Thursday, August 07, 2008

Left-libertarianism?

I've seen the label a couple of times now, and it's the one that seems to come closest to encapsulating my political philosophy. Some aspects of the label appeal to me, some don't. Of course, I could say that about every political label under the sun, but this one seems much more appealing than most.

Not the revolutionary version, no, nor do I think, as Wikipedia suggests , that "left-libertarianism" is just another name for Libertarian Socialism (which is itself, according to that link, just another name for anarchism anyway). No, it's a different ideology in its own right. And it has more than a few adherents.

The thing that finally solidified the label as appropriate for me was reading a short excerpt from self-described "left-libertarian" Ellen Willis in my Political Theory reader. I searched for a few of her writings online and, after reading them, found myself agreeing with a lot of what she wrote, although not all of it by any means (the two full pieces that I read are here and here; they are critical of both the Second Gulf War (the first one not so much) as well as the modern American anti-war movement, and are fairly controversial in content,imho).

So I suppose I could call myself "left-libertarian" from now on - if it weren't for those pesky other people describing left-libertarianism as an ideology that is the basis of yet another Glorious Revolution. I don't want a revolution. I just want to see government and other sources of coercive power in society curtailed.

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