Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

IV. Why Freedom Cannot Mean an A(nti-)Political Self-Sovereignty
Libertarianism is often associated with two interrelated viewpoints: that government – 
even democratic government – will be necessarily coercive and that, as a result, freedom is to be 
found in the private sphere, outside the reach of politics. In popular culture in the U.S., for 
example within the Tea Party movement, we can see this tendency as a desire to build walls, real 
or metaphorical. Thus, the Tea Party’s fixation on illegal immigration can be seen as an effort to 
seal off the nation to ensure the sovereignty of native-born people over “their” territory. Such a 
view is but another demonstration of how so-called “libertarianism” in the United States is aimed 
not at reducing state power, but rather, at amplifying and redirecting state power. We see it also 
in the Tea Party’s passion for gun rights, in the sense that guns provide us the ability to remain 
sovereign over our homes, to protect and defend ourselves. While I think that gun rights are 

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compatible with anti-authoritarianism in a way that militarized borders are not, they also 
demonstrates the way that many “libertarians” understand freedom: freedom occurs on my land, 
on my property, in my house. The task of the believer in freedom is to defend these private 
sanctuaries from the impositions of a distant government and the meddling of democratic 
politics.
This popular view finds roots within much liberal and libertarian philosophy, as well. If 
the Tea Party seeks to build real walls around the nation’s borders and around one’s home, 
Lomasky (1987, 54) aims to build metaphorical walls through an understanding of rights as
form of sovereignty: “By establishing boundaries that others must not transgress, [rights] accord 
to each rights holder a measure of sovereignty over his own life” (Lomasky 1987, 54). Notably, 
Mill (2002, 14) contends that “the appropriate region of human liberty” is, in the first instance, 
the “inward domain of consciousness” or “liberty of thought” and, in the second instance, the 
“liberty of tastes and pursuits.” As Arendt explains, this “inner freedom,” understood as the 
“inward space in which men may escape from external coercion and 
feel
free” constitutes a flight 
from politics. Freedom becomes a highly individualistic and apolitical, if not anti-political 
undertaking. Given that Friedman, Hayek and libertarians more generally are committed to 
individualism, such a conclusion is not surprising. It is worth noting, though, that Hayek (2007, 
68) is careful to distinguish this commitment to individualism from a commitment to “egotism 
and selfishness” – vices that Ayn Rand, for instance in her (1964) 
The Virtue of Selfishness
,
 
elevates to the status of virtues. For Hayek (
ibid
., 102), individualism
…does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish or ought to 
be. It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of 
imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a 
sector of the needs of a whole society.

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In contrast to Rand’s crude egotism, Hayekian individualism is committed to “respect for the 
individual man 
qua
man, that is, the recognition of his own views and tastes as supreme in his 
own sphere, however narrowly that may be circumscribed, and the belief that it is desirable that 
men should develop their own individual gifts and bents” (
ibid
. 68).
Let me be clear: I am 
not
arguing that private freedom, such as that described by 
Lomasky, Mill, and Hayek, is bad, frivolous or unimportant. Private freedom – the ability to 
have some space separate from others (physically and metaphorically), to develop one’s own 
talents and tastes, and to enjoy space from common undertakings and political matters – is, in my 
view, a critical component of any free society. My claim is, rather, that to define freedom this 
way is to unnecessarily restrict its domain and to, frankly, diminish individuals’ capacity for 
freedom by denying its social outlets and collective implications. Free people often, though by 
no means always, use their freedom in public and political ways: the engage in collective 
undertakings aimed at creating public spaces and providing public goods. Thinking about 
freedom as 
only
a place to escape politics, to escape democracy, fails to capture the reality that 
freedom is also about acting with others and exercising collective power. Thus, libertarians 
seeking to justify neoliberal states run into paradoxes that are symptomatic of their narrowed 
conception of freedom. As Harvey (2005, 69) astutely points out: 
While individuals are supposedly free to choose, they are not supposed to choose 
to construct strong collective institutions (such as trade unions) as opposed to 
weak voluntary associations (like charitable organization)…Faced with social 
movements that seek collective interventions, therefore, the neoliberal state is 
itself forced to intervene, sometimes repressively, thus denying the very freedoms 
it is supposed to uphold. 
Consider, for example, Friedman’s support of Pinochet’s regime and the reasons Friedman 
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