Ideological transformations.

How I've been changing my mind in the last years, or how I went in and out liberal/libertarian politics.

I am not sure if this blog post is a return to my ‘ordinary’ publishing schedule or if it's only a brief interruption in my indefinite writing break. In any case, on the occasion of having just finished my bachelor degree, it seems to be a good opportunity to narrate some of the changes that I experienced throughout the last 3 years. More specifically, I want to make a transparent account of the ideological transformations I have been undergoing and where that is taking me. 

Many friends know that I had a liberal/libertarian phase during my university years in Peru, a phase that lasted until the beginnings of my bachelor in Amsterdam. So, what drove me into that side of the political spectrum? How did I find myself reading Hayek, Mises, Rothbard and, most importantly, Nozick? There was a double movement that I think accounts for that interest. First, I joined a progressive (neo)liberal party in college (so, free markets + some form of identity politics) which certainly set me up to gain ‘political capital’ through the study of liberal theory. Second, my view of politics (and the reason why I always thought political science was or should have been some strand of philosophy) was very much moralist. My idea was that we could find, through rational inquiry, a set of True moral principles such that the development of politics could be reduced to how our societies departed or came close to that Truth. 

In this context, not only was I in the quest of a clear cut, absolute moral theory that would explain all politics, but I was also incentivized to do that for the sake of navigating through a new social space in university and finding a place for myself. It wouldn’t take long untill I realized that moral theory is -in many cases- messy, and that liberal economists and some liberal theorists did not have the answers I was looking for: they did not have a proposal for the exact size the state should be, the exact limits of individual freedom nor the exact scope of private property. Hayek is one of the authors that led me to great frustration and disappointment. It was not only extremely painful to read his interminable sentences, but his ambiguities and lack of definitive answers were agonizing. 

This led me to more radical thinkers like Mises, Rotbard and Nozick with the hope that their radicality would consist in no other than the rigor and non-negotiability of moral principles, which is precisely what I was looking for in a political theory. While Mises provided economic arguments in defense of free markets, it was Nozick and Rothbard who offered a moral theory from which to defend a market society in the name of Truth and Reason. Having convinced myself that private property was a natural right, it was marvelous to find in Nozick and Rothbard an account on how to take that premise to its ultimate consequences. 

I had a special investment in Nozick. This fixation occurred, first, because of the way he would use economic jargon to talk about moral dilemmas. But especially because -although being a radical libertarian- Nozick dedicated his work to giving a moral justification for the existence of a (minimal) state. In this way, I could have someone -Nozick- as a theoretical figure from which to justify a radical libertarian position without being an anarchist like Rothbard.

But, of course, endorsing a libertarian agenda in a country like Peru is an impossible task. What happens with inclusive development? What happens with the aid to the poor? What to do under national emergencies like Covid, where redistribution and public services are not only socially necessary but seem morally unquestionable? How can ‘private property rights’ be the answer to all these questions? My sincere intention of finding a Truth to which the world of politics could be made to coincide, led me, in fact, to a ‘truth’ that was completely mute about the world of politics and completely foreign to the world of human needs. 

But while I was still in Peru I was not yet fully willing to give up on my premises. The liberal/libertarian perspective not only says: “you must defend property rights (in the abstract)”, it also says: “you must defend your property rights!”. In other words, it tells you: “you must defend your class position”. Libertarian theory then presented itself with a particular seductiveness whereby Truth and Reason, somehow, coincide with your class interest and status. What a beautiful coincidence!.. And in this way I had trapped myself in ideology. It later became clear to me that if your position in the world is always justified by a higher theory, you fail to develop a critical attitude not only towards your own position but towards the world itself. 

From the libertarian perspective, the world needs more property rights as a way to gain freedom against state interventions. However, if the world is already organized and regulated by private property rights (and the markets they produce), libertarian theory is only able to propose a furthering of that very organization which is already built into the world and that already drives the current state of affairs. In other words, this theory is unable to produce a critical stance towards the world, a stance from which we could delineate alternatives for a better future. 

How to develop any form of critical conciousness out of this? I think that I will leave for the next post how I started changing my mind. For now I’ll just say that my general conclusion after having gone through that intellectual tradition is that the world is much more complex than what liberal/libertarian theory can afford to explain, that the struggles of our time are much more than a game of Truth or falsity, and that such struggles are rather the result of interests, power and the unfolding of social contradictions in open-ended history.