The End | Bleeding Heart Libertarians - Matt Zwolinski:
June 1, 2020 - "Back in 2011, a group of academic philosophers started a blog called 'Bleeding Heart Libertarians.' The idea behind that blog was ... that you could be a libertarian who favored free markets and limited governments, and still care about the kind of things people on the left refer to as 'social justice' – relieving poverty, racial and sexual equality, immigrant rights, LBGTQ rights, and so on. Hence, the slogan of the blog, 'free markets and social justice'....
"Reconciling free markets and social justice seemed like an especially worthwhile project to undertake in 2011. Academic political philosophy was largely dominated by followers of John Rawls, for whom a commitment to social justice (of a particular sort) was paramount. And libertarianism remained a fringe and unfamiliar view within the academy – for most academic philosophers, it was a view that was born and died in 1974 with the publication of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But a critical mass of scholars were working out new ways of thinking about libertarian ideas; and many of us who were excited by the work of scholars like David Schmidtz, Gerald Gaus, and John Tomasi thought that there was a different style of libertarian thought beginning to crystallize. And we didn’t only want to publicize that; we wanted to encourage it, to help build and develop the research program associated with it.
"Moreover, if we sought to open mainstream Rawlsian political philosophy and theory to the influence of market-friendly classical liberalism, we also wanted to wanted to steer classical liberal scholarship toward taking egalitarian liberal ideas much more seriously than it often had.
"In a more minor way, there was a political background, too. The Cold War 'fusionism' of conservative and libertarian politics was put under considerable strain during the George W. Bush administration; the 2008 presidential candidacy of Ron Paul had reenergized a strain of libertarian politics that rejected neoconservatism but embraced a kind of nationalist, anti-immigrant paleoconservatism instead. Libertarians who didn’t feel comfortable entangled with either neoconservatives or paleoconservatives, those who took the 'liberalism' in 'classical liberalism' seriously, hadn’t quite found a public voice....
"Things have changed quite a bit in the last nine years, both in the realm of academic philosophy and that of real-world politics. Rawlsianism and its particular interpretation of social justice have receded in prominence. The variety of libertarian and classical liberal views within the academy has become better known, even by those who reject those views. And that variety is now a more firmly established fact among libertarian scholars and students themselves
"I like to think that this blog, or at least the people who write for it, have played some role in at least the second of those two developments. We set out with the aim of articulating a new and distinct vision of libertarianism. And – while there are certainly a great number of important details of that vision that have yet to be worked out – I think we have succeeded. The project of establishing the intellectual space for bleeding-heart libertarian ideas has also more or less succeeded, giving way to the various different intellectual projects people are going to pursue in that space. In other words, we’ve said what we needed to say.
"For that reason, it’s time to bring Bleeding Heart Libertarians to a close. We’ll be keeping the archives open. But we won’t be posting anything new. At least not here. All of us are still actively writing, and many of us are writing on themes that are very much relevant to the Bleeding Heart Libertarian project. But we’ve said what we wanted to say here, and we think it’s best to put a period at the end of that sentence rather than an ellipsis."
Read more: https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2020/06/the-end/
June 1, 2020 - "Back in 2011, a group of academic philosophers started a blog called 'Bleeding Heart Libertarians.' The idea behind that blog was ... that you could be a libertarian who favored free markets and limited governments, and still care about the kind of things people on the left refer to as 'social justice' – relieving poverty, racial and sexual equality, immigrant rights, LBGTQ rights, and so on. Hence, the slogan of the blog, 'free markets and social justice'....
"Reconciling free markets and social justice seemed like an especially worthwhile project to undertake in 2011. Academic political philosophy was largely dominated by followers of John Rawls, for whom a commitment to social justice (of a particular sort) was paramount. And libertarianism remained a fringe and unfamiliar view within the academy – for most academic philosophers, it was a view that was born and died in 1974 with the publication of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But a critical mass of scholars were working out new ways of thinking about libertarian ideas; and many of us who were excited by the work of scholars like David Schmidtz, Gerald Gaus, and John Tomasi thought that there was a different style of libertarian thought beginning to crystallize. And we didn’t only want to publicize that; we wanted to encourage it, to help build and develop the research program associated with it.
"Moreover, if we sought to open mainstream Rawlsian political philosophy and theory to the influence of market-friendly classical liberalism, we also wanted to wanted to steer classical liberal scholarship toward taking egalitarian liberal ideas much more seriously than it often had.
"In a more minor way, there was a political background, too. The Cold War 'fusionism' of conservative and libertarian politics was put under considerable strain during the George W. Bush administration; the 2008 presidential candidacy of Ron Paul had reenergized a strain of libertarian politics that rejected neoconservatism but embraced a kind of nationalist, anti-immigrant paleoconservatism instead. Libertarians who didn’t feel comfortable entangled with either neoconservatives or paleoconservatives, those who took the 'liberalism' in 'classical liberalism' seriously, hadn’t quite found a public voice....
"Things have changed quite a bit in the last nine years, both in the realm of academic philosophy and that of real-world politics. Rawlsianism and its particular interpretation of social justice have receded in prominence. The variety of libertarian and classical liberal views within the academy has become better known, even by those who reject those views. And that variety is now a more firmly established fact among libertarian scholars and students themselves
"I like to think that this blog, or at least the people who write for it, have played some role in at least the second of those two developments. We set out with the aim of articulating a new and distinct vision of libertarianism. And – while there are certainly a great number of important details of that vision that have yet to be worked out – I think we have succeeded. The project of establishing the intellectual space for bleeding-heart libertarian ideas has also more or less succeeded, giving way to the various different intellectual projects people are going to pursue in that space. In other words, we’ve said what we needed to say.
"For that reason, it’s time to bring Bleeding Heart Libertarians to a close. We’ll be keeping the archives open. But we won’t be posting anything new. At least not here. All of us are still actively writing, and many of us are writing on themes that are very much relevant to the Bleeding Heart Libertarian project. But we’ve said what we wanted to say here, and we think it’s best to put a period at the end of that sentence rather than an ellipsis."
Read more: https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2020/06/the-end/
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