Actually this subject bores me to tears, but here goes.
Daniel Kuehn links here to a group of libertarians who seem to want to reclaim the word “liberalism” from “progressive” or “left” liberals and demand that it be restricted to “classical liberalism.” Why? Because the modern sense betrays the original meaning, or so the argument goes (though whether the broad range of opinions within Classical liberalism is even representative of modern libertarianism seems highly dubious, to begin with).
This is rather like Austrians having a fit because the word “inflation” has evolved to mean “price inflation” rather than the earlier meaning of “monetary inflation” (for a debunking of that tired argument, see here).
But, taken seriously, this argument would require that libertarians must abandon the word “libertarian” for their own political movement.
Why is that?
We need only consult that wonderful resource, the Oxford English Dictionary (3rd. edn. 2010).
In its earliest sense, the word “libertarian” seemed to have neither a political nor economic sense, but meant simply “a person who supports the view that human beings have free will” – as opposed to “necessarians” who denied free will (Oxford English Dictionary [3rd. edn. 2010], s.v. “libertarian,” sense A.1).
The first cited use of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1789 (but of course that may not be the first instance of the word’s use in English).
Therefore if one wants to take seriously the pedantic modern attempts to reclaim “liberalism,” one might just as well complain that modern “libertarians” have misappropriated the word “libertarian.” Therefore let us leave the word “libertarian” to the philosophers!
Of course, this is an absurd argument.
And it is not that we can’t abuse words, or that words cannot corrupt moral discourse, but that words change and develop over time, and anyone who demands that some word in our political or economic vocabulary must be restricted to its original or archaic meaning – as if they have some moral right to ban others’ use of language – is engaged in legerdemain.
I remember having this argument, at some blog, must have been Murphy's, and writing a brief reply using several words whose meaning has shifted over time.
ReplyDeleteA good example is "the exception proves the rule." I have seen people go off on that, Landsburg I think. But proves there means probes, test the extent of.
Libertarianism used to be synonymous with leftwing anarchism, a movement which rejected both state power as well private property. For right wing libertarians, the left-libertarians have coined the term propertarianism.
ReplyDeleteClassical liberals as Thomas Pain and J. S. Mill were closer to (some versions of) modern social democracy than Marxists and (right) Libertarians.
Yes, this view of language is horrendous. It is also highly prevalent among certain people on the left who think that eliminating certain derogatory words will suppress the emotional or political tendencies that generated the words. And these are generally people who claim to be children of Freud!
ReplyDeleteYou also find among the "redefinitionalists", as we might call them, a rather ironically tenuous grasp on etymological meaning. Those who want to "reclaim" words often have a seriously hard time actually getting to the root of the meanings. And these people often claim to be children of Derrida!
You can say what you want for the old religious scholars who tried to find "pure" meanings in the Holy Scripture (this is where this tendency comes from to some extent) but at least they were nuanced enough to appreciate actually etymology.
"And it is not that we can’t abuse words, or that words cannot corrupt moral discourse, but that words change and develop over time, and anyone who demands that some word in our political or economic vocabulary must be restricted to its original or archaic meaning – as if they have some moral right to ban others’ use of language – is engaged in legerdemain."
ReplyDeleteMordanicus
"Classical liberals as Thomas Pain and J. S. Mill were closer to (some versions of) modern social democracy than Marxists and (right) Libertarians.
Agreed on both counts.
LK,
If I might respond to a comment you left in the "Mark-Up Pricing in Italy Post"
"The marginalist theory of pricing says much more than just "businesses need sufficient demand for their product for the company to be profitable".
i am aware of that
"t is a whole theory of why firms produce and how much they produce, how prices are set, what even constitute rational firm behaviour, and how prices are supposed to clear markets."
Some of it is accurate, other parts of it are not, it might be trivial in a sense, to basically reduce marginalism to demand oriented thinking, but it is certainly an improvement over the LTV!
"It is fundamentally flawed and there is no way around that."
Newtonian physics is fundamentally flawed… no wait, all it is is incomplete. You see, its a MODEL. models are supposed to be judged on their predictive power not how accurate they are to real life. For example, I don't take seriously the idea that firms set marginal revenue to match marginal cost. But I DO take seriously the idea that if you have two quantities of inputs, one fixed in the short term and one variable, increasing the variable inputs will lead to an increase in output up to a point, and then to diminishing returns. Thats a true insight, Its also useful. it has implications for employment, for the optimal number of workers with a given amount of capital. Its also useful as a law to try and circumvent. (!) the obvious implication being that you need to increase the amount of capital per worker in order to get constant and increasing returns. (to employment- wages and people hired)
I just want to clarify a point that I made earlier. When I say that the test of a theory is in its predictive power, not in its assumptions, what I mean is you can strip out negligible assumptions to the domain assumption being tested. I WOULD agree, and here is where I differ from Milton Friedman, that in order for a theory to predict it must adequately explain first.
ReplyDeleteHOWEVER, being imperfect beings, and for the sake of simplicity, we MUST use simplification, even around the edges of our dominion assumptions, just to make a problem easier to compute. Science's task is to explain how reality differs from the theory, and what that means and predicts. (If a then b)
For example, in a perfectly competitive market, firms set prices equal to marginal costs. The problem is that a perfectly competitive market is ludicrous, and even neoclassicals like Mankiw realize this:
""Imagine that you were to ask a firm the following question: "Would you like to see another customer come through your door ready to buy from you at your current price"
Mankiw's answer: "A perfectly competitive firm would answer that it didn't care. Because price exactly equals marginal cost, the profit from an extra unit sold is exactly zero. By contrast, a monopolistically competitive firm is always eager to get another customer. Because its price exceeds marginal cost, an extra unit sold at the posted price means more profit."
Mankiw, Principles of Economics, 2nd edition, chapter 17, pg. 383.
It would be more honest of them if they just came out and said, "Liberal should mean X, Y, Z, etc." instead of some quasi-historical appeal.
ReplyDelete