From Free Life No 17, January 1993

We libertarians have a serious publicity problem. First, there are very few of us. Second, not many people know what we stand for. Third, we lack any obvious figureheads with which the public can identify. Pause for a moment and try to think of a single famous libertarian. Any luck? No, you can't have John Stuart Mill, because he was a liberal, or at any rate, the liberals have persuaded everybody that he was a liberal. The same goes for such luminaries as Isiah Berlin, who, in any case, was not nearly as famous as his brother Irving. What about Adam Smith? Well he may be an inspiration to us, but he was no great political theorist, and no sort of philosopher at all. Von Hayek? Friedman? Hardly the sort of names that one hears bandied about among our "educated" classes, who are far too polite to bring up the subject of Economics. Now I'm sure that many of my more erudite readers could cite several dozen libertarians who have achieved fame, notoriety, or mild approbation; but the fact remains that there is no libertarian whose name rings the bells of public consciousness.

We have no Marx, no Christ, no Thatcher: no spokesperson living or dead. Now I know what you are thinking to yourselves. You are thinking: "We don't want a figurehead because, as libertarians, we don't want a theoretical orthodoxy." "Our orthodoxy is to allow every heresy; our faith involves believing what we damn well like. And, to the extent that we wish to avoid the religious dogmas that made philosophies such as marxism so ridiculous, you are quite right. But if we have no figurehead to speak for us, no voice that the public (not even the intellectual public) will listen to in respectful recognition, how are we to make ourselves heard? The time has come, I contend, to steal, borrow and plagiarise. We long ago began to borrow the clothes of John Stuart Mill, whose place in the liberal pantheon gives us what little respectability that we already have. This borrowing is quite justified if, as I suspect, most libertarians owe their awakening to teenage readings of On Liberty. What we should now do is to make the words Mill and libertarianism as inseparable as Newton and Gravity, or Kellogg and Cornflakes. We should do the same with Adam Smith.

I leave it to the Lenins amongst us to decide on how this is tobe done. Profuse quotation is one obvious method. For my part, I would rather go on to ransack the archives of European culture, conferring the title of 'proto-libertarian' on as many famous and admired thinkers as possible.

This is not only a question of publicity, of fixing our ideas in the public mind. Libertarianism suffers badly from what we might term a "poverty of philosophy". We have one universal ideal (freedom of the individual), one political programme (minimising the state), and one economic theory (competition results in growth). The simple beauty of these beliefs is that they are all negative. They all advocate the abolition of present restrictions, of laws, government structures and economic barriers. The poverty of these beliefs is that they offer the individual no guide as to how he or she should live a life of libertarian freedom, once it is attained. Oh, Liberty is a fine word, and people will always be prepared to die for it. But when they achieve it, a cold fear of freedom starts to overtake them. The Germans call this fear of freedom angst. Which of us, with no god to worship, no state to succour and direct us, no laws to fix our moral horizons, no big brother to hold our hands - which of us could then face the future with a confident smile and a light step? Perhaps it is not enough to present the public with a set of largely negative ideas. Perhaps, when we scour history for great thinkers whose ideas on the freedom of the individual are akin to our own, we should also read what they had to say about how one should live.

Pompous? Possibly. But I have a warning for you: at the moment we are the scrapmen of society. As scrapmen, we shall undoubtedly be useful to society, used by society, and even paid by society. However, society will never give us a place at the dinner table. We shall remain on the margins of mainstream thinking, just as scrapyards are restricted to the margins of our cities. Society needs scrapmen, but it glorifies builders. It is time to build, and we have precious few bricks that we can call our own. Libertarianism is a philosophical mudhut. Let us, then, pillage the temples of antiquity for building materials that have stood the test of time. Where should we look for our spokespeople? To whom should we turn for inspiration? This article was inspired by a letter sent to the Editor, which mentioned Voltaire: Jean Francois Marie Arouet: a rationalist critic of all that was repressive to the human spirit. Indeed, I borrowed one of his names to give to the third of my three sons. Voltaire invented the shocking notion of free speech, writing "I disapprove of what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right  to say it." He also placed the idea of natural law above all states and religions. If ever there was a candidate for the title of "proto-libertarian", it is this world-renowned Frenchman. Voltaire is not just an authoritative name from whom we can draw quotes, arguments and precedents, he is a philosopher whose ideas live on. At the end of Candide, Voltaire tells us that when all governments, religions and ideals are found to be false, we should not despair, nor should we seek the shelter of new philosophical certainties. Instead, we should be content to cultivate what we are as individuals.

Voltaire wished us to see that mankind would be infinitely better off without any of the institutions that were supposedly created for our benefit. Uncertainty would be a small price to pay for looking after our own affairs. My second son is named after Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian playwrite whose work wandered between sublimity and melodrama. Those of you who know his play An Enemy of the People may already have guessed why I have brought him into this discussion. The central character of this political tale attacks the foundations of liberal democracy by pointing out that "Fools are in a terrible, overwhelming majority, all the wide world over." He concludes, and we may heartily concur, "The majority is never right".

These well-known quotes are important not for their platitudinous truth, but for what they tell us about the difference between liberalism (in particular its trust in proportional representation) and libertarianism (which refuses to believe that a change of electoral system will cure government of its tendency to enforce the will of the majority). Ibsen may not have rewritten history in the way that Voltaire undoubtedly did; nor is he such a rich source of insoiration: but he was a strong champion of the individual. who saw that liberalism as it stood could offer no answer to the "tyranny of fools" that still governs the Western world.

Some of you may also know from whom Ibsen drew these ideas. My number one son is named after Friedrich Nietzsche, who regarded liberalism as "reduction to the herd animal". Nietzsche scrapped most of Western thought since Plato, including the concepts of God, Self, Truth, Good, Morality, Knowledge, Existence, Being, Thing, and metaphysical Consciousness (amongst others). e advocated that having thrown away this mental junk, we should recreate man as "superman", with no need for the political structures that herd us like sheep.

Only Marx has had as much impact on twentieth century thought as this mad, misogynist German, whose words continue to explode in the minds of those who make the effort to read his difficult rhetoric.

And for every idea of Nietzsche's that already has popular currency, there are a dozen awaiting rediscovery. If ever there were an opportunity for us to reap from what somebody else has sown, Nietzsche provides it.

So ends my excursion through The Oxford Book of Oddly Named Intellectuals. I apologise if I have been a touch too prescriptive. However, I am certain that we need to add to the armoury of our thinking; and I am equally certain that there are many influential thinkers of the past whose ideas, and the eloquence with which they expressed those ideas, would make valuable contributions to the difficult task of getting our message across.

For those of you who believe that this is all a little cerabral, I fall back on one more quotation, from Victor Hugo: "A stand can be made against invasion by an army: no stand can be made against invasion by an idea." For those of you who are worried that my children have been named Friedrich, Henrik and Francois, fear not. These are their third names; their first names honour famous brewers and distillers.