Left and Right
Left and right are the coordinates of the modern political map: one line, socialists at one end, conservatives at the other, everyone else placed somewhere between. Asked where libertarianism sits on that line, the tradition gives not one answer but three. Hayek answers neither — the line sorts people by the direction they would push state power rather than by whether that power should be limited, so the party of liberty is a third corner and not a midpoint. Rothbard answers that classical liberalism was born the revolutionary Left, that conservatism was the counter-revolution raised against it, and that the modern spectrum is the wreckage of a map scrambled when socialism arrived. Hoppe answers that libertarians must be conservatives — that the Right, properly understood, is about the natural order of family, property and authority rather than about state power, and that consistency drives it to antistatism. The disagreement is real, and this article lets it stand.
The Map and Its Names
The spectrum’s claim is simplicity itself: every political position can be placed on a single line, and the distance between two positions measures how much they disagree. Where the two words came from is a question this article sets aside — the familiar origin story about revolutionary-era seating is not documented by any source gathered in this wiki, and nothing below turns on it. What matters is not where the labels were coined but what the line was subsequently made to do.
What it does is arrange positions by the content of the programme a movement wants enacted — how far toward equality or hierarchy, toward change or preservation, toward the collective or the nation. It does not arrange them by how much of life the enacting instrument is entitled to reach. Two positions can therefore occupy opposite ends of the line while sharing the premise that the state should decide who may marry, what may be printed, and where capital may go, disagreeing only about which answers it should give. The axis registers the disagreement and is blind to the shared premise.
Two further things have happened to the map since it was drawn. The words that name its positions have changed meaning — in the American case, reversed meaning — so that the same label now marks opposite ends of the line depending on the continent. And the positions themselves have migrated, fused and split, so that where a movement sits today says little about where it began. Both facts bear directly on the newcomer’s question of whether libertarianism is a right-wing thing, and the corpus contains three considered answers to it — given by three writers who overlap in opposing expansive government but who disagree, fundamentally, over whether any state at all is legitimate.
The Stolen Name
Before the position question can be asked, a vocabulary problem has to be cleared, because the word that named the tradition was captured. Ludwig von Mises opens the English edition of Liberalism by recording what had happened to the word that named his subject:
In England the term “liberal” is mostly used to signify a program that only in details differs from the totalitarianism of the socialists.
The American case is a straight reversal rather than a drift: “In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations.” The American who calls himself a liberal, on this account, “aims at government omnipotence, is a resolute foe of free enterprise, and advocates all-round planning by the authorities, i.e., socialism”. Given self-described liberals who endorse the nationalization of railroads and mines and even support protective tariffs, Mises concludes, “one can easily see that nowadays nothing is left of liberalism but the name”.
F. A. Hayek records the same displacement from the other side of the same decades. In Europe, conservatism’s opposite had been liberalism until socialism displaced it — “Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism” — while in the United States the European quarrel never had a home, “because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built”.
This is why the terminology here is not pedantry. The same word names opposite positions on the two sides of the Atlantic, and the map that is supposed to locate them inherits the ambiguity: whether the classical liberal belongs on the left or the right depends on which of two incompatible senses of liberal is doing the locating. A map whose central label has changed hands once already cannot be trusted to hold still.
Neither: Hayek’s Triangle
Hayek closes The Constitution of Liberty with a postscript titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative”, written precisely because defenders of liberty and habitual resisters of change kept finding themselves on the same side of current politics and being mistaken for one another. He concedes the alliance at the outset — in matters of current politics the friends of freedom “generally have little choice but to support the conservative parties” — and concedes the attitude its dignity: “Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change.” The objection that follows is positional, not a matter of tone or temperament:
Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.
Conservatism so described is a brake fitted to a vehicle someone else is steering. Hayek allows that the brake is sometimes needed and declines the job — “I personally cannot be content with simply helping to apply the brake.” — and states the liberal’s question instead: “What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move.” Standing still is not the alternative on offer, since “the main point about liberalism is that it wants to go elsewhere, not to stand still”.
From this the geometry follows directly:
They are usually represented as different positions on a line, with the socialists on the left, the conservatives on the right, and the liberals somewhere in the middle. Nothing could be more misleading. If we want a diagram, it would be more appropriate to arrange them in a triangle with the conservatives occupying one corner, with the socialists pulling toward the second and the liberals toward the third.
The triangle is not a rhetorical flourish but a claim about what the line cannot register. A middle position on a line has no direction of its own, and Hayek’s whole point is that liberalism does. Because conservatism’s content is resistance rather than destination, its location depends on whatever happens to be moving at the time; and since it is the socialists who have been pulling hardest, Hayek observes that conservatives have repeatedly ended up following them rather than the liberals. A position defined by resistance to current tendencies is not a fixed point on any axis.
The sharpest step in the argument is the one that dissolves the line altogether. Hayek’s conservative and Hayek’s socialist turn out to be asking the same question:
Like the socialist, he is less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people.
If the two ends of the spectrum differ over who should wield power while agreeing that it should be wielded, then the axis sorts people by a question the liberal is not asking. Hayek names the alternative question as the essential one — “It is not who governs but what government is entitled to do that seems to me the essential problem.” — and states the danger it is meant to catch: “The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.” The same asymmetry recurs over coercion, since “the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes”, whereas “to the liberal neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits”.
His credit to conservatism is not a courtesy, and it is worth keeping intact. To conservative thinkers’ “loving and reverential study of the value of grown institutions” Hayek says the liberal owes real insight into language, law, morals and conventions — an acknowledgement that the understanding of spontaneous order came in part from writers he otherwise calls reactionary. His complaint is that the admiration is retrospective: what conservatives revere in free growth they generally revere only in the past. The essay ends by doubting that “there can be such a thing as a conservative political philosophy” and by giving up the contested label without enthusiasm — of the American substitute he says that “the term “libertarian” has been used instead. It may be the answer; but for my part I find it singularly unattractive.” His own resolution reaches back past the stolen word to an older one: “I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig—with the stress on the “old.””
Originally Left: Rothbard’s Reversed Genealogy
The 1965 essay that opened the first issue of the journal Left and Right gives the opposite answer to the same question — not by disputing Hayek’s analysis of conservatism, but by reading the spectrum historically. Murray N. Rothbard begins from a periodization. Before the eighteenth century, Western Europe lived under an identifiable Old Order which, whether feudal or despotic, “was marked by tyranny, exploitation, stagnation, fixed caste, and hopelessness and starvation for the bulk of the population”. Against that order the liberal revolutions — English, American, French — blasted open the way to industry, mobility and peace, and two great ideologies crystallized around the event:
Soon there developed in Western Europe two great political ideologies, centered around this new revolutionary phenomenon: the one was Liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was Conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the old order.
— Murray N. Rothbard, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty
On this reading the original spectrum was real and legible, and the original Left simply was classical liberalism: “Political ideologies were polarized, with Liberalism on the extreme “Left,” and Conservatism on the extreme “Right,” of the ideological spectrum.”
The modern map is what remains after two scrambles. The first was internal decay. With partial victory won, “the Liberals increasingly abandoned their radical fervor, and therefore their liberal goals, to rest content with a mere defense of the uninspiring and defective status quo” — a decline Rothbard traces to the trading of natural-rights radicalism for utilitarianism and evolutionary gradualism, which left liberalism defending an order it had once attacked. The second was the arrival of a movement libertarians habitually mistake for their opposite:
Libertarians of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed. But this is a grave mistake, responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians in the present world.
— Murray N. Rothbard, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty
The polar opposite of liberty, on his account, was conservatism:
Conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the “left” of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the road because it tries to achieve Liberal ends by the use of Conservative means.
— Murray N. Rothbard, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty
Socialism accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress and higher living standards for the masses, but “it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, Conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc.” — which is why those who read socialism as classical liberalism’s heir and those who read it as conservatism’s heir are each seeing one face of a confused centrist movement. The essay tracks the wreckage forward through the fusion of right-wing socialism with a refurbished mercantilist conservatism, and on into the American Progressive Era and the New Deal.
The last stage is American and largely accidental. During the New Deal, libertarians such as Albert Jay Nock — who in the 1920s was regarded, and regarded himself, as a man of the extreme left — found themselves allied with older conservatives against Roosevelt, and gradually accepted the label their new allies wore. The Second World War fixed the arrangement, because anti-war and isolationist opinion was for once identified with the Right:
By the end of World War II, it was second nature for libertarians to consider themselves at an “extreme right-wing” pole with the conservatives immediately to the left of them; and hence the great error of the spectrum that persists to this day.
— Murray N. Rothbard, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty
What made the error stick, Rothbard adds, is that libertarians forgot or never realized that “opposition to war and militarism had always been a “left-wing” tradition which had included libertarians”, so that when the wartime alignment lapsed and the postwar Right resumed its enthusiasm for total war, they followed their supposed allies without understanding what had happened. The corrective is stated as a precondition of any strategy at all: the libertarian must “drastically realign his mistaken view of the ideological spectrum; he must discover who his friends and natural allies are, and above all perhaps, who his enemies are.”
In the later For a New Liberty Rothbard plants the flag in what looks like the opposite soil. There libertarians are “squarely in the great classical-liberal tradition that built the United States” and “the only genuine current heirs of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson, and the abolitionists”, and the movement is given a different ancestry:
Libertarianism is the logical culmination of the now forgotten “Old Right” (of the 1930s and ‘40s) opposition to the New Deal, war, centralization, and State intervention.
The two framings sit in visible tension, and the tension is worth naming rather than smoothing over: the 1965 essay files libertarianism under the disinherited Left, the manifesto under a forgotten Right. They trace different ancestries rather than contradicting each other outright — the essay traces the doctrine to the revolutionary liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the manifesto traces the American movement to the anti-New Deal, anti-war coalition that the essay itself describes as having been mislabeled. But the labels do pull in opposite directions, and the manifesto keeps both poles at once: “while we are more truly traditional and more rootedly American than the conservatives, we are in some ways more radical than the radicals”.
Properly Right: Hoppe’s Natural Order
Hans-Hermann Hoppe gives the third answer in Democracy: The God That Failed, and it deserves to be taken at full strength: it is the anarcho-capitalist tradition itself offering a position that conflicts with the other two. His announced project is to explain “why conservatives today must be antistatist libertarians and, equally important, why libertarians must be conservatives”. The argument begins by refusing the status-quo definition of conservatism. A conservative understood as a supporter of whatever happens to exist has no doctrine at all, since what he defends changes with time and place; discarding that sense leaves what Hoppe takes to be the only substantive one:
Conservative refers to someone who believes in the existence of a natural order, a natural state of affairs which corresponds to the nature of things: of nature and man.
The content of that order is sociological rather than constitutional. Concretely, “a conservative recognizes families (fathers, mothers, children, grandchildren) and households based on private property and in cooperation with a community of other households as the most fundamental, natural, essential, ancient, and indispensable social units”, and conservatives “stand for and want to preserve the family and the social hierarchies and layers of material as well as spiritual-intellectual authority based on and growing out of family bonds and kinship relations”. Note what is absent: nothing in the definition assigns the conservative to the state’s side. Hoppe’s Right is defined by what it conserves, not by which way it would push political power, which is what connects it to natural law and natural order rather than to any party alignment.
The historical claim is that democracy transformed this conservatism into its opposite. “Modern conservatism, in the United States and Europe, is confused and distorted. This confusion is largely due to democracy.” Under representative and then mass democracy from the First World War onward, conservatism “was transformed from an antiegalitarian, aristocratic, antistatist ideological force into a movement of culturally conservative statists: the right wing of the socialists and social democrats” — a description Hoppe extends to the postwar American conservative movement, whose militarism and interventionist foreign policy he treats as its defining trademark. His verdict on the modern Right is therefore harsher than Hayek’s: not that conservatives lack a direction, but that they have adopted their opponents’ instrument while keeping their own vocabulary.
The constructive argument runs through economics. Against a conservatism that would restore traditional morals while keeping the welfare state, Hoppe argues that the two goals are incompatible, because the welfare state’s institutions — compulsory old-age insurance, socialized health care and education, subsidized irresponsibility — are themselves what dissolves families and the authority structures grown out of them, relieving individuals of provision for their own income, health and children and so lowering the value of marriage, kinship and intergenerational obligation. Hence the first half of the double thesis: “true conservatives must be hard-line libertarians (antistatists).”
In order to restore social and cultural normalcy, true conservatives can only be radical libertarians, and they must demand the demolition—as a moral and economic perversion—of the entire structure of social security.
The second half runs the other way, and it is the part that makes the position a genuine rival rather than a re-labelling. Hoppe denies that the two doctrines are hostile: “The relationship between libertarianism and conservatism is one of praxeological compatibility, sociological complementarity, and reciprocal reinforcement.” Libertarian law defines just appropriation, exchange and contract; conservatism describes the family and community forms in which those property relations are actually lived, so that each supplies what the other lacks — the libertarian ethic giving conservatism a more rigorous account of its own end, conservatism giving the ethic its concrete social substrate. Because conservatives hold that what is natural is old and widespread, and libertarians hold that the principles of justice are universally valid and so must have been known from the beginning, Hoppe can conclude — in direct opposition to Rothbard’s 1965 party of revolution — that “the libertarian ethic is not new and revolutionary, but old and conservative”.
That converse cuts against the libertarian movement as it actually exists. Corrupted by the same welfare-state culture, Hoppe argues, “it has become a movement that combines radical antistatism and market economics with cultural leftism, counter and multiculturalism, and personal hedonism” — a combination he holds to be as unworkable as welfare-statist conservatism, since restored rights of property, exclusion and covenant enforcement would sharply constrain many such experiments. “In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives.” Because private property includes the powers of selection and exclusion, the free society he describes is not culturally neutral: owners and covenant communities may preserve particular norms without ever converting them into state commands. Two features of the position are easily missed. Hoppe is not defending the Right of the existing spectrum — he classifies today’s conservatives as socialists, and his charge against them is statism. And his argument, like the other two, ends by rejecting the modern line; it differs in insisting that one of the two words on it names something worth keeping.
Why One Dimension Fails
The sharpest statement of what is wrong with the line is Hayek’s, and on the reading taken here it generalizes furthest. What the line records is the direction in which its occupants would push state power; what it does not record is the extent of the power itself. That is the content of his charge that conservative and socialist alike care about who wields the powers of government rather than how they are limited. A ranking built on the first question cannot represent a position defined by the second, so the libertarian appears on the line only as a distortion, dragged toward whichever pole happens to share his current conclusion.
The other two object to the line differently, and their objections should not be collapsed into Hayek’s — because neither of them actually discards it. Rothbard’s move is genealogical and corrective: the spectrum misreports where the tradition came from, so what he demands is that the libertarian “drastically realign his mistaken view of the ideological spectrum” — a reordering of the map, not its abolition, with libertarians restored to the Left end they began at. Hoppe’s move is definitional and reclamatory: one of the two words on the line names something real, an order of families, property and inherited authority, and rather than surrender the word to the movement now wearing it he redefines it and keeps it. Only Hayek proposes to replace the geometry outright.
Rothbard makes the point by enumeration. Opposition to conscription, war, censorship and the criminalization of victimless conduct reads as leftist on the contemporary scale; opposition to taxation, regulation and economic control reads as extreme right. His response is not to split the difference but to deny that the two halves conflict — “the libertarian sees no inconsistency in being “leftist” on some issues and “rightist” on others” — and to turn the charge of inconsistency back on the poles themselves:
For how can the leftist be opposed to the violence of war and conscription while at the same time supporting the violence of taxation and government control? And how can the rightist trumpet his devotion to private property and free enterprise while at the same time favoring war, conscription, and the outlawing of noninvasive activities and practices that he deems immoral?
The failure shows up in ordinary political classification. Campaigns for local parental control of schooling, Rothbard notes, have been filed as extreme right-wing on some occasions and extreme left-wing on others while the libertarian motivation behind them stayed exactly the same. A map that assigns one demand two opposite coordinates depending on who makes it is not measuring the demand.
What the libertarian objection isolates instead is the distinction between production and predation set out in Political Means and Economic Means — Franz Oppenheimer’s contrast between satisfying wants by work and exchange and satisfying them by coercive appropriation. That axis asks how control is acquired rather than which faction directs it, and it cuts across left and right rather than along them: subsidy, tariff, conscription, monopoly privilege and censorship fall on the same side of it whatever their sponsor’s coordinates, which is why the nonaggression principle generates positions the spectrum has to split between its two ends. A related question is asked by abstract power hierarchies, which examines rule-based authority as such rather than the direction of the rules it enforces. Rothbard’s own summary states the resulting position as one held against both poles at once: “In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society.”
Where the Fault Lines Actually Run
The most direct evidence that the spectrum is the wrong instrument is that it cannot see the divisions libertarians actually have with one another. The Libertarian Family sets those divisions out in detail: they run through rival theories of property, and especially of property in land, rather than through any left-right coordinate. One of the four positions mapped there is conventionally called left-libertarian, but the label marks a doctrine of tenure, not a distance along a line — which is precisely the point. Where a tradition’s real disagreements are invisible to an axis, the axis is not describing the tradition.
The corollary holds for the tradition’s practical alignments. Non-interventionism has been coded left in one decade and right in the next without its content changing, which is exactly what Rothbard’s account of the wartime realignment predicts: the coordinate tracked the company kept, not the position held. Hoppe’s quarrel with the culturally leftist wing of his own movement is likewise an intra-libertarian dispute about social substrate that the line can only misfile.
A Live Disagreement
The three answers are not three phrasings of one answer, and none of the sources here resolves the disagreement between them.
They differ first in what question they are answering. Hayek is describing a policy space and asking where liberalism sits in it; his answer is a third corner, because conservatism supplies resistance rather than a destination. Rothbard is doing genealogy and asking whose descendants libertarians are; his answer is that they descend from the revolutionary party that fought throne, altar, caste and mercantilism, and that the modern arrangement is an artifact of a wartime alliance. Hoppe is describing a social substrate and asking which cultural order the libertarian ethic actually requires; his answer is families, property and the authority growing out of them — a Right defined by what it conserves rather than by what it would legislate.
They also conflict outright at identifiable points. Hayek doubts that a conservative political philosophy is possible at all; Hoppe holds that conservatism has a determinate content, the natural order, which the libertarian ethic can define more precisely than conservatism defines it for itself. Rothbard’s 1965 essay treats socialism as a confused middle and reserves the position of liberty’s opposite for conservatism; Hoppe treats today’s conservatives as socialists and would reclaim the word rather than concede it. Rothbard’s party of revolution and Hoppe’s ethic that is “old and conservative” are descriptions of the same doctrine that cannot both set the tone. And the split runs through anarcho-capitalism itself: the founder of the tradition argued Left, a prominent Rothbardian successor argues Right, from the same theory of property and the same verdict on the state.
What survives all three is the negative result they converge on. If the line measures attachment to established authority, Hayek’s refusal stands and the liberal belongs to neither camp. If it measures historical descent, Rothbard’s claim stands and the position was born on the extreme Left of the original spectrum and misfiled on the Right within living memory. If it measures the defence of a natural social order against its political destruction, Hoppe’s claim stands and the consistent Right ends in antistatism. Each of the three is an argument that the axis fails to register something essential, though they do not agree on the remedy: Hayek replaces the line with a triangle, Rothbard keeps it and reorders it, Hoppe keeps one of its words and redefines it. None of the three is a quarrel about whether government should be confined; that much all three take for granted. The quarrel is over ancestry, terminology and social substrate — and beneath it lies a disagreement the spectrum is equally unable to show, since Rothbard and Hoppe would abolish the state that Hayek would only bind. So the newcomer who asks whether libertarianism is just a right-wing thing has asked a question the tradition takes seriously and answers three different ways, and in every case the answer starts by disputing the instrument: the question the line was never built to ask is not who should govern, or in which direction, but what anyone is entitled to govern at all.
See Also
- Libertarianism - the hub for the tradition whose position on the spectrum is in dispute
- The Libertarian Family: Anarcho-Capitalist, Minarchist, Mutualist, Georgist - the divisions the spectrum cannot see, running through property rather than left and right
- Political Means and Economic Means - Oppenheimer’s appropriation-versus-production axis, the alternative the libertarian objection points to
- Abstract Power Hierarchies - rule-based authority examined as such, independent of which rules it enforces
- Nonaggression and Property Rights - the principle Rothbard and Hoppe build on, whose conclusions the spectrum splits between its two poles
- Rothbard vs. Hayek: The Two Heirs of Mises - the methodological split underlying two of the three answers here
- Natural Law and Natural Order - the tradition Hoppe’s natural-order conservatism draws on
- Spontaneous Order - the grown-institutions insight Hayek credits to conservative thinkers
- Non-Interventionism - the position whose left-right coding flipped without its content changing
- Mutualism and Individualist Anarchism - the position the family map calls left-libertarian
- Minarchism - the in-family rival on the extent of the state
- Market Anarchism and Private Law - the anarcho-capitalist position two of the three answers argue from
- Objections to Libertarianism - the companion map of external criticisms
- F. A. Hayek - author of the triangle argument and the who-wields-power objection
- The Constitution of Liberty - the book whose postscript states the neither case
- Murray N. Rothbard - author of the reversed genealogy and the Old Right self-description
- For a New Liberty - the manifesto’s Old Right claim and the leftist-and-rightist consistency argument
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe - author of the natural-order conservatism and the double thesis
- Democracy: The God That Failed - the argument that democracy corrupted the Right into statism
- Ludwig von Mises - the record of how the word liberal was captured
- Liberalism - the statement of the classical programme whose name was taken
- Albert Jay Nock - the worked case of a radical who accepted the conservative label
- Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty - the 1965 essay supplying the originally-Left answer set out here
- Is Milei’s Government Libertarian?
Sources
- Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty (Full Text) - the 1965 essay opening the journal Left and Right: the Old Order, Liberalism as the party of hope on the extreme Left and Conservatism as the reaction, socialism as a middle-of-the-road movement using conservative means for liberal ends, the decay of liberalism, and the wartime realignment that fixed libertarians at an extreme right-wing pole
- The Constitution of Liberty (Full Text) - the postscript “Why I Am Not a Conservative”: conservatism as brake rather than direction, the triangle replacing the line, the conservative-and-socialist concern with who wields power, the credit to conservative study of grown institutions, and the Old Whig conclusion
- Democracy: The God That Failed (Full Text) - the chapter on conservatism and libertarianism: conservatism defined as belief in a natural order of family and authority, democracy’s transformation of the Right into statism, the incompatibility of welfare-statism with traditional morals, and the twin theses that conservatives must be antistatist libertarians and libertarians must be conservatives
- For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (Full Text) - the classical-liberal placement, the Old Right culmination, the heirs of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson and the abolitionists, the leftist-on-some-issues consistency argument, and the school-control classification example
- Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (Full Text) - the preface and introduction on the capture of the word liberal in England and the United States, and the verdict that nothing is left of liberalism but the name