TGIF: Democracy Is Not Liberty

by Sheldon Richman

Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) was a standout British advocate of self-ownership, individualism, and liberty. He promoted a fully free society marked by voluntary exchange and the exclusion of the initiation of physical force, which he understood to be contrary to reason and human flourishing. Herbert was an author and, briefly, a member of Parliament for the Liberal Party. Under the influence of the great laissez-faire social philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), he became a consummate libertarian, though his favored label was “voluntaryist.”

We are fortunate that in 1978, the Liberty Fund and Tulane University libertarian philosophy professor Eric Mack compiled Herbert’s best writings in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays. As a young libertarian, I fondly recall seeing Mack lecture on Herbert, whom I was unfamiliar with, just as the book hit the market. I had not thought about Herbert since then, until I came across a three-year-old video from Harry Binswanger extolling Herbert. I am grateful for the reminder. (Trivia: young Murray Rothbard once used the pen name “Aubrey Herbert.”)

Mack’s excellent introduction to the volume sums up Herbert’s thinking well. During the late Victorian age, Mack writes,

[Herbert] formulated and expounded voluntaryism, his system of “thorough” individualism. Carrying natural rights theory to its logical limits, Herbert demanded complete social and economic freedom for all noncoercive individuals and the radical restriction of the use of force to the role of protecting those freedoms—including the freedom of peaceful persons to withhold support from any or all state activities. All cooperative activity, he argued, must be founded upon the free agreement of all those parties whose rightful possessions are involved.

I could go on (see the book!), but I want to get on to my main purpose. Unlike most people today, Auberon Herbert understood that democracy is not to be equated with freedom. The fact that the government lets an individual deposit one drop in a sea of millions of votes does not make him free—far from it. Voting, to be sure, is preferable to overtly violent power transfers, but that is not saying much. Groups cannot be free if the individuals that comprise them are not free. Group rights per se do not exist.

Here is Herbert’s take from the book’s title essay. After asserting that the “really free man will neither submit to restrictions placed on himself, nor desire to impose them on others,” he anticipated an objection: are not things different under self-government, majority rule, democracy? Here is his reply (some paragraph breaks have been added to ease the eyes):

“…I must reply to you that your majority has no more rights over the body or mind of a man than either the bayonet-surrounded emperor or the infallible church. The freedom of a man to use either his faculties or his possessions, as he himself wills, is the great moral fact that exists in independence of every form of government. It is the moral law that, as we may believe, the Great Mind—in which we may trust, though we can neither know nor understand it—has placed as the foundation of human society, as the one necessary condition of all social happiness, to represent to us in the moral and intellectual order what gravitation represents to us in the physical order. We can see, when once our eyes have been opened to see clearly, that there is no other method by which it is possible to conceive of a man as arriving at his perfect development; that there is no other means by which he can even cease to be his own unresting tormenter.

“For think what human society must necessarily be without this law of individual liberty? If this law has no real existence, if the individual has no rights, then the larger or more powerful part of a nation may force upon the smaller or weaker part of a nation what they will. According to the ideas that prevail at the moment, they may dictate their religion or their philosophical creed; they may regulate their occupations, their labor, their amusements, their possessions; they may permit or refuse to permit them to marry; they may leave their children to dwell in their homes, or drag them away to be trained in state barracks. There is no matter, from the highest and most vital matters of life to the lowest trifle, that the stronger, the more aggressive, the more presumptuous-minded part of a nation may not decree and organize for the weaker part and compel them to observe, if this claim of some to direct others is once sanctioned. And if this be so, if this rule of the majority is the true rule for the guidance of the race, if each human being has in himself no rights of self-ownership, if to be the most numerous party in the state is to all effect to be the slave-owning portion of the nation—the portion which holds all others subject to its own ideas of what is best—think of the wretched future that by some cruel destiny would be reserved for all time for all men.

“In this case the possession of power would necessarily confer upon those who gained it such enormous privileges—if we are to speak of the miserable task of compulsion as privileges—the privileges of establishing and enforcing their own views in all matters, of treading out and suppressing the views to which they are opposed, of arranging and distributing all property, of regulating all occupations, that all those who still retained sufficient courage and energy to have views of their own would be condemned to live organized for ceaseless and bitter strife with each other.

“In presence of unlimited power lodged in the hands of those who govern, in the absence of any universal acknowledgment of individual rights, the stakes for which men played would be so terribly great that they would shrink from no means to keep power out of the hands of their opponents. Not only would the scrupulous man become unscrupulous, and the pitiful man cruel, but the parties into which society divided itself would begin to perceive that to destroy or be destroyed was the one choice lying in front of them. How true it is that the great evils under which men have suffered have always been those of their own invention; that man has been and still continues to be his own tormentor!

“And here, perhaps, again you will say to me, “You are conjuring up mere phantom dangers. We are only inclined to give power to the majority for some things, not for all. There are many matters in which we would recognize the right of the individual to judge and to act for himself; while we allow society, organized as a whole, to decide such other matters as we are all pretty well agreed should be so decided.”

“I answer that when you use such words you are deceiving yourselves. You will find your position an impossible one. There never can be agreement amongst men as to what these things are. One person will wish to regulate the mass of men in matters of religion; another in education; another in philosophy; another in art; another in matters of trade; another in matters of labor; another in matters of contract; another in matters of amusement. One person will desire to regulate the people in a few matters, and give freedom in many; another to give freedom in few and regulate in many. There is no possibility of permanent human agreement in the matter, where once you have ceased to stand on any definite principle, where once you have sanctioned the use of force for certain undefined needs of the moment.”

To which I would add, for the socialists of our day: do not think you can disguise your program of aggression by adding the word “democratic” to your label.

TGIF—The Goal Is Freedom—appears on Fridays.

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