Property

Two Liberalisms: Mill vs Lock
property  / harm  / liberalism  / locke  / mill

I want to suggest an idea from an observation that’s been made many times before. Namely, that what the modern center-left now likes to call “classical” and/or “social” Liberalism, is a muddle of two strains of thought in the Enlightenment, that both stand in opposition to Rousseau; but that the latter strain smuggles him back in through the kitchen door.

The division in the Enlightenment between Rousseau and Hobbes is so famous it’s practically a cliché at this point. Is human nature fundamentally good, or fundamentally bad? Is society a super-organism with a sovereign head, or a collection of self-interested agents, who need to be threatened to stay in line? Those debates will continue ad nauseam, I am sure. That’s not what I mean by the title of this post. Rather, I want to explore the distinction between Locke and Mill. It is THIS distinction that, I think, identifies the lanes of separation we see between American libertarianism, and American liberalism (or “classical liberalism”, and “social liberalism” ).

Chamberlain Nozick and Rawls

In his book, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”, Robert Nozick offers the Wilt Chamberlain thought experiment in order to demonstrate how a conception of justice based on “end-state patterned distributions” (as he put it) would require constant coercive interventions on the part of the state, in order to maintain the desired pattern. This, in turn, would undermine theories of justice that incorporated liberty into their framework. John Rawls’ theory of justice is one such example. I will briefly outline the thought experiment and the problem it poses, consider some objections to Nozick, and conclude that despite these objections, Nozick succeeds.