rights theory that bears mention here is that of Roger Pilon. Pilon (1979b) has developed a libertarian version of the theory propounded by his teacher Alan Gewirth.^[21] Although he disagrees with the non-libertarian conclusions that Gewirth draws from his own rights theory, Pilon builds “upon much of the justificatory groundwork he [Gewirth] has established, for I believe he has located, drawn together, and solved some of the most basic problems in the theory of rights” (1173).

To determine what rights we have, Pilon (following Gewirth) focuses on “what it is we necessarily claim about ourselves, if only implicitly, when we act” (1177). Pilon argues that all action is conative, that is, an agent acts voluntarily and for purposes which seem good to him. Pilon argues that the prerequisites of successful action are “voluntariness and purposiveness,” the so-called generic features that characterize all action. Thus, an agent cannot help valuing these generic features and even making a rights-claim to them, according to Pilon/Gewirth. From this conclusion, it is argued that all agents also necessarily claim rights against coercion and harm. And since it would be inconsistent to maintain that one has rights for these reasons without also admitting that others have these rights too (since the reasoning concerning the nature of action applies equally to all purposive actors), such rights-claims must be universalizable.^[22] Thus, an agent in any action makes a rights-claim to be free from coercion and harm, since such rights are necessary to provide for the generic features of action, which an agent also necessarily values, and the agent also necessarily grants these rights to others because of the universalizability requirement.

From this point, Pilon/Gewirth develops a sort of modern categorical imperative, which is called the “Principle of Generic Consistency” (PGC). The PGC is: “Act in accord with the generic rights of your recipients as well as of yourself,” and “Recipients are those who stand opposite agents, who are ‘affected by’ or ‘recipients of’ their actions” (1184). Under Pilon’s libertarian working of the PGC,

the PGC does not require anyone to do anything. It is addressed to agents, but it does not require anyone to be an agent who has recipients. An individual can “do nothing” if he chooses, spending his life in idle contemplation. Provided there are no recipients of this behavior, he is at perfect liberty to perform it. And if there are recipients, the PGC requires only that he act in accord with the generic rights of those recipients, i.e., that he not coerce or harm them. (1184)

Pilon extends his reasoning and works the PGC to flesh out more fully just what (primarily libertarian) rights we do have. All this is well done, except for one crucial error. As Hoppe (1993) points out, it is argumentation, not action, that is the appropriate starting point for such an analysis, because,

from the correctly stated fact that in action an agent must, by necessity, presuppose the existence of certain values or goods, it does not follow that such goods then are universalizable and hence should be respected by others as the agent’s goods by right. . . . Rather, the idea of truth, or of universalizable rights or goods only emerges with argumentation as a special subclass of actions, but not with action as such, as is clearly revealed by the fact that Gewirth, too, is not engaged simply in action, but more specifically in argumentation when he wants to convince us of the necessary truth of his ethical system.^[23] (181 n.18)

It is possible that, despite this error, much of Pilon’s work is salvageable by, in effect, moving it to an argumentation context, such as is done in the estoppel approach where an aggressor must engage in argumentation to object to his punishment and is therefore subject to the unique constraints of argumentation. In other words, the weak link in Pilon’s PGC chain may be able to be repaired by considering claims made about prior actions when the agent later objects to punishment, for an objection to being punished requires the agent to enter into the special subclass action of argumentation, to which criteria such as universalizability do apply.

Conclusion

Under the three theories outlined above—argumentation ethics, estoppel theory, and the self-contradictions of rights-skeptics—we can see that the relevant participant in discourse cannot deny the validity of individual rights. These rationalist-oriented theories offer very good defenses of individual rights, defenses that are more powerful than many other approaches, because they show that the opponent of individual rights, whether criminal, skeptic, or socialist, presupposes that they are true. Critics must enter the cathedral of libertarianism even to deny that it exists. This makes criticism of libertarian beliefs hollow: for if someone asks why we believe in individual rights, we can tell them to look in the mirror and find the answer there.^[24]

Notes

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Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. 2000. Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Shearmur, Jeremy. 1988. Habermas: A critical approach. Critical Review 2, no. 1: 39–50.

———. 1990. From dialogue rights to property rights: Foundations for Hayek’s legal theory. Critical Review 4, nos. 1–2: 106–32.

United States v. Carolene Products Co. 1938. 304 U.S. 144, 152 n.4. Online at: http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep304/usrep304144/usrep304144.pdf.

van Dun, Frank. 1982. On the philosophy of argument and the logic of common morality. In Barth and Martens 1982, 281–94.

———. 1986. Economics and the limits of value-free science. Reason Papers 11 (Spring): 17–32. Online at: https://reasonpapers.com/pdf/11/rp_11_2.pdf.

———. 2009. Argumentation ethics and the philosophy of freedom. Libertarian Papers 1, article no. 19. Online at: http://libertarianpapers.org/19-argumentation-ethics-philosophy-freedom/.

Veatch, Henry. 1985. Human Rights: Fact or Fancy? Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Yeager, Leland B. 1988. Raw assertions. Liberty (November): 45–46.

———. 1996. Book review (Review of Rothbard 1995.) Review of Austrian Economics 9: 181–88.

Zimmerman v. Zimmerman. 1982. 86 A.D.2d 525, 447 N.Y.S. 2d 675. Online at: https://www.leagle.com/decision/198261186ad2d5255499.

See, for example, Nagel 1975, 136–49. Also see Machan (1989): “in a way, this book is a response to Nagel’s criticism of [Nozick,] a criticism often endorsed by others, to wit, that libertarianism lacks moral foundations” (xiii). Also see Lomasky (1987), who says that Nozick declines “to offer any systematic rationale for the vaguely specified collection of rights he takes to be basic” (9).

See, for example, Mises 1985; Rothbard 1982, 1985; Rand 1964, 1967; Machan 1989; Narveson 1988; Lomasky 1987; Rasmussen and Den Uyl, 1991. Also see Barnett 1989, 611 and 2014, 23–24, where he contends that consequentialist arguments for rights need not be utilitarian. Some libertarian theorists provide arguments other than traditional deontological, principled, or natural rights, and utilitarian, empirical, or consequentialist, approaches. For example, Michael Huemer (2007) argues for a type of intuitionism, and J. C. Lester (2000) opposes “justificationist” arguments for liberty and advances a critical-rationalist, “conjecturalist” approach influenced by Karl Popper’s thought. For a review of Lester 2000, see Gordon and Modugno 2003.

See Hoppe 1989, chapter 7 and Hoppe 1993, 180–86, from which sources the following discussion is drawn. See also Hoppe 1988, 20–22.

See note 10, below, for one view of the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the connection between property and other rights.

Rothbard (1988) gave wholehearted endorsement to Hoppe’s argumentation ethics early on:

In a dazzling breakthrough for political philosophy in general and for libertarianism in particular, he [Hoppe] has managed to transcend the famous is/ought, fact/value dichotomy that has plagued philosophy since the days of the scholastics, and that had brought modern libertarianism into a tiresome deadlock. Not only that: Hans Hoppe has managed to establish the case for anarcho-capitalist, Lockean rights in an unprecedentedly hard-core manner, one that makes my own natural law/natural rights position seem almost wimpy in comparison. (44)

The late Leland Yeager claimed (1996) that Rothbard, who died in January 1995, had changed his mind before his death regarding the validity of Hoppe’s argument. Yeager asserts that, based on language in this posthumously-published treatise: “Rothbard no longer endorses Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s claim to derive libertarian policy positions purely from the circumstances of discussion itself, without any appeal to value judgments. . . . On the contrary, and as he had done earlier, Rothbard now correctly observes that policy recommendations and decisions presuppose value judgments as well as positive analysis” (185). There is no doubt that Yeager himself sees no merit in Hoppe’s argumentation ethics. See Yeager 1988, 45–46. However, Yeager provides no evidence for his contention about Rothbard’s change of mind. Hoppe’s argumentation ethics has drawn a number of critics and defenders since its debut in the mid-1980s and continues to attract attention. See, for example, Kinsella 2011 and 2015, van Dun 2009, and Eabrasu 2009. Sciabarra (2000, 367–69) also discussed Hoppe’s argumentation ethics and my own estoppel views, as well as other dialectical approaches. See also Murphy and Callahan 2002 and my response 2002, and Block 2011. Hoppe recently re-presented his argument and responded to critics (2016).

See Kinsella 1996a, 51–73 and 1992, 61–74.

See American Law Institute 1981, § 90 and Louisiana Civil Code, art. 1967. See also Kinsella 2016.

See, for example, Zimmerman v. Zimmerman (1982), from which this example was derived.

Of course, an accused criminal need not engage in discourse with his accuser at all. But if the criminal is to put forward an objection to his punishment, he must engage in argumentation and thus be subject to the rules of argumentation. As Hare (1963) noted in a similar context:

Just as one cannot win a game of chess against an opponent who will not make any moves—and just as one cannot argue mathematically with a person who will not commit himself to any mathematical statements—so moral argument is impossible with a man who will make no moral judgments at all. . . . Such a person is not entering the arena of moral dispute, and therefore it is impossible to contest with him. He is compelled also—and this is important—to abjure the protection of morality for his own interests. (§ 6.6; emphasis added)

10.

As Hoppe’s argumentation ethics approach grounds self-ownership rights and then is extended to cover property rights, so the estoppel argument may also be extended to cover property rights and the Lockean homesteading principle, essentially by showing that self-ownership rights presuppose the right to homestead, because one is meaningless without the other. See Kinsella 1996a, part III.F. As the U.S. Supreme Court (Lynch v. Household Fin. Corp. 1972) has recognized, “The right to enjoy property without lawful deprivation . . . is in truth a ‘personal’ right. . . . In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property. Neither could have meaning without the other. That rights in property are basic civil rights has long been recognized” (emphasis added). But see the famous footnote 4 in United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938), implying that economic and property rights are less fundamental than personal rights.

11.

Many definitions of the concept “rights” have been offered. See, for example, Flew 1984, 306 (defining “rights”) and 1979, 1117–41; Gewirth 1979, 1148; Hohfeld 1946, 30 et passim (discussing four senses of “rights” and explaining that a right is a three-term relation between a right-holder, a type of action, and one or more persons); Kocourek 1927, 7; Lomasky 1987, 101; Machan 1989, 102; Narveson 1980, 41; Nozick 1974, 29–30; Rand 1963, 29–30; and Rasmussen and Den Uyl 1991, 111. One of the clearest, non-tautological definitions of rights of which I am aware is Sadowsky’s: “When we say that one has the right to do certain things we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this by the use of physical force or the threat thereof. We do not mean that any use a man makes of his property within the limits set forth is necessarily a moral use” (1974, 120–21). Whatever the definition, however, it seems clear that the concept of rights and the concept of enforceability are mutually dependent in the sense discussed in the text.

12.

Indeed, another way to respond to a rights-skeptic would be to propose to physically harm him. If there are no rights, as he maintains, then he cannot object to being harmed. So, presumably, any rights-skeptic would change his position and admit there were rights (if only so as to be able to object to being harmed)—or there would soon be no more rights-skeptics left alive to give rights-advocates any trouble.

13.

Madison and Hoppe both draw on the “discourse ethics” of Jürgen Habermas (1990) and Karl-Otto Apel (1990). Rasmussen has criticized both Habermas’s discourse ethics and Hoppe’s argumentation ethics; see Rasmussen 1992, 17–34 and 1988, 50. This latter article was part of a symposium, “Breakthrough or Buncombe,” containing discussion of Hoppe’s argumentation ethics by several libertarian theorists.

14.

See Ricoeur 1979, 226–76. Madison notes that Frank Knight made a similar point, quoting his statement that “The only ‘proof’ that can be offered for the validity of the liberal position is that we are discussing it and its acceptance is a presupposition of discussion, since discussion is the essence of the position itself. From this point of view, the core of liberalism is a faith in the ultimate potential equality of men as the basis of democracy” (Knight 1982, 473–74). See also Knight 1956, 268.

15.

Madison does maintain that the supreme “ought” or demand of liberalism is “that conflicts of interest and differences of opinion should be resolved through free, open, peaceful discussion aimed at consensus and not by recourse to force” (1986, 266).

16.

See also van Dun 1982, 281. Since these earlier publications, he has expanded and elaborated on his argument in van Dun 2009.

17.

Also see Shearmur 1990, 106–32.

18.

See also Martin 1982, 906–19 and in reply, Chevigny 1982, 920–31. See also Blackman 1995, 285–353, which defends a procedural natural-law position on the grounds that, as we normally use language and define “law,” law has a procedural component that, if adhered to, limits a government’s arbitrary and irrational use of power. Blackman contends that language users implicitly accept this normative, procedural aspect of what is described as law; they use a definition of law that also limits what state power can be classified as law. (Of course, H. L. A. Hart argues that some types of rules or arbitrary commands enforced by a given regime are too unlawlike to be considered even positive law. See Hart 1961.) A somewhat similar argument may be found in Barnett 1995, 93–122, where he argues that those who claim that the U.S. Constitution justifies certain government regulation of individuals are themselves introducing normative claims into discourse, and thus cannot object, on positivist or wertfrei grounds, to a moral or normative criticism of their position. See also Barnett 1993, 853–68.

19.

For some efforts in this direction, see Graf 2011.

20.

Madison (1986) notes that “it should be possible to derive in a strictly systematic fashion all of the . . . universal values” necessary to defend liberalism (268). Concerning extending Hoppe’s discourse ethics to natural law, it should be pointed out that both Hoppe and Madison appear skeptical of the validity of classic natural law theory. Madison states that rights are not “a requirement of some natural law existing independently of the reasoning process and discernible only by metaphysical insight into the ‘nature of things.’” (269); Hoppe (1993) states: “It has been a common quarrel with the natural rights position, even on the part of sympathetic readers, that the concept of human nature is far ‘too diffuse and varied to provide a determinate set of contents of natural law’” (179; the internal quote is of Gewirth 1984, 73). However, Machan (1996), accepting the validity of action-based ethical theories (similar to Pilon’s and Gewirth’s approach, discussed below), but not purely-argumentation-based theories, also maintains that “human action needs to be understood by reference to human nature” (46). See also the quote by Machan in note 23 below.

21.

See also Pilon 1979a, his unpublished dissertation completed the same year; and Gewirth 1978 and 1979.

22.

See Pilon 1979b, 1179.

23.

Note that Machan (1996) seems to agree with Gewirth/Pilon here rather than with Hoppe, claiming that “discourse is not primary. Instead, it is human action itself that is primary, with discourse being only one form of human action. It is the presuppositions of human action that require certain political principles to be respected and protected. And human action needs to be understood by reference to human nature” (45). For further criticism and discussion of the Gewirthian argument, see Machan 1989, 197–99; MacIntyre 1981, 64–65; Veatch 1985, 159–60; and Narveson 1980, 651–74.

24.

This chapter is based on the author’s previous article (1996b) “New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 313–26, and is published under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

Chapter 6

Dialectical Psychology

Robert L. Campbell

The Road to Dépassement

As has been the case since World War II, if not earlier, the United States is the world’s center for academic research in psychology. Many varieties of American psychology have burgeoned and extended since the initial shoots in the 1870s; a few of these have had real dialectical potential. But the prevailing view of how psychology is to be done—and, by intended or unintended consequence, of what psychology has to be about—has been some form of positivism. Not so much logical positivism, which insisted that theories be axiomatized in symbolic logic, as the older-fashioned, raw, crude, strictest variety, for which science accrues and amasses sets of atomic facts, and has no business trying to do anything else (Mach 1883/1893; Smith 1986). American psychology, largely governed by positivism, has not seen a need for—or shown much concern about—dialectics.

Positivists Don’t Think They Need Dialectics

Yet, if we define dialectics as Chris Matthew Sciabarra (2000) has in Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (and similar definitions can be found in the work of other dialecticians), it is hard to see how psychology could not be dialectical. And even if by various tricks psychologists have managed to avoid it, how can psychology afford not to be dialectical?

Dialectics, then, pertains less to the discovery, demonstration, or validation of facts and principles and more to the ways in which we might understand and interpret these facts or principles once they have been discovered, demonstrated, or validated.

A fully dialectical theorist recognizes, however, that while dialectics is not reducible to demonstration, the moment of inquiry is essential to any dialectical approach. For if a dialectical analysis is to help us understand the real world, it must relate first to the facts of that world. [. . .]

Furthermore, dialectics and demonstration have mutual implications. Just as dialectics requires a moment of inquiry, so too does inquiry require a dialectical sensibility if it is to reveal the rich character of the real world. Indeed, the proper identification of a fact often requires that we examine that world from different vantage points, never dropping the context within which the facts are embedded. (150)

As Mark Bickhard and I have argued previously, from the standpoint of philosophy of science, psychology is unavoidably dialectical.

When any science, natural or social, is functioning well, thought and criticism move up and down among levels in dialectical fashion—from metaphysics to theory, from theory to data, and back again. Even activities that look like routine aspects of data gathering—procedures such as measuring this person’s propensity to develop an eating disorder, or that person’s working memory capacity—require ongoing participation in the dialectic. Researchers need to keep asking such questions as: “How good a measurement of working memory capacity is this?”; “Would that other one be better?”; “Is working memory capacity the right thing for us to be trying to measure?” Neglecting the interrelations among the levels—or within each level—hampers rational decision making and prevents a science from fulfilling its potential. (Bickhard and Campbell 2005, 4)

But the vast majority of researchers have been trained in an undialectical way. They continue to view what they are doing undialectically. So committed have psychologists often been to amassing data sets, and to reducing psychological concepts to the patterns of data obtained by applying socially accepted measurement operations, that hypothesis testing, the design of experiments, and the evaluation and improvement of measurement procedures have often seemed superfluous. The positivism of Ernst Mach (1883/1893) still prevails.

[I]f piling up data inexorably leads to correct generalizations about the phenomena of interest, even the most venerable lore about experimental design becomes superfluous. If the point of science is merely to accumulate inductive evidence in favor of some favored hypothesis, what need could there be for control groups or conditions in an experiment? For the standard, taken-for-granted procedures of empirical research to make sense, science needs to be understood as a decision making process that generates, criticizes, and tests theories and hypotheses. A Machian cultural eye that, over time, sees vaster and vaster patterns of data has no need of experimental design. Every science needs data collection and analysis. But every science also needs theory. Empirical work done atheoretically—without regard to the assumptions that lie behind it, the implications of the hypotheses being proposed, and the wider meaning of its results—will never deliver the answers that were expected from it. (2)

There are more aspects of psychology that can be viewed from multiple perspectives, dialectically, than we have room to consider here. The historical development of psychology as a discipline, the philosophical treatment of its principles and procedures, can be so taken, as indicated above. Perhaps some productive paths can be selected for the future of psychology, and unproductive paths avoided, to the extent that it starts being consciously understood as dialectical.

At its root, psychology is obliged to inquire into, and to explain, the nature of knowing itself. There is good reason for recognizing—as dialectical, and as partly internal—the relationships between the knower, his, her, or its means of knowing, and what is known. Some of these issues will get attention below, but the fullest such inquiry involves more than an application of dialectics. It gets into the deepest of ontological questions about processes, entities, systems, change, emergence, and causality, and would prove too heavy a lift here.

Two Cases: Development and Social Relations

I will try, instead, to make the case for dialectics into two related ways. One is an analysis of developmental psychology and what it requires when done right. In particular, developmental psychology isn’t doing its job unless it can explain the emergence of new knowledge, which does not merely integrate, subsume, or replace old knowledge, but goes beyond it. To use a word that will show up a few times in this chapter, developmental psychology needs dépassement—and it needs to be able to explain dépassement. The second way, which will just be sketched here, pertains to the relationship between individuals and groups, societies, or cultures—as individuals are developing and the groups, societies, and cultures in which they participate are also developing.

The case for dialectics in developmental psychology is fairly straightforward. In the course of human development, there are plausibly opposing but enduring forces: interactions plausibly involving reciprocal causality, plausibly over many cycles. There are plausibly qualitative changes in knowing, feeling, and acting, which plausibly involve a synthesis of what went before and plausibly transcend, or subject to dépassement, what could be known, felt, or done before. And if the relationship between an individual and other individuals, groups, institutions, or a culture, is a relationship undergoing development between related systems themselves undergoing development—if it is necessarily developmentally situated—the case for dialectics should be likewise straightforward.

A Case Study in Developmental Theory

I will also rely on an existing theory in developmental psychology. It is not the only self-consciously dialectical theory to be found there. Others have proposed dialectical theories and gone varying distances to elaborate and test them. Some of these proposals (Riegel 1973; Basseches 1980) have been explicitly centered, in a way that this particular theory has not been, on the philosophies of Hegel or Marx. They have also been centered, in a way that this theory has not been, on dialectical reasoning as the most advanced kind of reasoning, instead of one of the tools in the toolkit. For that matter, I do not consider this theory correct in all major respects (for areas needing significant improvement, see, for instance, Campbell and Bickhard 1986; Bickhard and Campbell 1989; Bickhard 1998; Campbell 2002; 2019).

Where I think the theory has largely gotten it right is in the questions it asks about human development, and what it aims to achieve by way of developmental explanation. Meanwhile, dialectics is independent, to some degree, of the underlying ontology of a theory. So one can follow a theorist on psychology needing to be dialectical, without necessarily subscribing to his entire ontology of knowledge, to his views about the ties between, say, physics, and explanations of how we acquire our knowledge of physics, or to his notions about ethics and what ethical norms imply for human moral psychology. What the theory in question does do well, among other things, is to make the case for dialectics—the case for dépassement—along several dimensions of psychological inquiry.

Genetic Epistemology

Our theory of choice is Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology. For Piaget, genetic epistemology was the study of human knowledge and its development. It subsumed what most other researchers call developmental psychology, as well as the history of scientific thinking (considered by most in that field to be allied with philosophy of science, if not an auxiliary of the latter).

A pragmatic reason for picking genetic epistemology is that Piaget’s contribution to modern psychology was massive. The influence he was able to exert on American psychology, considering how radically different his assumptions often were, how unfamiliar his questions often were, and how off the path his empirical methods could be, doesn’t always meet the expectations of his admirers, but in a wider context it was just short of miraculous. It took years, and every measure of acceptance was won right in the teeth of positivism.

Another reason is that Piaget was doing dialectical psychology before he had any notion either of what that was or of how he might be doing it. It isn’t that hard to behave dialectically without dialectical self-awareness; we can find others who have pulled off the feat. But Piaget’s gradual prise de conscience—I’m starting to hear about dialectics, and maybe that’s relevant; who would have thought, maybe all this time I’ve been dialectical without knowing it; maybe some part of my theory needs to be overtly dialectical; maybe some aspect of what I’m studying is also, by its nature, dialectical—was unusual in his time. It still seems to be in ours.

Finally, Piaget’s main ideas and procedures are susceptible of wider application and many of them can even be repurposed. Once again, dialectical method may rule out some options—it doesn’t work well with permanent, innate atoms of knowledge—but method doesn’t dictate ontology. One need not be committed to Piaget’s moral conception (partly altruistic, from his religious upbringing; partly rule-based, from his reading of Immanuel Kant); his theory of moral development can be recentered on individualism or eudaimonism (Campbell 1999). One certainly need not be committed to his politics (vaguely socialistic); different places can be found for his conception of the individual in relation to the social, institutional, and political order. Even after he built up some enthusiasm for dialectics, Piaget never became a Marxist or a Hegelian.

Piaget’s Encounter with Dialectics

Jean Piaget launched his work in psychology in 1920 (his second scientific career, after a doctorate in biology; he held no degrees in the field). His expansive program of empirical research commenced in 1921. He first discussed dialectics in print in 1950, just after completing his magnum opus (Piaget 1949–1950). That first article, appropriately published in a journal called Dialectica (Piaget 1950), was a reply to a review of his book by an old colleague, Ferdinand Gonseth, a mathematician and epistemologist who at the time was an editor of Dialectica. Gonseth was urging Piaget to adopt a dialectical method in his work; the “descriptive schema” that Piaget mentions in his response was part of Gonseth’s epistemological theory, while the “operatory scheme” was part of his own.

Piaget took Gonseth’s recommendation to imply that his ways of studying human development and the history of ideas were not sufficient. But, on thinking about the matter, he considered what he was already doing to be dialectical. No secret sauce needed to be added; no full-time experts in dialectics had to be called in to prepare it.

[. . .] we believe in dialectics insofar as it is the direct expression of the countless interdependencies out of which reality is made. But we do not believe in dialecticians, to the extent that they allow the possibility of knowing these interactions by means that are not developmental [psychogénétique] or historico-critical. Differently put, we believe in the dialectics of reality (whether that is physical or mental reality), but not in a dialectical method that can solve, single-handedly, problems raised by these “dialectical situations”; i.e., by the various circles or relationships of interdependence, either in the universe or in our thinking.^[1] (287–88; emphasis added)

[. . .] there may very well be interdependence between the operatory scheme, or the scheme that is inherent in the actions that the subject carries out on the object, and the descriptive schema, or the product of the summary schematizing, of the object as such. But whether there is such interdependence, the characteristic method of genetic epistemology requires that the interdependence be established either psychologically or historically (even logically, if one wishes to construct an abstract model). This method refrains from any reconstruction that is neither experimental (in the broad sense) nor formal. (288)

[. . .] the only job for scientific epistemology is understanding how the sciences solve problems of knowledge. Epistemology cannot solve such problems in their stead. Which is why we believe only in the psychogenetic or historico-critical methods, which are enough to assure this conscious realization [prise de conscience], not in a dialectical method that sooner or later will replace the dialectics of reality with the dialectician’s dialectics. (289; emphasis added)

In 1955, Piaget set up his International Center for Genetic Epistemology and invited onto its editorial committee (Beth, Mays, and Piaget 1956) no fewer than five of those involved in editing or reviewing for Dialectica. By this date, most of Piaget’s key concepts had been formed, but nearly all would have time to undergo further reconstruction. As he learned more of dialectics, Piaget treated it first as convergent with his theory in interesting ways, eventually as part of his theory, finally as a description of aspects of human development. Dialectics was his research group’s topic of the year for 1977–1978; the resulting book appeared a week after his death, in 1980.

Études Approfondies

We feel the impact of dialectics frankly and clearly in the grand volume that Piaget edited on Logic and Scientific Knowledge (1967b). Commissioned as part of an encyclopedia, Logic and Scientific Knowledge runs to more than 1,300 pages, and the writing and editing took three or four years. Aiming at some études approfondies (advanced study), Piaget solicited two articles specifically on dialectics. One came from Léo Apostel, a Belgian logician, then frequently in attendance at Piaget’s Center, who was also responsible for articles on the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of symbolic logic, and on the epistemology of linguistics. The other was from Czeslaw Nowinski, a Polish logician and philosopher of biology. Whatever the ultimate source of his interest in dialectics, for a couple of decades Nowinski could hardly have avoided being immersed in the Soviet variety. A particularly valuable feature of the volume was the dialogue: Piaget responded, in his own chapters, to the main points made by the other contributors.

Apostel’s (1967) article was firmly tentative, offering to explore the meaning of dialectics without committing the analyst to either the truth or the utility of any particular version of it. Apostel’s best developed idea was his rendition of “contradictions in reality” in terms of equal and opposed forces, which he found could easily be cashed out physically. His was not a formulation that Piaget especially resonated with.

Nowinski on Darwin and Piaget

Nowinski (1967), by contrast, was deeply committed to dialectics. More interestingly to Piaget, he found some of it in evolutionary biology, while wanting to see a lot more there. From the Nowinksian standpoint, Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection was already significantly dialectical, but Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology was much more so. Between the two, there had been dépassement.

In Darwin’s theory, accounting for evolution involves designating particular species, genera, and other classes of living organisms. But species, genera, families, orders, and so on cannot be successfully defined without relating them to lines of descent, to the paths by which they evolved. Hence, Nowinski says, there is a “dialectical relationship between the totality and its parts” (1967, 872), and it doesn’t matter whether Darwin consciously recognized the relationship (as far as we know, he did not).

How biologists classify fish, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, and mammals depends on what they have learned about the lines of descent for vertebrates. In Darwin’s time, dinosaurs were considered to be reptiles and no special affinity between birds and dinosaurs would have crossed anyone’s mind. Fish were often still considered one big category. Today, both advances in paleontology and in DNA analysis (which didn’t even exist till the 1950s) support an early split, evolutionarily, between reptiles that were the ancestors of mammals and reptiles that were the ancestors of dinosaurs—and of birds. And from an evolutionary point of view, fish are no longer anything like a single category. Changes in the evolutionary account feed back to the classificatory system in ways that could not have been anticipated prior to the evidence that motivated the changes in the evolutionary account.

Nowinski points to a new relationship, in Darwin’s theory, between induction and deduction. Darwin’s treatment of empirical evidence and of hypothesis testing (the inductive aspects) broke no new ground. But the deductive aspect of evolutionary theory could not be so straightforward. The theory of natural selection implies that each species will have a place in the tree of life. But it does not, and in general cannot, prescribe in advance where this will be. To find where each species goes in context, taxonomists will have to do their own empirical work. “[T]he concrete total process of descent cannot be taken deductively; history does not lend itself to deducibility” (873). Here, too, Darwin’s theory is de facto dialectical.

For Darwin, however, variation and selection as such always stayed the same. They were independent of any of the particular evolutionary changes that have taken place over time, and not subject to modification as a result of any.

For Piaget, by contrast, only the general adaptive functions stay the same; the way they are accomplished keeps changing.

Piaget’s thinking is developmental in its very program. The psychology of the formation of intelligence, as well as the epistemology of the growth of knowledge and of the mechanism of that growth, are a theoretical (explanatory) reconstitution of a historical process. The principle of development and the principle of totality are consciously acknowledged and concretized accordingly. In this theory, there is none of the dualism, so characteristic of Darwin’s conception, between a general theory that is not historically situated and the reconstitution of a line of descent [which is]. The presentation of steps in the line of descent and the theory of the developmental process unite in an indissoluble whole. (873–74)

Equilibration between assimilation and accommodation was usually considered the main developmental process in Piaget’s theory (e.g., Piaget 1975). Assimilation is the application of a scheme or cognitive structure to an environment; accommodation is a change in the scheme or structure to better fit or “adequate” that environment. Nowinski noted how

[A]ssimilation and accommodation constitute the two aspects of adaptation. However, these invariants are not thrust outside developments in the concrete, as was the case with Darwin. This is because of something that might seem paradoxical: the invariants are variable. Piaget calls them functional invariants, because the adaptive function persists throughout the course of development, while the structures or “organs” of assimilation-accommodation are different at different steps in development. For instance, there are rhythms, then regulations, then operations. (Nowinski 1967, 874; emphasis added)

There are changes over time in the instruments of adaptation (schemes and operatory cognitive structures); changes in what environments get assimilated to, changes in what gets accommodated. But there are also changes over time in the processes of adaptation (different levels of equilibration or of abstraction or of generalizing; e.g., Piaget 1975; Piaget 1977/2001; Piaget and Henriques 1978). Consequently, the mechanisms of development are themselves subject to development. The final version of Piaget’s account of equilibration posited three levels; reflecting abstraction would end up with multiple levels, and so would generalization (e.g., Campbell 2009).

For a thinker like Nowinski, a comparison with Marx would be hard to avoid:

[Piaget’s] method of generalizing is truly novel; there is no analogy to it except Marx’s method of generalizing in Capital. Hence a certain number of methodological consequences. In the theory of natural selection, the dynamic structure of the process of differentiation and adaptation made it possible to deduce a general schema for the formation of new species. On the contrary, in Piaget’s theory, deductive prediction of the further steps in assimilation-accommodation that arise in the development of intelligence is obviously impossible. In the theoretical reconstitution of the real, concrete process of the development of intelligence in individuals, deduction is intertwined with inductive generalization from the results of observations and experiments. (Nowinski 1967, 875)

Still, it might not have been prudent for Nowinski to envision Piaget outdoing Marx:

the family resemblance in method between [Piaget’s] developmental psychology and Marx’s theory is surprising at times. There is nonetheless an important difference. What is most characteristic in Piaget is the idea of equilibrium as the central mechanism and necessary tendency of development, even though each form of equilibrium succeeds its predecessor because of the disequilibria that give rise to it. For Marx, on the contrary, the central mechanism of development is the continual destruction of equilibrium, with all of the ensuing consequences for method. (879–80)

As it evolved, Piaget’s own view of dialectics showed that he had been paying close attention to Nowinski. In fact, he would quote this passage later on.

An Example: The Multiplication Study

Considering the abstract nature of nearly everything we are relying on here (several essays by Piaget and one by Nowinski), it might be helpful to consider some data for a while—especially when further concrete examples will not be arriving until this chapter is nearly done. A classic study that will illustrate many of the points to be made in what follows is Piaget, Kaufmann, and Bourquin’s work (1977/2001) on the development of multiplication. Here we will not try to work in every Piagetian developmental process (there are many, and they are often internally related) or every key property of such processes—just enough to identify some basics, and to indicate where dépassement resides among them.

The starting point for this study was the observation that we might consider multiplication to be mere repeated addition, but for children who are learning to add and then to multiply numbers, it is a good deal harder to master than addition. In its most basic form, the study worked like this:

The experimenter presented two stocks of differently colored [poker] chips. The child was asked to make two equal collections (the same total number in each) taking chips two by two from the first stock (which we will call A) and three by three from the second stock (which we will call B).

Once the problem was solved, the experimenter had the subject explain how it was done, and asked further questions about the possibility of succeeding with larger and smaller collections. (Piaget et al. 1977/2001, 56)

A typical response from a five-year-old (Level IA) shows the child (code named Pat) centering on one dimension (the number added each time), paying no attention to an important property of her own (or the experimenter’s) actions, and running into a contradiction. If the numbers being added each time are unequal, how could the results ever be equal?

Pat [adds] two As and three Bs until she discovers to her astonishment that she ends up with 6 chips of each color. “Both have the same amount!” “How did that happen?” “I don’t know.” “Could you do it again?” “I don’t think so.” “Let’s try” (same procedure). “Again, they’re both the same amount!” [. . .] “What did you do to make your pile?” “I took 2 (at a time).” “And to make my pile?” “I took 3.” “How many times did you take 3?” “I don’t remember any more.” “And (how many times did you take) 2?” “I don’t remember either.” (57)

At Level IB (roughly, age six in this study), children discover by trial and error that adding 2 chips three times and adding 3 chips twice will produce an equal number. But they insist that this cannot be predicted in advance, and doubt that the process will continue (for instance, on to 4 x 3 and 6 x 2, 6 x 3 and 9 x 2, etc.).

From Piaget’s standpoint, the children who function at Levels IA and IB are relying strictly on empirical abstraction^[2] (of the number of chips added each time), are centering on that dimension (at the expense of the number of times chips are getting added), and are running into a contradiction (if the numbers being added are unequal, and the total in each “pile” depends only on the numbers being added, then the child’s pile and the experimenter’s pile should never be equal).

At Level IIA (seen in seven- and eight-year-olds), children have some notion that the two collections can come out equal, but a lot of trial and error is necessary before they actually get 3 x 2 = 2 x 3 = 6, or 4 x 3 = 6 x 2 = 12. They are now engaging in reflecting abstraction of properties of their actions, noticing the number of times they are adding 2 chips, the number of times they are adding 3, and so on. They are also considering two dimensions and discovering a compensation or tradeoff between n (the number of times) and x (the number of items added): as n gets bigger, x has to get smaller, in order to obtain n times x = n’ times x’.

At Level IIA, children are doing reflecting abstraction on the number of times they add. Reflecting abstraction is not just projecting the number added each time onto a new level (along with the number of times). There is reorganizing reflection (reworking and remolding are other words Piaget sometimes used) that synthesizes the two dimensions; decenters (now both dimensions are available for consideration and for coordination when they are relevant); overcomes the contradiction that resulted from centering on one dimension; and provides dépassement (incorporating and transcending the one dimension previously considered into a qualitatively more advanced operatory structure for multiplying numbers).

At Level IIB (seen in nine- and ten-year olds), children quickly predicted the equal outcomes for 3 x 2 and 2 x 3 and predicted further equal outcomes. They could also note the similarities between the problem of taking chips and putting them in piles, a problem of building towers with 2-unit and 3-unit blocks, and a problem involving the meshing of two gears, in which black marks on each wheel are aligned at the beginning and will come back into alignment after the bigger gear has made 5 turns and the smaller one has made 7. Being able to recognize the similarities (when solving each problem by itself already requires reflecting abstraction) calls for higher-order reflecting abstraction (also known as reflected abstraction), along with further decentration, further coordination, and further dépassement.

Internal Dépassement

In a long chapter presenting his final thoughts on issues raised in his 1967 volume, Piaget (1967b) contrasted two kinds of dépassement. Dépassement (literally, overtaking or passing) we have encountered already. It was his term for what happens when an emergent structure or system integrates and incorporates the structures from which it arose and also does something significantly new, going beyond them in an important respect.

How do we render dépassement in English? “Transcendence” is often a good choice. I have used it before, and, on occasions, I used it above. But in the present context, it would be deeply confusing. One sort of dépassement then under review from Piaget (1965/1992; 1967a) is the kind he called “transcendental,” as the term was used in Husserlian phenomenology. Nobody needs transcendental transcendence.

We could adopt a Hegelian perspective and translate dépassement as “sublation” or “Aufhebung.” A good case can be made for this as well—except that in these discussions, Piaget was trying to differentiate his views from Hegel’s. So, in this chapter, our custom will be to leave dépassement untranslated.

The very notion of internal dépassements is dialectical. It means that the system renews itself as it extends itself. But the system does both at once without crossing its own boundaries; it merely pushes them back, so the constructions it carries out remain internal to it. In just this fashion, the system of the sciences is neither simply accumulating new chunks of objective knowledge nor proceeding without further ado to new deductive generalizations. Either would merely add onto the system, without producing anything truly new [renouvellement]. On the other hand, novelties that arise when knowledge is being transformed—be they experimental or deductive—do not eject themselves from science into other areas of knowledge. There are genuine dépassements, in the sense of renewals, and they are internal, in the sense we have just reviewed—which implies the continual appearance of oppositions to surmount and syntheses to perform. (Piaget 1967a, 1260)

As science progresses, it keeps getting closer to its object, to what it aims to know, but also keeps elaborating the knowing subject’s interactions with the object. And in the process of elaboration, conflicts and contradictions arise. The object of knowledge, Piaget says, is not laid out on a single plane; it can be observed at multiple scales, micro to macro, and different models or explanations may be needed at each scale. Besides, the subject knows the object through schemes of assimilation. Whenever the knower’s schemes change, the knower’s perspective on the object and the knower’s interactions with it also change. Meanwhile, what is known is not just the object “all by itself” (1261), but the full panoply of operations on and interactions with the object. So as the knower gains objective knowledge (Piaget’s term for this process is objectivation), conflicts of various kinds keep arising at various levels: from changes of scale on the object, from lack of fit between current assimilating schemes and available facts, and from contradictions between different currently active schemes. Dépassement is required to overcome any of these.

Meanwhile, the knowing subject obviously isn’t staying put. Every time the knower takes a new physical action on the object; every time the subject coordinates his or her actions in a manner that can then become known through reflecting abstraction; every time the knower uses reflecting abstraction to construct new logical or mathematical operations—the subject is also changing. The knower has his or her own differences of scale, from the firing of neurons, to elementary patterns of physical action, all the way to systems of formal or abstract thinking. At different levels, the subject has different modes of interdependence with the object, from the organic environment all the way to “any number whatever” (according to Piaget, the actual object of many advanced mathematical operations). In the course of new interactions with the external world, the subject is also transforming; these transformations also involve dépassement.

Piaget rejected the notion that philosophy of science, or dialectical philosophy, could operate above any of the sciences, or outside them, and drive changes within them. Rather, the boundaries of any science are open, and capable of moving over time. At any point in history, some problems could be solved using the deductive and empirical methods then available to physics or astronomy or some other science; others could not. It does not follow that there is any permanent division between problems that are scientific and problems that are nonscientific. New methods may be developed that turn previously nonscientific problems into scientific ones; whole new sciences have even come into being (as Piaget pointedly reminds his readers regarding the social sciences). What constitutes a scientific problem is subject to dépassement. Hence, any attempt to impose permanent limits on what can be studied scientifically (for instance, an attempt made by some kind of positivist philosophy) runs up against the dépassements, the internal dialectic, of empirical science as it keeps evolving.

Dépassement affects the object of knowledge, in the process of “objectivating” or “objectivation.” Phases of development that consolidate a science, such as Newtonian mechanics in physics, often lead to “deep dislocations” (1263), such as those that preceded special and general relativity, or quantum mechanics. The dislocations, in their turn, promote progress on the empirical front (new facts are unearthed, whole new fields of experimental or other empirical study are opened). They also promote progress via reflective abstraction, which both leads forward, projectively, to new conclusions and works backward, reflectively, by reorganizing or remolding what was already known. Although exposure to new data will often be sufficient to produce such dislocations, it isn’t necessary; logic and mathematics also develop through proactive construction and reorganizing reflection.

In general, our ways of arriving at knowledge have dialectical characteristics:

Objectivating and interiorizing, on the one hand; progression and retroaction, on the other. These are the fourfold aspects of constructing different types of knowledge. Such constructions are consequently never distributed along one uniform plane of additive growth in knowledge or in one linear unfolding of deductions. Rather they attest the presence of continual oppositions that need to undergo dépassement and perpetual obstacles, external and internal, that need surmounting.

These obstacles and oppositions depend on the resistance of physical reality [le réel]. But they depend just as much on this fact: While every new problem evokes a new variety of material experimental actions or internal operatory structures aimed at solving it, these new experimental actions, external or internal, are initially centered on the gap to be filled and to the perspectives that are attached to it. Progress can only then be made by decentering, which removes the obstacles put in place by the original centration. Decentering and coordinating are thus the two aspects of every construction that is authentically fertile and generalizable. But these are both the manifestations of difficult syntheses. The syntheses must not just win out over the external obstacles that they break loose from, but over the oppositions engendered by the multitude of possible distorting ways of centering, which show up again on new planes with each partial mastery. (1264)

For instance, in the multiplication study referred to above, development from Levels IA and IB to Level IIA involves reflecting abstraction, which constructs new operatory structures (for multiplying numbers). The reflecting abstraction objectivates (by adding to the mathematical operations that numbers of poker chips and other objects are susceptible to; eventually, to the operations that any number whatever is susceptible to). It interiorizes (by leading toward multiplication with symbols, pencil and paper, or mental multiplication, instead of physical transfers and arrangements of objects). It works forward in time, not just by constructing a qualitatively new ability, but in affording new predictions and new extensions of the process (what worked for 3 x 2 = 2 x 3 will work for 4 x 3 = 6 x 2, and on and on). It works retroactively by restructuring adding into multiplying, incorporating a second dimension (number of times) alongside the first (number added each time), decentering, coordinating. It brings together what was separated; it overcomes contradictions. It leads to dépassement. And the dépassement expands the child’s mathematical understanding; it doesn’t move out into some non-mathematical domain, or out of the child’s knowledge altogether.

Immanent Dialectics

By 1970, Piaget was comfortable with what he was calling “immanent dialectics.” Immanent was the opposite of transcendent. Piaget (1965/1992; 1967b) had even reviewed “transcendental dépassement,” which for him was exemplified by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, and rejected it. It was “internal dépassement” that he preferred. Immanent dialectics, which leads to internal dépassement, does not need phenomenology. Nor does it need Marxism, Hegelianism, or some other “dialectical philosophy” for a guide.

[. . .] when dialectics makes evident the specific nature of historical developments with their continual conflict, opposition, and dépassement, it often confines itself to extracting mechanisms that everyone could acknowledge. Without a doubt the dialectical spirit is much more widely found than membership in one school of thought or another. (Piaget 1970/1972, 85)

Immanent dialectics, then, is already being practiced by scientists. The effort to make its operating principles explicit is not a job requiring specialized dialecticians. It is undertaken within the different sciences (for instance, when Piaget or another psychologist examines the methods used in psychology) or in comparisons between them (for instance, when Nowinski compares Darwinian, Piagetian, and Marxist dialectics).

The representatives of immanent dialectics regard dialectics as an epistemological enterprise; it seeks to identify the common (or differentiating) characteristics of all scientific approaches that aim to take into account developments that unfold over time. Dialectics in this sense is a way of becoming conscious of the methods of interpretation actually used in various research efforts, whether they are in biology, developmental psychology, economics, etc. And, since it respects the facts, it can converge (often very closely) with the views of authors who know nothing of philosophical dialectics and may not be interested in knowing. (86)

Referring to his own constructivist theory and his own empirical work on developmental processes, Piaget says:

In developmental psychology, studies of the construction of intellectual operations out of sensorimotor and preoperational regulations, of the role of disequilibria or contradictions, and of reequilibration through a novel synthesis or dépassement—in short, every type of constructivism that accounts for the progressive construction of cognitive structures—have often drawn close to dialectical interpretations despite the complete lack of direct influence. Naturally it follows that such convergences are useful to proponents of methodological dialectics, which aims only to extract the orientations of the developmental sciences without intervening in these sciences. Such an effort to make comparisons and engage in epistemological reflection can only be beneficial to the sciences in question. (86–87)

Quoting Nowinski on the difference between Marx’s dialectics and his own (see above), Piaget continues:

Now the reason for this difference hits us between the eyes. The development of intelligence leads to completed structures in which functions and values are entirely subordinated to the normative laws of transformation internal to the structure; this kind of development is directed by the equilibration or autoregulation that leads to such a final equilibrium. By contrast, biological or political or economic structures are constantly open; precisely for lack of closure they cannot fully integrate functioning in the structural mechanism. Hence in their history disequilibria can go so far as to cause structures to disintegrate. (340)

While, from Piaget’s point of view, normal development does not involve the disintegration of structures already constructed, some of his claims about “completed structures” are getting stretched here—from his own standpoint. All we have to do is compare his book about reflecting abstraction (Piaget 1977/2001—where he declares that mathematical structures, when they reach final equilibrium, are error-proof) and his book about generalization (Piaget and Henriques, 1978—where Piaget makes no such assertion, and his coauthor maintains that new possibilities at a particular level of cognition always form too quickly and abundantly to allow all of them to be caught up in completed structures at that level). No form of knowledge or skill is ever as closed or completed or perfected as Piaget was occasionally tempted to claim it is; here he could have afforded to get more dialectical (or, at least, to stay as dialectical as he’d been in 1967).

Dialectical and Discursive
Waves in Development

Richard Kitchener (1986), who takes an overtly Hegelian standpoint on Piaget, has stated forthrightly that “constructive synthesis,” when contrary forces have to be overcome, is the same as Aufhebung (161). “In fact, there are several dialectical concepts running throughout Piaget’s work, including equilibrium, stage, holism, the relation between epistemic subject and epistemic object, the spiral of the sciences, and reflective [reflecting] abstraction” (1986, 89).

We have illustrated Kitchener’s points from Piaget’s own writings, for equilibration, holism, and subject and object. We have also shown how Piagetian dialectics applies to a classic instance of reflecting abstraction. For Piaget’s notions of developmental stages, and of the interrelations over time of the different sciences, we refer the reader to Kitchener’s treatment. But there is still more to come: an overtly dialectical account of developmental processes. One of the two books by Piaget that came out in 1980, the year of his death, was Elementary Forms of Dialectic. It presented, in somewhat abbreviated form (Piaget was over eighty by then; the studies he was supervising were fewer in number and moving more slowly than in previous years), empirical research on acquisitions that he now considered products of a dialectical process.

In 1980, Piaget still rejected any confinement of dialectics to triads; he kept being neither Hegelian nor Marxian. His final view was that there is, or has been, a dialectical process whenever there is dépassement. Some syntheses with transcendence merely integrate what used to be separated; it doesn’t have to have been opposed or contradictory. He was again parting company with Apostel (1967), whose conception required “contradictions in reality” (such as a body at rest while equal and opposite forces were being applied to it) as dialectical moments.

For Piaget, some syntheses are dialectical even if they overcome no contradictions. Some contradictions can also be resolved without recourse to dialectical processes. These are typically the product of “insufficient analysis; no dialectic is needed to overcome such contradictions when better definitions or better inferences will allow the matter to be seen more clearly” (Piaget 1980, 213).

Piaget now saw the construction of new operatory cognitive structures as, in general, dialectical. By contrast, straight inferences or deductions from what has been constructed are “discursive” (213). Psychological development thus alternates between dialectical and discursive phases.

Dialectical activity generally involves

[. . .] the construction of interdependent relationships, not previously established, between two systems A and B. A and B are initially conceived either as opposed to each other or as simply foreign to each other. When unified, A and B end up being considered subsystems of a new totality T, whose overarching characteristics belonged neither to A nor to B before they were unified. For instance, in the equalizing tasks of Chapter 2 the younger subjects do not see right away that adding elements to one of the collections implies subtracting them from another. Coordinating these two operations is the only way to guarantee that the total system will be noncontradictory. (214–15)

[. . .] each new interdependency generates new dépassements, when, added to those that preceded it, it leads to a new totality T2 whose predecessor T1 now becomes a subsystem.

For instance, in the case of spatial perspectives (Chapter 10) the child discovers the inverse relations before-behind when the observer makes a 180° excursion around the house; for the child this new interdependency leads to totality T1, which already transcends the static totality T0 (without modifying the projective relations). But there is nothing more to that dépassement than the new interdependency.

By contrast when the child goes farther, grasping that left-right relations can also be inverted, hence that a new totality T2 incorporates T1 as a subsystem, the concept of dépassement takes on a new meaning. This is so in particular when, as may be the case here, there is what must be called dépassement of the very instruments of dépassement (which is a form of constructive generalization). (215–16)

Dialectical processes involve

circles or spirals in the construction of interdependencies. They are essentially different from vicious circles: the dynamics of these interactions necessarily involve temporal succession. Progress in the proactive direction promotes retroactive reworking that enriches the already existing forms of the system under consideration. Thus, in the case of predicates, concepts, judgments, and inferences (chapter 1) the order in which the construction unrolls entails the inverse order on the plane of justification, yielding an opening onto new possibilities. (216)

The Dialectical Drinking Duck

They can even lead to qualitative improvements in knowledge accompanied by a broader and deeper understanding of problems and limitations, as in a study where the researchers did not expect even the most advanced participants to reach a final equilibrium, with completed structures and no future need for dépassement.

A drinking bird, like Albert the Drinking Duck, is often used to demonstrate various principles in a junior high or high-school physics course. The “bird” consists of a glass head with a “beak” that is covered in felt or some other material that absorbs water; a tubular neck; and a “body” that serves as a reservoir for a liquid, such as methylene chloride, with a low boiling point. Besides being an interesting toy, the bird is a type of heat engine that simultaneously exemplifies multiple physical laws. As the head rises and falls, it drops into the water inside a glass (from which it might appear to be drinking) and then rises back above the surface of the water. Meanwhile, the liquid inside evaporates and condenses, its vapor pressure rising and falling.

Without significant help from a teacher or a textbook, participants have a tough time figuring out how the drinking bird works. In the sample (Piaget, Dionnet, and Zinder 1980), no one reached a satisfactory synthesis of opposing subsystems with dépassement. The oldest participants in the study (who were fourteen) could not come up with a good explanation; the average adult, without teacher or textbook, would not be able to either.

Still, noteworthy improvement over time can be inferred from the data. Children at Level I (age six, on the average) fall into “predialectical circles,” attributing both the rise and the fall of the bird’s head to various properties of “water” (which refers indifferently to both the liquid inside the bird and the water in the glass). At Level II (ages seven to nine), the preferred explanations center on variations in one dimension: the weight of the “water.” At Level III (ages eleven to fourteen), the participants’ explanations seek to relate the behavior of the “water” or the liquid inside the bird, the “air” inside the bird, and variations in heat or temperature. Their explanations are better; they are decentered and bring in more relevant factors, though not necessarily the exact dimensions involved. Participants functioning at Level III are also much better than those at Levels I or II at recognizing failed predictions—and at identifying issues that they don’t understand.

The drinking duck example [Chapter 11] brings to light the dialectical character of every relation between the knowing subject and the objects that he or she seeks to know. On the one hand, their material or mental manifestations naturally bring the subject closer to the objects, through progressive and successive approximations. On the other, each time the subject gets closer, the object draws partway back, because each new act of becoming conscious raises new problems. It is striking to note that participants at Level III, while doing far better than those at Levels I and II at ferreting out the possible factors at work in the drinking duck, feel far less confident in their solutions. Yet from an absolute standpoint their explanations are much improved over those given at earlier stages. (215)

Further Dialectics: Self and Others

Piaget gradually actualized many of the dialectical potentialities within his theory and his program of empirical research. But further dépassement, recontextualizing, remolding, and retroactive reworking would have required active revisiting of each area of inquiry. And not everything from earlier phases of his career got revisited.

For example, Piaget’s pathbreaking book on The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932) brought many of the ideas of his early period (which had started in 1921) to their most advanced level. Both prise de conscience (conscious realizing) and what he would later call reflecting abstraction played critical roles; the studies presented in the book, and the theorizing, made much of the differences between practical mastery of rules (the rules for playing marbles, as well as injunctions or prohibitions regarding fairness, respect for property, truth-telling, and so on) and conscious understanding of the rules (along with their rationales and possible alternatives to them). But there was much more of a dialectical nature in the book, concerning the relationship between reasoning by the individual and critical discussions with others, even the relationship between the developing self and developing interactions with others.

If Piaget had returned to the study of moral development after 1950, there would have been remolding and reworking as he consciously formulated reflecting abstraction (Piaget 1949, 1950), rethought (and re-rethought) equilibration, and began acknowledging an affinity with dialectics (e.g., Piaget 1950). If he’d returned to moral development after 1967, there would have been much more about conscious realizing, contending with contradictions (e.g., Piaget 1974a; 1974b), reflecting abstraction (Piaget 1977/2001), and generalization (Piaget and Henriques 1978)—and a frankly dialectical reframing.

For whatever reason, Piaget never got back around to moral development. Had he done so, here is just one instance of an implicitly dialectical way of thinking in 1932 that could have easily been reframed later on, in terms of immanent dialectics, or even in alternating dialectical and discursive waves.

In his study of boys playing marbles, Piaget noted that the children’s actual practice of the game of marbles and their conscious understanding of its rules are quite different things. In particular, there are different ways for egocentrism to manifest itself; for Piaget, egocentrism was basically the failure to relate one’s own point of view to another person’s point of view. The need for prise de conscience (Claparède 1918) has deep implications for the development of the self:

It is perfectly normal for cooperation as it emerges (on the plane of action) not to promptly eliminate states of mind (on the plane of thought) that were products of the egocentrism x constraint complex. Thought always lags behind action and cooperation has to be practiced for a long time before its consequences can be brought fully to light by reflection. This is a new example of the law of prise de conscience or conscious realization formulated by Claparède; we have observed the same kinds of delays in many other domains [. . .]. Such a phenomenon helps to simplify the general problem of egocentrism; it explains why intellectual egocentrism is much more resistant than egocentrism in action. (Piaget 1932, 43)

Indeed, Piaget sketches what looks like the first draft of a theory of the development of the self (a theory that never got a final draft):

At the beginning of this developmental progression the child had no notion of himself [self-concept, notion de son moi]. He undergoes the constraints of his immediate social environment, and distorts them as a function of his own subjectivity, without distinguishing what derives from his subjectivity and what derives from environmental pressure. Rules also appear to be external to him, and of transcendent origin, even though in fact he does a poor job of following them.

To the extent, now, that cooperation replaces constraint the child dissociates his ego [self, moi] from other people’s thinking. As the child grows, he is less swayed by the prestige of his elders and he participates more in discussion as an equal, having the occasion to freely oppose his own point of view to anyone else’s; he has options besides obedience, suggestion, or negativism. Henceforward he will not only discover the boundaries that separate self [le moi] from other—he will learn to understand the other person and be understood by him.

Cooperation is thus a factor of personality—if by personality we mean, not the unconscious self [moi] of childish egocentrism, nor the anarchical self [moi] of egoism in general, but the self [le moi] that situates itself within the norms of reciprocity and of objective discussion and submits to them in order to make itself respected. Personality is thus the opposite of the primitive ego [moi] and this explains why the mutual respect felt by two personalities for each other is genuine. It is not to be confused with the mutual consent of two egos [deux “moi”] capable of joining forces for evil as well as for good. Cooperation being the source of personality, rules cease, in accordance with the same principle, to be external. They become both factors in personality and products of it, in a process that circles back around [un processus circulaire], of the sort that is common in the course of mental development. (69–70)

In Piaget’s later writings, “circular” or spiral processes were always considered dialectical.

Piaget’s insights in The Moral Judgment of the Child about the individual and society remain relevant today. Among his assumptions, when he conducted that research, was that morality consists of rules, but his ideas of prise de conscience and reflecting abstraction will apply whether ethics is a matter of rule-following or a matter of acquiring skills or habits. Similarly, his conception of the difference between being a self and knowing that self applies whether the boundaries between what is good for ego and what is good for alter are where Piaget thought they were in 1932 or where someone else thinks they are today. The dialectical relationships do not depend on Piaget’s residual attachment to altruism (Campbell 1999) in the years when he undertook this line of research. What Piaget sketched in 1932 can lead to a more advanced (and more obviously dialectical theory) of the self (e.g., Campbell and Bickhard 1986; Campbell 2002) as well as more obviously dialectical methods for assessing that development (e.g., Campbell, Eisner, and Riggs 2010).^[3]

Conclusion

We have employed Jean Piaget’s genetic epistemology, not as a detailed model of what psychologists should be studying or theorizing about today, but as an “existence proof” for dialectical psychology. Piaget provided an existence proof in two respects: showing how a fairly successful theory of human development already was dialectical and showing why any account of human development needs to be dialectical. Insofar as explaining how genuinely new knowledge or skill comes about remains a central task—either when we are aiming to account for the mental processes of individual human beings or when we address the relationship between individual and group, society, or culture—we need dépassement; and any theory that has a place for dépassement, or an explanation for it, will be dialectical.

There is no direct path from positivism (still very much the prevailing mindset regarding psychological research) to particular social or political outcomes. Insofar as positivism blocks any inquiry into the nature of norms, or their emergence, providing neither foundations for them nor grounds for critique, psychology done positivistically is effectively compatible with nearly any prevailing ideology (unless that ideology selectively or comprehensively rejects science).

For quite different reasons, there is also no direct path from psychology done dialectically to particular social or political outcomes. Dialectical psychology gives its practitioners a chance at understanding the emergence of norms, but the opportunity does not dictate that they will land on the correct explanation overall, let alone the right explanation for the right norms. For example, Piaget (1932) insisted that the exercise of authority in the classroom does little to advance moral development. Yet, his assumptions about the nature of morality (rule-based, either impersonal or altruistic) were not the most promotive either of human flourishing at the individual level or of individual liberty at the social and political levels (Campbell 1999).

Dialectical psychology cannot constitute the dialectics of liberty all by itself, but, if our argument is on the right track, some kind of dialectical psychology will be required. The emergence of the relevant norms involves dépassement. Any significant constructive change in the course of individual human development involves dépassement. Significant developments in human ideas, institutions, societies, and cultures involve dépassement. Spontaneous orders involve dépassement. And dépassement is inescapably a dialectical concept.

Notes

References

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Basseches, Michael. 1980. Dialectical schemata: A framework for the empirical study of the development of dialectical thinking. Human Development 23: 400–21.

Beth, Evert W., Wolfe Mays, and Jean Piaget. 1956. Épistémologie génétique et recherche psychologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Bickhard, Mark H. 1998. Levels of representationality. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 10, no. 2: 179–215.

Bickhard, Mark H. and Robert L. Campbell. 1989. Interactivism and genetic epistemology. Archives de Psychologie 57: 99–121.

———. 2005. Editorial. New Ideas in Psychology 23, no. 1: 1–4.

Campbell, Robert L. 1999. Piaget’s moral psychology in post-Kohlbergian perspective. In Haaften, Wren, and Tellings 1999, 105–30.

———. 2002. Goals, values, and the implicit: Explorations in psychological ontology. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 3, no. 2 (Spring): 289–327.

———. 2009. Constructive processes: Abstraction, generalization, and dialectics. In Müller, Carpendale, and Smith 2009, 150–70.

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Although a few passages from Piaget’s writings on dialectics have been quoted in English translation (notably by Kitchener 1986; Campbell 2009), the mass of the material remains available only in the original French. All translations from Piaget (or from Nowinski, in a volume that Piaget edited) are mine.

Piaget called what the children were doing “pseudo-empirical” abstraction. The distinction he wanted to make between empirical and pseudo-empirical is not important here.

In fact, eudaimonism, particularly Aristotle’s version of it, has made a belated entry into American psychology, though so recently that we can’t know how Piaget would have reacted to the change. Virtues as skills or habits are now an acknowledged option in the study of moral development (e.g., Campbell and Christopher 1996), and the Positive Psychology movement has made them part of its theoretical core (e.g., Peterson and Seligman 2004). Considering that for most of the twentieth century, American psychologists had no use for moral personality, which they viewed as a lost cause, and the only alternatives for moral development were learning and reasoning with systems of rules, or dribs and drabs of behavior “under the control of the stimulus” (Campbell and Christopher 1996), the rediscovery of eudaimonism certainly counts as dépassement.

Foundations and Systems of Liberty

Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism

Marx, Hayek, and Utopia

Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

The Tri-Level Model of Social Relations

Focusing on the Cultural: L1–L2–L3

Focusing on the Personal: L2–L1–L3

Focusing on the Structural: L1–L3–L2

Total Freedom:Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism

Notes

References

Freedom and Flourishing

Freedom, Flourishing, and Dialectics

The Nature of Man and the World

Natural Rights

Austrian Economics and Objectivism:A Comparison

Austrian Economics and Objectivism:Their Compatibility

Human Sociality

Needs, Values, and Goals

Goods and Virtues

Flow, Self-Esteem, and Emotions

Toward an Integrated Framework ofFreedom and Flourishing

Notes

References

The Unchained Dialectic and the Renewal of Libertarian Inquiry

The Case for a New Dialogue

Two Dimensions of Dialectical Critique

Making a Theoretical Break

Conflict and Contradiction

Summation and Transcendence

Notes

References

Whence Natural Rights?

References

Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights

Argumentation Ethics

Estoppel

Rights-skepticism

Other Rationalist-related Theories

G. B. Madison and Argumentation Ethics-related theorists

Crocker’s Moral Estoppel theory

Pilon and Gewirth on the Principle of Generic Consistency

Conclusion

Notes

References

Dialectical Psychology

Positivists Don’t Think They Need Dialectics

Two Cases: Development and Social Relations

A Case Study in Developmental Theory

Genetic Epistemology

Piaget’s Encounter with Dialectics

Études Approfondies

Nowinski on Darwin and Piaget

An Example: The Multiplication Study

Internal Dépassement

Immanent Dialectics

Dialectical and DiscursiveWaves in Development

The Dialectical Drinking Duck

Further Dialectics: Self and Others

Conclusion

Notes

References

Total Freedom:
Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism

Austrian Economics and Objectivism:
A Comparison

Austrian Economics and Objectivism:
Their Compatibility

Toward an Integrated Framework of
Freedom and Flourishing

Dialectical and Discursive
Waves in Development