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Was Ayn Rand a classical liberal?

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Excuse me, but I'm having a big confusion with the term "liberal". Some use it as an equivalent of bigger government controls over the economy, or socialism; while others use it as the exact opposite, meaning, individual rights, freedom, capitalism, etc. I think the distinction to make here would be between classical liberalism and what it has become now, am I right? If so, how did it get to become the opposite of its nineteenth century original meaning? I mean, that's terrible! How is it possible that so many of these concepts have lost their original meaning? Seriously, like, when people get all confused when they hear Chomsky is a libertarian socialist?, for example. I've been reading a little of Bastiat's and Locke's writings, and I find them to be really in tune with Objectivism. So, what I'm trying to say is: would it be correct to say Ayn Rand was a classical liberal? Is Objectivism against classical liberalism? I really don't want to sound like a troll, but her politics don't sound very original to me now. More like a further development of Bastiat's.

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My understanding:

Politics is just one of the 5 branches of philosophy. Therefore, similarities you find in Objectivism to specific political ideologies would just mean that some beliefs about what are permissible political actions overlap.

Classical liberalism did include laissez faire economic principles. (to what degree, I do not know)

In America, in the early-ish 20th century the term liberal was co-opted by the socialist party when socialism was unpopular. (similar to how many modern liberals have recently taken toward calling themselves progressives)

Objectivism isn't the same as any other previously known philosophy since it was specifically devised and explained by Ayn Rand who was a student of philosophy so she would have known that she was copying something. :-)

This is just information as I understand it. I am open to any correction or additional context to what I stated.

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She built on other people's ideas instead of making up her own from scratch and that's somehow bad? Ayn Rand developed the first principled, coherent, non-contradictory philosophy.

She didn't even coin the term Lassiez-faire capitalism. It was first identified by Adam Smith. She drew influence from many philosophers, to make one cohesive and integrated philosophy.

As far as classical liberalism: Classical liberalism means "Likes new ideas." It means to prefer nonrestrictive freedoms over old traditions. So yeah, you could call her a classical liberal. Is that bad?

Concepts lose their original meaning for many reasons, including the decay of education, and the ulterior motives of various political movements in 'redefining' various words.

What I'm confused about is...you seem to have posted this because you're learning enlightenment history and you're discovering things you didn't know before...so...why is the overall tone of your post surprise, fear, and disbelief?

EDIT: Adam Smith didn't coin the term Capitalism, so I fixed that sentence.

Edited by Jackethan
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By definition liberals want change, and conservatives oppose change. By connotation todays liberals want more socialism. So technically Objectivists are liberals but have little in common with the majority of common liberals

I don't think those definitions apply. Neither is an ideology that is for or against change only for change sake. (You might call that Obamaism, btw... joke).

First, the term liberal doesn't have anything to do with wanting change. It is more rooted in terms related to being free, generous, loose or not literal, etc. Economically speaking Objectivism agrees with classically liberal economic ideals.

Second, conservative is less about not changing than it is about preserving. Ideologically, It would only oppose change if the ideal it wishes to conserve were in perfect working order. (i.e. an American conservative would profess to want to conserve/preserve the founding principles of the United States. With many of those founding principles missing in current politics, you see conservatives claiming to want to reclaim them by "changing" the current ways back to the original ways).

The liberal and conservative labels as political ideologies no longer tell us much because of how they've been used to represent completely conflicting political philosophies throughout history and in different parts of the world. If Objectivism lasts long enough and ever gains a high level of awareness in the political realm, it too will have its original name corrupted by some who would take advantage of any current political value it may hold.

The key is having and understanding your core, underlying philosophy. Then you can call it whatever you want.

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... If so, how did it get to become the opposite of its nineteenth century original meaning? I mean, that's terrible! How is it possible that so many of these concepts have lost their original meaning? Seriously, like, when people get all confused when they hear Chomsky is a libertarian socialist?, for example. I've been reading a little of Bastiat's and Locke's writings, and I find them to be really in tune with Objectivism. So, what I'm trying to say is: would it be correct to say Ayn Rand was a classical liberal? Is Objectivism against classical liberalism? I really don't want to sound like a troll, but her politics don't sound very original to me now. More like a further development of Bastiat's.

No. Ayn Rand was not a classical liberal because she did not live in the classical period. Her ideas only have elements in common with old liberalism to the extent both were Aristotelian. Your readings in Locke and Bastiat are tempting you to understand the intellectual history through trends in economics and politics but that cannot be done, hence your confusion.

Liberal vs. Conservative begins in the context of europe. Conservative there meant 'royalist', being in favor of and loyal to your country's monarch and religion. Set against monarchy and religion was a disorganized mass of contradictory enlightenment intellectuals. The biggest and most obvious display of the contradictory elements at work during the enlightenment are the diverging courses of the American and French revolutions. European liberalism descended into egalitarianism and communism, American liberalism became the northern mercantile establishment. American liberalism has been being pulled toward the european socialist version by the deliberate intellectual influence of 'german idealist' philosophers after the American Civil War. All of the intellectual excitement in America over new trendy ideas was over the european liberalism, classical liberalism died in that period and became relegated to the ghetto of American conservatism. Conservatives in America now explicitly take inspiration from Edmund Burke, a religious monarchist. Classical liberalism (and conservatism) is dead end, static and boring, doomed to succumb to successive assaults by generations of daring atheists rebelling against their parents' religion and morally righteous socialists who take their religion seriously.

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I disagree strongly, Grames. Allan Gotthelf even identified Rand as providing a philosophical defense of classic liberalism (I believe it was Gotthelf anyway, I might be thinking of another philosopher).

The key point is that classic liberalism is a political movement whereas Objectivism is philosophical. Objectivism encompasses classic liberalism, and is therefore a bit more complete, but I've seen very little in liberalism that contradicts Rand. Government provision of things like roads comes to mind as one difference, but liberalism would tend to support it by saying that government provision of the service is equivalent to a private company providing it, as long as that service is one that is demanded by the population (and one that they themselves are willing to pay for, as opposed to one for which they want to pass the cost off to others). That description I think still falls loosely in the area of voluntary taxation, even though it isn't quite.

Liberal literally means "free". Thus, the ultimate (political) objective of a liberal is freedom. Because it contrasts so starkly with the European tradition of conservatism, it connotes a dynamic society as opposed to a rigid one. Liberalism in Europe is still identified this way, which occasionally leads to some confusion when Americans and Europeans discuss politics.

In the late nineteenth century, socialism was openly advocated in politics, liberalism was mainstream and generally considered good, and conservatism has never really gotten off the ground because it is (or at least appears to be) very static. The Russian revolution, however, cemented the association of socialism with violence and oppression, so it became a stigma in American politics. As is typical of the Left, it co-opted the word "liberal" to conceal its real agenda and latch on to the powerful positive associations liberalism had at the time (around the 1920-30's, which is why FDR is a "liberal" that defined the "liberal Left" as tax-and-spend, Nanny State, etc). Similar things have happened with words such as "plan", "reform", "progress", etc - I'm sure you've heard the Left's watchwords before.

If classic liberalism is "dead end, static and boring", how is it that Milton Friedman, liberalism's modern poster boy, is cited as the single most influential economist of at least the latter half of the 20th century, and arguably of human history? He may not have been working explicitly within the Objectivist framework, but he carries an extremely large proportion of its premises and insights into his political discourse. On re-reading portions of Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free to Choose (1980), both of which are contemporary with Rand, I found extremely little that conflicts with Objectivism. He even went so far as to say his own plan for educational freedom was insufficient and that for the record he preferred a 100% voluntary system of both educating children and financing that education. The difference is that he does not make the perfect the enemy of the good and will strive to improve a bad system as much as possible, even if that gets him less than he originally sought.

As far as originality is concerned, no one ever is. Everyone draws to some extent from the knowledge and work of others, that's the whole point of man's ability to transmit information across generations through speech, text, and so on. Rand read Aristotle - does that make her contributions to philosophy somehow less?

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If classic liberalism is "dead end, static and boring", how is it that Milton Friedman, liberalism's modern poster boy, is cited as the single most influential economist of at least the latter half of the 20th century, and arguably of human history? He may not have been working explicitly within the Objectivist framework, but he carries an extremely large proportion of its premises and insights into his political discourse. On re-reading portions of Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free to Choose (1980), both of which are contemporary with Rand, I found extremely little that conflicts with Objectivism. He even went so far as to say his own plan for educational freedom was insufficient and that for the record he preferred a 100% voluntary system of both educating children and financing that education. The difference is that he does not make the perfect the enemy of the good and will strive to improve a bad system as much as possible, even if that gets him less than he originally sought.

Milton Freidman is dust in the wind. He had no philosophical mooring and so can have no lasting influence. The current administration is all Keynesian, again, because it fits their more fundamental philosophical premises.

As far as finding little that conflicts with Objectivism, you missed how his value-free approach and utilitarianism are contrary to Objectivism.

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Suffice it to say that many elements of classic Western Liberalism, as known during the Enlightenment period, are compatable with Objectivism's stance on individual rights, at least as envisioned by our nation's founders. That they made the mistake of attributing these rights to a Creator is forgivable, given the time frame and generally uber-religious framework prevalent in the world at that time.

Edited by Maximus
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Describing Friedman as value-free is quite a misinterpretation of his writing. His writing is FULL of value judgments. It's just that he does not proclaim that some undesirable things should be illegal, which is quite different. And saying he's "dust in the wind" because he doesn't have "philosophical moorings" is nonsense - people can be very influential in the long term without subscribing to an explicit philosophical orthodoxy. Case in point, Friedman was dead before I ever even heard of him.

Regardless, this isn't the place for a defense of Friedman, so I think we ought to put that away or move it to another thread.

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Describing Friedman as value-free is quite a misinterpretation of his writing.

I refer you to Essays in Positive Economics.

Everyone buys into the is-ought problem, including economists of the Chicago and Austrian schools. Prescriptions about what ought to be are therefore arbitrary and cannot be resolved ("... about which men can only fight.") Which is why he delves into positive economics, the technical value-free theorizing about what is.

"Factual evidence can never “prove” a hypothesis; it can only fail to disprove it, which is what we generally mean when we say, somewhat inexactly, that the hypothesis has been “confirmed” by experience." He is a Popperian skeptic.

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The essay is referring to economics as a technical science. From the essay, "Normative economics and the art of economics, on the other hand, cannot be independent of positive economics. Any policy conclusion necessarily rests on a prediction about the consequences of doing one thing rather than another, a prediction that must be based - implicitly or explicitly - on positive economics." Criticism of this is akin to criticizing a physicist for saying that special relativity has characteristics including the twin paradox but not assessing whether that trait is good or bad. Positive economics is restricted to the question, "if this, then what?" The good or bad of the "what" is a question for normative economics, ethics, or politics. Friedman tends to be very careful about mixing his technical research with pronouncements about what should be (he addresses this issue in the video form of Free to Choose), but he is by no means silent on his normative economics.

His political writings, including Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose, are explicitly value oriented. From C&F (pg 50):

"Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men that mistakes -excusable or not -can have such far reaching effects is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic...But it is a bad system even to those who set security higher than freedom. Mistakes, excusable or not, cannot be avoided in a system which disperses responsibility yet gives a few men great power, and which thereby makes important policy actions highly dependent on accidents of personality."

Friedman comes out very explicitly against non-objective law in this (and many other) passage, which I pulled from a random page to show how prolific his value judgments are. His political theory is very similar to Rand's - capitalism is the ideal social/economic system because it protects individual rights, rewards virtue, and maximizes freedom. Friedman is not quite as consistent as Rand, especially in his earlier works, but if you trace his policy recommendations over time they do become more consistent with the political philosophy he describes in his earlier works.

If you've ever taken statistics, the commentary on "failing to reject" a hypothesis should be familiar. The implication of a failure to reject a hypothesis is to establish it as "the best hypothesis currently formulated", or at the very least one that neatly describes the scenario in question. This is analogous to Rand's view of definitions - they are left open-ended in case a more complete hypothesis/definition is called for. As far as I remember (it's been a while), Rand's ItOE does not make many value judgments, it addresses the scientific side of human concept formation. Same thing goes for Friedman's technical work, as contrasted with his political advocacy.

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The essential issue is still the is-ought gap. Because of the gap normative statements are arbitrary and men can only fight over them. So he picks some values (that we find agreeable but are only justified in utilitarianism and pragmatism) and fights for them. Yay. He dies and stops fighting, and his influence wanes because his values were personal and arbitrary. He did some good, but the source of his good was interred with his bones.

I realize that I am faulting Freidman for not being Rand, or not at least joining forces with her. A great economist spurned an opportunity to become an immortal economist.

(Rand's ITOE does not have value judgements because epistemology is hierarchically prior to ethics. Economics is hierarchically later than ethics and so cannot legitimately avoid making moral arguments.)

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