[Reinterpreting Libertarianism: New Directions in Libertarian Studies edited by Lukasz Dominiak, Igor Wysocki, Stanislaw Wotowicz, and Dawid Megger. (Routledge, 2026; x+ 245 pp.)]
Those living in Generation Z are tired of the welfare-warfare state that has dominated political life in America from well before they were born and shows no signs of going away. They would like something new, and you will not be surprised to learn that, in my opinion, libertarianism is just what they are looking for. Reinterpreting Libertarianism will be an essential guide for young people, particularly those who think of themselves as on the right rather than the left on the political spectrum, who are willing to give it the attention that the essays in the book require. Unfortunately, many of these young people confuse the welfare-warfare state with the free market, and, as a result, they have been beguiled by anti-capitalist views that in some instances fall little short of fascism.
The contributors to this volume—who are young professors and post-doctoral researchers who remember the horrors of communism, which after all bears many similarities to fascism—are fully inoculated against anti-capitalism. And there is yet more good news. Polish libertarians have gone far beyond the stage in which they had to learn about libertarianism from others, and they are now major contributors to libertarian thought.
It is heartening to know that the brand of libertarianism they profess is Rothbardianism. As Lukasz Dominiak (who is the most senior academic among them and, it is fair to say, is their guiding spirit), Stanislaw Wojtowicz, and Igor Wysocki tell us in their introduction,
Polish libertarian scholarship focuses on what can be called the most radical version of right-libertarianism, which finds its original expression in the works of Murray Rothbard, Walter Block, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, David Gordon [?], and many others. . . Thus, the fourth wave of Polish libertarian scholarship critically builds on these foundations and develops the Rothbardian theory in new dimensions, both in depth and in breadth.
Often, these new modifications call for substantial revisions to Rothbard’s own positions.
The book consists of thirteen articles, which range from the libertarian theory of justice, the relation of libertarianism to Thomism, libertarian slavery, and evolutionary game theory, among many others. I cannot comment on all of the articles and will just concentrate on a few points of interest, but all of the essays are excellent and display analytic talent and wide scholarship. I often had to struggle to keep up with their arguments.
The philosopher Norbert Slenzok argues with characteristic force and ingenuity that a problem which threatens to show that Rothbard’s defense of freedom is circular can be solved through Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics. The problem, which also besets Robert Nozick’s minarchism, is this:
As Gerald Cohen was probably the first to observe, the core category of this [libertarian] philosophy, freedom, is typically defined in the moralized terms of the libertarian justice theory itself. Stated more precisely, one is said to be at the same time free and non-aggressed against if and only if one’s legitimate property rights are not violated… Hence, whenever libertarian thinkers justify their position on legitimate property rights by maintaining that it preserves freedom and the so-called non-aggression principle (NAP), the argument becomes viciously circular. Freedom and non-aggression are supposed to support the libertarian conception of justice, yet the concepts of freedom and non-aggression themselves turn out to be parasitic upon that very conception of justice.
I must say that the alleged problem seems to me non-existent. Rothbard does not attempt to argue for the basic principles of his libertarian view, self-ownership, and the Lockean acquisition of property through homesteading by appeal to an independent notion of freedom. Rather, he argues for these principles directly. If, however, you agree with Slenzok that there is a problem of circularity, you will find of interest his valiant attempt to solve it.
But if Rothbard’s libertarianism is founded on self-ownership and the Lockean acquisition of property, a genuine problem does arise. If I own something, then prima facie I can sell it. If that is so, why can’t I sell myself into slavery? Isn’t Rothbard—who denies that you can do this—guilty of inconsistency? This point has been pressed against him, with his customary polemical exuberance, by Walter Block; and, at least during one period of his life, Nozick agreed with him, leading him, among other reasons, to give up libertarianism. It is the great merit of Patryk Trzcionka, in his article “Against libertarian slavery,” to have shown that Block’s argument is subject to challenge.
One of the challenges is that Block assumes that if you have made a contract—any contract, not just a contract selling yourself into slavery—you can be compelled to specific performance. For example, if I contract with someone to give a concert, and on the day of the concert, I am sick and can’t sing, I can be dragged from my sick bed and forced to do it. But why assume this? Why not say, instead, that I have to repay the money I’ve been given when I made the contract? As Trzcionka puts it,
…as a result of my contractual agreement to install a TV in someone’s home, the object of the contract is a particular action, not the partial property rights over my muscles and brain. It is therefore not contradictory that I retain my self-ownership rights in relation to the contract binding me if we assume that this contract constitutes only a basis for claims for breach of contract, which should be compensated. This is because using someone to enforce a contract seems, as Rothbard wrote, a grotesque example of disproportionality.
This is a book that contains many insights, and one that particularly struck me was Dawid Megger’s demonstration that the methodological individualism of Rothbard and Mises can be given an ontological grounding in the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Reinterpreting Libertarianism deserves the attention of all friends of freedom in Generation Z , as well as earlier generations.
