Roundtable: Angus Burgin on Andrew Koppelman, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed (St Martins, 2022)

In Burning Down the House, Andrew Koppelman makes a brave case for the merits of a centrist liberalism in a political environment otherwise drawn to extremes. In doing so he adopts the perspective, he writes, of a “pro-capitalism leftist,” who accepts the generative capacities and efficiencies of markets but also seeks to ameliorate poverty and to preserve the positive freedoms made possible by a functioning welfare state. In service of this goal, he expresses deep frustrations with an extreme strand of libertarians—who live, he writes, in a world of “romantic fantasy” based on “an infantile vision of invulnerability.” Although not the primary focus of the book, he directs similar ire toward the anticapitalist left, who have consigned themselves to remain “politically impotent” by denying the extraordinary “capacity of markets to alleviate poverty.” Instead, he wants to draw readers’ attention back to an earlier, more moderate strain of libertarianism, one represented most fully in the book by the positions of Friedrich Hayek. Open to the role of the state in redressing market failures, providing public goods, and offering some forms of social insurance to cushion the capricious exigencies of the marketplace, Koppelman sees Hayek as exemplifying a strain of market advocacy that acknowledged the need for political action to curb the occasional excesses of capitalism. Hayek, Koppelman writes, “thought that central planning would inevitably lead to tyranny and poverty, but he also rejected the nineteenth-century ideal of a laissez-faire, minimal state. He sought to delineate a middle path.”

Any writer in the present moment who aligns himself or herself with the advocacy of a “middle path” in economics is destined to make many enemies on both the political left and right. Koppelman embraces that challenge, recognizing the importance and potential value of work that dwells on ways to bridge the seeming chasm between a right-wing political vision centered on the primacy of markets and property rights and a left-wing vision centered on the need to grow state capacity in order to redress inequality or foreground intergenerational justice. Burning Down the House earnestly searches for resources within libertarianism that could open possible conjunctures between these worldviews, hoping to draw on them to transcend the static disagreements that have left much of the American policymaking apparatus in paralysis in recent years.

In pursuing this ambition via a discussion of “radical libertarianism,” Koppelman is making a deliberate departure from recent writings on related themes.  Scholars over the last 15 years have tended increasingly to frame their writings on the late twentieth-century history of market advocacy around the concept of neoliberalism — but Koppelman eschews that term, referencing it less than a handful of times outside the footnotes. This decision opens some questions that I would be eager for him to address.

First, it’s striking that the pantheon of characters that Burning Down the House brings into the foreground is quite different from those privileged in the literature on neoliberalism. Whereas the latter dwells heavily on a story that runs from the ordoliberals through Hayek to Friedman and Gary Becker, Koppelman instead foregrounds the objectivism of Ayn Rand, the anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard, and the austere rights-based philosophy of the early Robert Nozick. This allows him to establish a stark contrast between the minimalistic understandings of the state advocated by “corrupt” libertarians and a more moderate philosophy put forward by Hayek.

But is it possible that this binary might be a little bit too neat? Friedman provides an interesting test case of a theorist who bypasses the darker tones of Rand, Rothbard, and Nozick, while at the same time largely eschewing the more moderate policy outcomes that Hayek was willing to accept. Koppelman excoriates Rand and Rothbard “for justifying inequality on the grounds that the winners in market competition are better, worthier people than the losers,” thereby implicitly valorizing elites over the dispossessed— but Friedman almost always sought to place himself on the rhetorical side of those in marginal economic positions, arguing that minimizing the government’s role in the economy would open new opportunities for them (and reduce the unfair benefits states often conferred to those in positions of economic influence). Koppelman further criticizes “corrupt” libertarians for valuing property over liberty — but Friedman spoke very little about property rights, always accentuating the freedom to make choices in the present day rather than the sanctity of rights accumulated in the past. And this sunnier form of radical libertarianism — emphasizing hope, opportunity, choice, the well-being of marginalized members of society — has arguably been far more influential than the bleak worldview advocated by the radical libertarians foregrounded here. Why focus readers’ attention on Rand, Rothbard, and Nozick, creating a Manichean opposition between their worldview and Hayek’s — and dwell for only a few paragraphs on Friedman, who fits uneasily into this binary and arguably proved more influential than any of them?

Second, many of those writing on neoliberalism would surely be suspicious of Koppelman’s efforts to find a middle ground that pursues redistributive politics in ways that prioritize market efficiencies. “Too many on the left,” he writes, “fail to grasp that the original libertarian strategy has been massively vindicated.” It is “silly,” he suggests, to “keep denying” that markets can do much to alleviate poverty. Further, he suggests that the left has been sidetracked by a misguided fixation on inequality, while their focus should be on the problem of ameliorating poverty. And in addressing that issue, they should acknowledge that Hayek was right about the wastefulness of many government interventions and the stifling nature of some government bureaucracies. If only libertarians would recognize the need for the government, and leftists would recognize the dynamism and efficiency of the market, they would realize that the apparent divide between them is “less deep than it seems.” This is a dispute, he suggests, which can be adjudicated in the shallows.

One of the central claims of the writing on neoliberalism, however — running from Foucault to Wendy Brown — is the depth of the difference between those who embrace the task of fostering and supporting (in Brown’s words) the “homo politicus” and those who privilege the “homo economicus.” According to this critique, as soon as those on the left start framing their policies around market imperatives and market efficiencies, they have already ceded too much moral and political ground to those on the right. One of the most powerful books to make this case in recent years was Elizabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist, which argues that policymakers in the center left in the 1990s came to adopt an “economic style of reasoning” that placed “a very high value on efficiency as the measure of good policy.” This approach, Berman writes, “often treats efficiency as self-evidently good, rather than itself a choice that sometimes competes with other values, like equality or democracy.” And she suggests that its effects on the left’s ability to draw on moral imperatives to advocate for transformative policies – whether single-payer health care, or robust antitrust actions, or efforts to counteract climate change — have been debilitating. What would Koppelman say to critics, along these lines, who worry that by embracing the “economic style of reasoning” they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Finally, I would be curious to hear why Koppelman has chosen to target a book at radical libertarianism in our present moment? Arguably there hasn’t been a period in the last fifty years of American public policy when libertarians have felt more abandoned by mainstream political parties. The loose alliance between libertarian policy advocates and the Republican Party has utterly collapsed amid the Trumpist remaking of the party apparatus; and tariffs and industrial policy are now in vogue across party lines. If scholars of neoliberalism find urgency in representing it as a trans-partisan political “order,” which has cut across much of the American political elite for the past fifty years, the kinds of radical libertarians Koppelman angles his book against seem increasingly marginal to present-day American political conversation. In an age of populist economics and resurgent nationalism, what explains the urgency in combatting a strand of libertarianism that may well have peaked in the American 1980s?

Thinking with neoliberalism complicates discussions about the relationship between states and markets in ways that may add depth to our discussions of libertarianism as well. Friedman’s career reveals that extreme forms of market advocacy can appear populist and even concerned about the plight of the dispossessed, rather than elitist and fixated on the preservation of property rights alone. The ascent and influence of “third-way” neoliberalism shows that some libertarian economic ideals have been embraced by centrist Democrats, from Clinton to Obama, yielding policy solutions have advanced market imperatives while leaving those further to the left frustrated and disillusioned. While there is much to admire in Koppelman’s attempt to clear the philosophical ground for a new politics of compromise, the lessons that I’ve taken from this literature make me less confident in the prospects for such a convergence. Closing the distance between those who see markets as an endlessly generative social good, and those who want to reduce our reliance on economic logics in order to advance other moral imperatives, may require wading away from the shallows and into the murkier depths.

Angus Burgin is Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression and co-editor of the series Intellectual History of the Modern Age with the University of Pennsylvania Press.