I don’t remember what I was reading the moment I first discovered libertarian ideas. But I do remember the feeling. It was the feeling of having been let in on a secret. Libertarianism had seemingly given me a key to understand politics in a way that most people could not. It helped me to see through the apparently complex morass of politics to its very essence: force versus freedom. It enabled me to recognize, as Murray Rothbard liked to put it, that regardless of what everyone around me thought about this politician or party or policy, the plain fact was that the emperor has no clothes.
Rothbard’s use of that line is more significant than it might look. In Andersen’s story, the person who eventually sees through the lie is a child. It’s not a scientist. It’s not an academic researcher. It’s someone who doesn’t know much about the way the world works. But precisely because their understanding is not muddled by “conventional wisdom,” the child can see clearly what the adults miss.
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Complexity, on this view, is a distraction. The real truths of politics are simple. And once you have true principles, you unlock the answers to a whole set of apparently unrelated questions: What should the minimum wage be? What should the government do to support the poor? What kind of immigration policy should we have? With nothing more than the Non-Aggression Principle in hand, the libertarian dissolves these debates down to their pure, simple essence.
I see this kind of approach most clearly among libertarians. But it’s probably a feature of many other ideologies too, socialism included. And you can find similar sentiments throughout the long tradition of classical liberal thought. Adam Smith famously wrote that the system of natural liberty is “obvious and simple.” Around a hundred years later, the American lawyer Lysander Spooner developed a more radical version of the same idea. “Honesty, justice, natural law,” he argued, “is usually a very plain and simple matter, easily understood by common minds.” Once understood, its consistent application entails not merely abolitionism, but anarchism.
There is a real and admirable kind of leveling power to this sort of analysis. If the principles of good government were esoteric, then only the initiated could pass informed judgment on the state, and everyone else would be obliged to trust the people who happen to be running things. Mystification has always been the friend of established power, whether the mystery on offer is the divine right of kings or the technical judgment of the credentialed expert who explains that your objection reflects a failure to understand the model. Simplicity is a demand that the state be answerable for its conduct in terms that ordinary people can understand. That is about as central a liberal commitment as there is.
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I thought about all of this recently while reading Yuval Levin’s excellent book on the eighteenth-century debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. The main focus of that debate was the French Revolution, which Paine enthusiastically supported and Burke famously opposed. But beneath the surface lay a whole range of disagreements about human nature, the value of change, and, most importantly for my purposes here, the nature and source of political knowledge.
Burke argued that we should take tradition seriously, because tradition embodies a kind of knowledge that is unavailable to individuals reasoning on their own. That knowledge comes from the evolutionary process through which traditions emerge. If a tradition survives a long time, it may well be doing something useful. We might not understand what, and neither might the people who started it. But the bare fact that it has survived in a wide range of circumstances, against a host of competing alternatives, suggests there may be more to it than meets the eye.
Consider, as an analogy, the human appendix. For a long time, scientists believed that it was a useless, vestigial organ, and it was routinely removed for the flimsiest of reasons. But it turns out, and I was today years old when I learned this, that the appendix isn’t useless after all. It’s actually rich in lymphoid tissue and appears to serve as a reservoir for beneficial gut bacteria. It’s a kind of “safe house” from which the intestine can be repopulated after a severe diarrheal illness clears it out. Who knew?
Of course, not absolutely everything that survives turns out to be useful, much less optimal. The point is simply that in retrospect, we ought to have been more cautious. That, applied to the art of government, is precisely Burke’s point. “The science of government … requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life … it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society.”
The unsettling part of Burke’s position is the claim that the reason an institution works might be one that nobody involved can articulate. “The old building stands well enough,” he wrote, “though part gothic, part Grecian, and part Chinese, until an attempt is made to square it into uniformity. Then it may come down upon our heads altogether, in much uniformity of ruin.” Complex systems are sometimes ugly, and they’re almost always difficult to fully comprehend. But as with Burke’s building, the beauty is not the point. The point is that you do not know which of its mismatched parts is holding up the roof.
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The logic of Burke’s point should be a familiar one to classical liberals. It is, after all, the same argument we have long made about free markets. Hayek, for instance, says the “extended order” of the market “resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection.”
All of this is familiar enough. Economic planners can’t obtain the knowledge they would need. Prices carry information that no committee could produce. Attempts to impose a uniform design on a spontaneous order tend to destroy the very thing they were trying to improve.
But then we turn to politics, and many of us start acting like engineers. Rothbard is the clearest case. About markets he was a thoroughgoing Austrian, insisting that no mind could assemble the knowledge that prices convey. When the subject turned to rights, though, he proceeded almost entirely by deduction, deriving an entire legal and political order from self-ownership and homesteading. He held his deductions not as presumptions that experience might revise, but as absolutes, true always and everywhere. The same thinker who found the market unknowable found the just constitution derivable, as though a system for restraining violence, settling disputes, and determining who owns what were somehow less demanding than the coordination of a grain market, rather than more.
If Burke was right, then the same story classical liberals like to tell about markets applies to governments as well. Governments are not simple, any more than markets are. They are complex ecosystems of interrelated parts, and they are, for the most part, products of an evolutionary process. A similar humility might do well in matters of governance.
The analogy has a limit, though. Market power, at least when markets are functioning freely and effectively (and often they are not), is disciplined by exit and competition. Government power frequently lacks any comparable check. That means we can’t assume what a government does is “working” simply because it’s been doing it for a long time. It might be only that those burdened by the policy have no way to escape or object. Slavery lasted for millennia on precisely those terms. Still, where people can object and leave, the evolved institutions of government will often embody a kind of knowledge not readily apparent to our individual reason, and one we probably couldn’t have discovered through “obvious and simple” principles. The correct conclusion is caution, not quietism.
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Where does this leave us? The problem, I think, lies not in simple principles, but in the assumption that they can be applied simplistically and still yield determinate answers to practical problems of governance. As Burke put the point, philosophical ideas of natural rights, when applied to practical problems, are “like rays of light … refracted from their straight line … it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.”
Burke’s image is illuminating. A principle can be perfectly clear in the abstract and still bend when it passes into the dense medium of actual human affairs. Any child can understand that it’s wrong to take what belongs to someone else. What the child does not understand, and what it has taken a thousand years of property law to discover, is how to decide what belongs to whom in a world of complex, overlapping, and contradictory claims. I’ve written about this before in the context of the history of libertarian thought. The fact that people agree on a principle like non-aggression tells us remarkably little about where they’re going to end up on practical questions like those of immigration law, abortion, or environmental policy. Simple principles are the beginning of inquiry, not the end.
It would be a mistake to think that Burke wanted to dispose of principles and rely entirely on tradition as an alternative. Quite the contrary. Without “the guide and light of sound well understood principles,” he wrote, all reasoning in politics “would be only a confused jumble of particular facts and details.” Principles orient us in a complex world. What they cannot do is decide for us.
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All of this matters for how we ought to think, and talk, about politics. If the right answers really do follow simply from a few principles that any child could grasp, then anyone who reaches a different conclusion must be either stupid or dishonest. If being a libertarian really is just a matter of realizing that it’s wrong to hurt people or take their stuff, or if socialism is simply recognizing the basic point that human beings should be treated more like friends on a camping trip, then anyone outside our favored tribe is a fool or a knave. They’re brainwashed, indoctrinated, bought, captured by an interest, or voting against their own good—and they’re too far gone to notice it. What possible reason can we have for talking with, or listening to, people like that?
Things are different when we take complexity seriously. If getting from a principle to a policy requires judgment about balancing competing moral principles and evaluating tangled empirical questions, then thoughtful, well-informed, honest people are going to end up in different places, even when they start from the same principles. That doesn’t mean that every position is just as good as every other. And it doesn’t mean that arguing with each other is pointless. It means we need to argue better, operating as much as we can on the assumption that maybe, just maybe, the person across from us has seen something we haven’t.
Complexity also has implications for politics beyond how we talk about it. If nobody can work out from first principles what our institutions ought to look like, then nobody should be trusted with the power to impose his answer on everyone else. This is the key insight of the philosophy of political liberalism as worked out by John Rawls and, later and more consistently, by Gerald Gaus. Political institutions that involve polycentricity, contestability, and freedom of exit are valuable largely because they allow us to discover when we have made a mistake, and to do something about it. In doing so, they provide us with a forum through which disagreements can be expressed, acted upon, and taken seriously.
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Burke, to his credit, understood the appeal of simplicity. “If you were to contemplate society in but one point of view,” he wrote, “all these simple modes of polity are infinitely captivating.” That’s precisely the feeling I had when I first encountered libertarian ideas. A simple system is captivating because it lets you survey the whole of politics from a single vantage, and from a single vantage, everything resolves. The problem here is the “single.” A simple polity, Burke went on, “would answer its single end much more perfectly than the more complex is able to attain all its complex purposes.” But it is better, he thought, that the whole be “imperfectly and anomalously answered” than that a few parts be perfected while the rest are neglected.
None of which means the impulse behind the simplicity claim was wrong. The demand that government explain itself in terms that ordinary people can understand remains one of the great leveling forces in political life. What was wrong was the theory that grew up around it: that a demand for accountability could double as a method for deriving institutions, and that the people who held the key would therefore know what to build. Good government is not, as it turns out, obvious and simple. It is, in Burke’s phrase, “in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned.” That is a harder place to work than the one I thought I had found. It is also, I have come to think, the only place there is.
