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

Like most readers, when I open a book for the first time, I usually have some idea of what I may encounter. From the title or the cover design, from a dustjacket blurb or where I found the book on a library or bookseller’s shelf, I know something about it even before I start reading. When I first picked up a copy of Andrew Koppelman’s Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed last year, I thought I’d encounter a history of libertarian thought and politics in the twentieth-century United States—a history, I suspected from the title, that would argue for libertarianism’s corruption, its stray from earlier and perhaps, better, forms. In one sense, I wasn’t wrong. Koppelman does trace the history of twentieth-century libertarianism through the life, writings, and ideas of key figures such as Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and Ayn Rand. And he does argue for libertarianism’s corruption over time. But in other sense, my initial hypothesis was wrong.

For Koppelman’s goals in Burning Down the House are not historical, and his book is not a work of history. Or, at least, it’s not a work of history as much as it is a work of political philosophy. In other words, for reasons I’ll explain below, I see Koppelman’s goals as decidedly presentist. He is less interested in improving our understanding of the past than in reforming certain aspects of American political life and culture today. As a work of political philosophy—with historical concerns but contemporary goals—however, Burning Down the House succeeds in providing a number of valuable lessons for both professional historians and a historically-curious public. In what follows, I’d like to start by explaining my reasons for calling Koppelman’s book a work of political philosophy before turning to its payoffs.

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Koppelman’s work does more than offer a “sustained critique of libertarianism” (13; see also 24)—what we might think of as a negative argument. It also provides positive arguments, by suggesting, for example, that left-leaning liberals and right-leaning libertarians might find common ground in a “moderate libertarianism…in its original Hayekian form” (9). Taking a step back, I read Koppelman as offering useful approaches to understanding the relationship, first, among individuals in civil society; and, second, these individuals and the state (i.e., their government). Two of Koppelman’s most important contributions along these lines are his definition of freedom and his formulation of what he terms a “Lockean aspiration” to explain both John Locke’s seventeenth-century understanding of property rights and twentieth- and twenty-first-century libertarians’ misunderstandings and misuses of them. Let me start with the latter.

As Koppelman explains so effectively, John Locke is “the philosopher to whom modern libertarians are most deeply indebted” (22). Yet Locke was “no libertarian” and “libertarianism doesn’t follow from Lockean premises” (75). As a result, libertarians’ uses of the seventeenth-century English philosopher are, in fact, misuses based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Locke’s most famous political work, the Two Treatises of Government (1690). Most strikingly, and most damningly, twentieth-century libertarians—Murray Rothbard chief among them—misinterpret Locke’s discussion of property in the Second Treatise to support “the absolute right to private property of every man,” and, as a result incorrectly (perhaps embarrassingly) use Locke to argue that “the State is a group of plunderers” and “Taxation is Robbery” to quote Rothbard (78). Locke, as Koppelman writes, in fact provides “compelling reasons for rejecting” arguments such as these (85). To make his case, Koppelman introduces what he calls the “Lockean aspiration.” Namely, what Locke offers in the Second Treatise is not a proto-libertarian defense of absolute property rights (which actually bear more resemblance to the ideas of Robert Filmer). Instead, “Locke aims to bring about a world in which human effort is likely to be rewarded” (22). It’s this “Lockean aspiration”—that Locke seeks a world in which “human effort is likely to be rewarded”—that explains both Locke’s own views and why twentieth- and twenty-first-century libertarian uses of Locke are problematic. After all, the “Lockean aspiration” is frustrated or “thwarted” by the very sort of minimal-state, free-market arguments to which libertarians today adhere most closely. Neither the minimal state nor unfettered markets (where “the world is so open to upheaval by market forces that it is impossible to plan a life”) allow reward of human effort (23). Nor, more importantly, do they allow for actual or real human freedom, which brings me to point number two.

The “fundamental problem” with—the “deep flaw in”—libertarian thought is an “underdeveloped account of what is necessary for human freedom,” Koppelman explains (183; 178; 183). “The lives that most of us hope for require the cooperation of others,” he writes (178). As much as we may wish to be autonomous, as much as we may wish to “sustain[] [ourselves] without any external support,” we neither can nor should because “we are social beings” (236; 178). What this means is that “freedom is not the absence of government” as libertarians would have it. Rather, “it is the capacity of people to shape their own lives” (while usually living alongside others) (21-22).

What this means is that people cannot actually be “free to live the lives they want” without something more than a minimal state (21). For Koppelman, this is readily apparent from his two favorite examples—the issues of drug addiction and discrimination. Human beings are freer to live the lives they want to live—they have more freedom—because of state involvement in regulating dangerous, addictive drugs (keeping them off the shelves of your neighborhood bodega) and codifying anti-discrimination laws.

With their Koppelmanian understanding of the “Lockean aspiration” and freedom as “the capacity of people to shape their own lives,” readers come away from Burning Down the House with what might be best described as the ingredients for crafting a revitalized political philosophy of their own. This revitalized political philosophy might blend the best bits of an earlier twentieth-century version of libertarianism (think Hayek) with the best bits of a later twentieth- or twenty-first-century liberalism (think Obamacare).

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It’s worth pausing here to acknowledge Koppelman’s complicated relationship with / attitude toward political philosophy—and why I imagine some fellow readers may bristle at my portrayal of the work. After all, Koppelman takes great pains to underscore the limits of academic conversation (e.g., the discussion about a certain strain of libertarianism animating the contemporary Democratic party that’s played out in academic writing but not made it onto the radar of said Democratic politicians, much less the ordinary voter) and he underscores the limits of, well, political philosophy as formal practice. “Most people hold their political views for reasons that have nothing to do with philosophy,” Koppelman explains. And, as a result, “political philosophers sometimes need to get over themselves” (236). But this does not mean that political philosophy is unimportant or inconsequential. In fact, as Koppelman writes elsewhere, “political philosophy matters,” and “everyone with political opinions” has a political philosophy (8; 24). In suggesting that Koppelman’s work provides the ingredients for a revitalized political philosophy and is, itself, a work of political philosophy, I’m speaking to this later formulation—to his recognition that “philosophy” or “ideas” or “thought” is not the purview of a select few (i.e., “philosophers” or “thinkers”) but everyone. And thus that understanding the truth about libertarianism in the past, present, and future, is not only for the Koppelmans of the world, but for everyone.

And it’s this point that brings me to where I’d like to end: with two questions about what Koppelman’s book—as a work of political philosophy—has to offer historians, especially intellectual historians, broadly speaking, and historians of American democracy. But before I pose these two questions, let me suggest just one thing that a more general audience might take from Koppelman’s approach that falls outside what I’ve been talking about so far.

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Counterintuitive as it may seem, the signal contribution of Burning Down the House for an ordinary, non-expert, but curious American (say, an undergraduate) might not be anything Koppelman says about libertarianism per se but rather what his discussion reveals about the best practices for understanding any topic as fraught, misunderstood, oversimplified, and highly politicized as libertarianism in the contemporary United States: namely, that we should not  assume something has always been, always meant, or always mattered as it does today.

For historians—especially intellectual historians who approach “understanding the American past by way of ideas and the people who made or were moved by them” in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s words— Burning Down the House provides a welcome reminder that the “givens” of our world (libertarianism as incompatible with a more humanistic liberalism) are, in fact, anything but given.[1]

My first question for the author is what he would articulate as the most important payoff(s) of his book (empirical, methodological, or otherwise) for those of us who operate largely within the academy as academic historians, writing what are generally academic books. What do you most hope we take from your work?

My second question is how you—or your interlocutors—understand your work as a contribution to our understanding and practice of democracy in the United States today. Though democracy is clearly related to the topics you discuss, it always seems to remain in the background, rarely taking center stage in what you’ve written (for most sustained discussion see, e.g., p. 49 and 61). As I read, however, I was continually reminded of a line from Jim Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama: “Democracy,” Kloppenberg writes, “in a pluralist culture means coaxing a common good to emerge from the clash of competing individual interests.”[2] What might your story of “how libertarian philosophy was corrupted by delusion and greed” have to offer us here? What might it tell us about the past, present, and future of American democracy?

Claire Rydell Arcenas is an associate professor of history at the University of Montana. She is the author of America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life (Chicago, 2022).