I have very much enjoyed the work of my friend and colleague Matt Zwolinski, especially his coauthored book with John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism (2023). In a recent essay, Zwolinski addresses “The Myth of Libertarianism”, echoing themes from that earlier volume.
Zwolinski raises many serious questions about the nature of libertarianism and the impact of contemporary political realities on how we think about libertarianism and those who are adjacent to its project. Indeed, one implication of Zwolinski’s work is that there is no single, coherent libertarian project to speak of, that libertarianism is a Big Tent, which includes many, sometimes conflicting projects offering substantially different interpretations of the world and starkly different proposals on how to identify and resolve the social problems they encounter.
How adjacent these proposals are to libertarianism is a key issue here because when the definition or even description of a term becomes so fluid that it encompasses virtually everything, it ultimately signifies nothing. This isn’t about asking those in libertarian and adjacent spaces to hand in their club cards. It’s a question of how “adjacency” can morph into ideological complicity and outright support for the very power structures that most libertarians have sought to dismantle.
The enormous implications of this for both libertarian thinking and acting in the world are a prime focus of my newest essay on Substack, where I grapple not only with issues raised by Zwolinski’s essay, but also with the life and work of “libertarian-adjacent” entrepreneur Peter Thiel, whose tech company Palantir is providing the tools for massive government surveillance worldwide.
Check out my Substack essay: “Are We all Libertarian-Adjacent Now? Reply to Matt Zwolinski“.
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