Contra Libertarianism

Here's a core of my critique of Libertarianism. At least of some flavors of it, since, had that label not already been appropriated by the free-market crazies, I could accept it as descriptive of my own political theory/stance. At least of part of my stance. Cooperative Libertarianism, perhaps.

To speak of “the peninsular individual” is to offer a contrast with “the insular individual.” The latter is separated from others; the former is connected with them via the common substrate of the group. The latter is conceived as independent of others, the former as interdependent, connected, receiving-&-providing from/to others.

Human beings are a social animal, unlike bears, for example. More like wolves, we run in packs. Unlike a foal, which can stand on its own four feet as soon as it is born, an infant human is totally dependent upon its mother for years after birth. And the mother can hardly care for the child, can hardly survive herself, without the aid and comfort of her own immediate social group, the family and its community. (“It takes a neighborhood to raise a child.”)

Furthermore, the child's human self --a symbolic construction, crafted by a team composed of itself, its mother and father and siblings and aunts and uncles and grandparents and neighbors and neighbors' children, and more-- is composed not only of its biological needs, but of internalized images of the others who relate to it as it slowly matures. The self-concept --the soul-- of a human child is made up of the aspirations and boundaries, the possibilities and impossibilities, it obtains from the behavior of those other humans who care for it in its long years of utter dependency. (Cf., D. Siegel, Mead, Cooley, . . .)

Furthermore, the adult human being retains this habit of dependency (but more than a habit) upon his group, his society, throughout his entire life. No one lives alone; no one is a self-made man. All human economies are group constructions.

In a very real sense, the living of every man is given to him by his society. While he must typically labor to obtain it, he can never wrest it from the earth, from the field or the forest or the ocean, unaided by his fellows. Without the cooperation of our fellow man, each of us is dead.  In earlier societies, capital punishment is excommunication; to be cut off from all communication, from all commerce, with one’s fellows is to be sentenced to death.

No individual can, without the support, the physical and social and cultural infrastructure, of his society, produce anything.

All wealth is social wealth, community wealth.

The autonomous individual is a fiction. A fiction characteristic of this particular culture.

Melanie Klein:

The assumption was relinquished of an atomistic, only recently socially modeled individual, who is faced with a closed world, in favour of a mental picture in which the subject and his reality are gradually differentiated and mutually developed.

Rosemarie Kennel, Bion’s Psychoanalysis and Edelman’s Neuroscience

John Donne

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), No. XVII