Self-ownership is the concept of property in one's own body, often expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to have bodily integrity meaning the exclusive right[1] to control one's own body including one's life, where 'control' means exerting any physical interference and 'exclusive' means having the right to install and enforce a ban on other people doing this.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] Since the legal norm of property title claim incapacitates (or bans) other people (except the zygote[7]) from claiming property title over the same resource at the same time, the right to control or interfere with one's own body in any arbitrary way is secured. Anarcho-capitalism defines self-ownership as the exclusive right to control one's body as long as the owner does not aggress upon others, leading to the concept of the sovereign individual. In Minarchism the 'exclusive right' is understood by separating the 'liberty-to' from the 'liberty-from' where for each person the 'liberty-to' is restricted by all the 'liberty's-from' of others, effectively subjecting the 'liberty-to' to the ban on the usage of force. Thereafter self-ownership means the exclusive right to control one's body insofar considering action between inhabitants and not involving the state, making it roughly a pacifist morality (except for the right to limited self-defense) only among inhabitants. Self-ownership is a central idea in several political philosophies that emphasize individualism, such as libertarianism and liberalism.
'Sovereignty of the individual, individual sovereignty or de-jure self-autonomy, is generally understood as a right implying the right of self-ownership and one's property, also called negative sovereignty, but also implying the rejection (Hohfeldian disability) of positive sovereignty, in the sense that it is the initiation of forceful action, where negative sovereignty includes property rights and positive sovereignty includes the right to subjugate self-owning people to command obedience or sovereign rule [10][11][12] or simply being endowed with the right to receive some economic good.[2] A view that is held by 'negative-rights libertarians'. Legal theoretically sovereignty is achieved by person A, the declarator, by applying a power norm on person B which does not require any declarative volitional behavioral action of B, where as a legal consequence B becomes the legal subject (of the obligation) meaning B receives an obligation that is satisfied by the 'non-initiation of forceful action' (negative sovereignty) by B, or any other obligation (positive sovereignty). Example of negative sovereignty power norms are declaring a land ownership claim by planting a flag or raising a fence on previously unowned land installing a physical interference ban exempted by local rules. Positive sovereignty power norms violate consent (volition) of the legal subject in the sense of libertarian involuntariness, but the negative sovereign power norm does not by definition.
Johannes Voet originator of the Voetstoots acquisition norm which is an element of libertarian property acquisition theory.
The conception action is legally a power norm that imposes the (positive) parental duty on the parents[13] which is understood not to violate the individual's sovereignty or impose involuntary servitude because it was imposed on themselves by their own behavioral physical interference action with a zygote as a negative claim right of the zygote to the parental duty which is an implicit obligation similar to a sanction norm in corrective justice.[14] One is obligated not to create a zygote by an pure (physical) interference action or perform the parental duty which is an obligation resulting from negative sovereignty by assuming an implicit law on the zygote. So the parental duty is not a positive sovereignty claim right by the zygote. Normally in libertarian theory the claimer of property implicitly immunizes all people from circumstances on the property at the moment of acquisition that were caused by a pure (physical) interference action, which is also known as the negative Voetstoots assumption of property acquisition. Most libertarians assume the zygote to have a form of self-ownership called liberty from immediate harm,[7] while still being subject to ownership by the parents. This right does not imply the unconditional right to subject the child to command e.g.parental power or compulsory education, a form of involuntary servitude. Many assume the parental duty to imply raising the child unharmed and to full physical and mental health combined with the duty to secure for the child its right to full anarchic individual sovereignty (both de-jure and de-facto), in the 'blank-slate' sense, meaning that (1) it is free from any obligations it did not enter in to with its own consent from majority age. For example, obligations created under parental legal guardianship (Law of agency). And (2) meaning that it has free will, implying that it is free from external control (de-facto autonomy). This duty is subject to remote liability. Sustaining the right to self-ownership requires independent moral capacity (moral agency) according to the NAP. Negative-rights libertarians assume people to be self-sovereign until they voluntarily dispose parts of this right.
Conseil d'État, the highest court in France for all conflicts involving itself.
States generally do not recognize individual sovereignty of any natural persons, but only of states. The right to state sovereignty and duty to keep to its treaties follows from the fundamental principles of international law called just war theory and is an implementation of the non-aggression principle. States generally only recognize natural persons as bearers of rights as matter of national law sourced from international human rights treaty and not as a fundamental principle. This fundamental non-recognition of natural persons leads to states violating the property of individuals outside of the boundaries of sovereign states,[15] and denying the people the right to resist when the state violates the state law that it bound itself to by declaration. Such a state considers itself the ultimate arbiter in every conflict with a natural person, including conflicts involving itself,[16][17] outside of any other sovereign state, as long as it does not aggress upon another state. This is called the monopoly on violence and goes further than merely claiming the right to set rules on a territory (negative sovereignty) and enforce it.[18] It implies that this state claims the legal right to initiate force.
American libertarian socialistStephen Pearl Andrews frequently discussed the sovereignty of the individual in his writings. In The Science of Society, he says that Protestantism, democracy and socialism are "three partial announcements of one generic principle" which is "the sovereignty of the individual".[19] Andrews considered the sovereignty of the individual to be "the basis of harmonious intercourse amongst equals, precisely as the equal Sovereignty of States is the basis of harmonious intercourse between nations mutually recognizing their independence of each other."[20]
Discussion of the boundary of self with respect to ownership and responsibility has been explored by legal scholar Meir Dan-Cohen in his essays on The Value of Ownership and Responsibility and the Boundaries of the Self.[undue weight?–discuss] The emphasis of this work illuminates the phenomenology of ownership and our common usage of personal pronouns to apply to both body and property–this serves as the folk basis for legal conceptions and debates about responsibility and ownership.[21][non-primary source needed] Another view holds that labor is alienable because it can be contracted out, thus alienating it from the self. In this view, the choice of a person to voluntarily sell oneself into slavery is also preserved by the principle of self-ownership.[22]
Labour markets and private property
For anarcho-communist political philosopher L. Susan Brown: "Liberalism and anarchism are two political philosophies that are fundamentally concerned with individual freedom yet differ from one another in very distinct ways. Anarchism shares with liberalism a commitment to individual freedom while rejecting liberalism's competitive property relations".[23] Scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood says that "there are doctrines of individualism that are opposed to Lockean individualism... and non-Lockean individualism may encompass socialism".[24]
Right-libertarian conceptions of self-ownership extend the concept to include control of private property as part of the self. According to Gerald Cohen, "the libertarian principle of self-ownership says that each person enjoys, over herself and her powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that she has not contracted to supply".[25]
Philosopher Ian Shapiro says that labor markets affirm self-ownership because if self-ownership were not recognized, then people would not be allowed to sell the use of their productive capacities to others. He says that the individual sells the use of his productive capacity for a limited time and conditions but continues to own what he earns from selling the use of that capacity and the capacity itself, thereby retaining sovereignty over himself while contributing to economic efficiency.[26] A common view within classical liberalism is that sovereign-minded individuals usually assert a right of private property external to the body, reasoning that if a person owns themselves, they own their actions, including those that create or improve resources, therefore they own their own labour and the fruits thereof.[27]
In Human Action, Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises argues that labor markets are the rational conclusion of self-ownership and argues that collective ownership of labor ignores differing values for the labor of individuals:
Of course, people believe that there is an essential difference between the tasks incumbent upon the comrades of the socialist commonwealth and those incumbent upon slaves or serfs. The slaves and serfs, they say, toiled for the benefit of an exploiting lord. But in a socialist system, the produce of labor goes to society of which the toiler himself is a part; here the worker works for himself, as it were. What this reasoning overlooks is that the identification of the individual comrades and the totality of all comrades with the collective entity pocketing the produce of all work is merely fictitious. Whether the ends which the community's officeholders are aiming at agreeing or disagreeing with the wishes and desires of the various comrades are of minor importance. The main thing is that the individual's contribution to the collective entity's wealth is not requited in the shape of wages determined by the market.
Other scholars are critical of the idea of private property, specifically within anarchism. The anarchist Oscar Wilde said:
For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is... With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all".
Within anarchism, the concept of wage slavery refers to a situation perceived as quasi-voluntary slavery,[30] where a person's livelihood depends on wages, especially when the dependence is total and immediate.[31][32] It is a negatively connoted term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. The term "wage slavery" has been used to criticize economic exploitation and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital (particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops)[33] and the latter as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy.[34][35][36] With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery in the context of a critique of societal property not intended for active personal use[37][38] while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines. Emma Goldman famously denounced "wage slavery" by saying: "The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves".[39]
Within left-libertarianism, scholars such as Hillel Steiner,[40]Peter Vallentyne,[41]Philippe Van Parijs,[42]Michael Otsuka[43] and David Ellerman[44][45] root an economic egalitarianism in the classical liberal concepts of self-ownership and land appropriation, combined with geoist or physiocratic views regarding the ownership of land and natural resources (e.g. those of John Locke and Henry George). Left-libertarians "maintain that the world's natural resources were initially unowned or belonged equally to all, and it is illegitimate for anyone to claim exclusive private ownership of these resources to the detriment of others. Such private appropriation is legitimate only if everyone can appropriate an equal amount, or if those who appropriate more are taxed to compensate those who are thereby excluded from what was once common property". This position is articulated in contrast to the position of other libertarians who argue for a right to appropriate parts of the external world based on sufficient use, even if this homesteading yields unequal results.[46] Some left-libertarians of the Steiner–Vallentyne type support some form of income redistribution on the grounds of a claim by each individual to be entitled to an equal share of natural resources.[47][48]
History
John Locke wrote in his Two Treatises on Government that "every man has a Property in his own Person". Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick interprets Locke as saying that the individual "has a right to decide what would become of himself and what he would do, and as having a right to reap the benefits of what he did".[49][50]Josiah Warren was the first who wrote about the "sovereignty of the individual".[51]
↑ BGB Germany: "Rights of the owner: The owner of an item can, unless the law or the rights of third parties conflict with it, handle the item as he wishes and exclude others from any influence." https://dejure.org/gesetze/BGB/903.html
1 2 Block, Walter (1986). The U.S. Bishops and Their Critics: An Ethical and Economic Perspective. SSRN1896495. Citation: "In classical philosophy, negative rights or negative liberty consist solely of the right not to have physical force, or the threat thereof, initiated against oneself. Each person, then, has the right not to be murdered, raped, robbed, assaulted, battered, etc. The doctrine of positive "rights," in contrast, typically holds that people have the right to food, clothing, shelter, and, depending on which variant is under discussion, to a reasonable lifestyle, to non-discriminatory behaviour, to meaningful relationships, to psychological well-being, to employment, to a decent wage, etc." Block assumes a positive right to mean a positive obligation that was imposed without requiring a declarative volitional act of the obligated like with a contract.
↑ Homowy, Ronald (2008). "Individual Rights". The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. p.246. Citation:"each person is born to a negative obligation to leave others in the peaceful enjoyment of their persons and their own property.. property rights are negative rights. In the absence of special complications, one’s property rights only impose on others the duty not to trespass and to leave one free to do as one sees fit with oneself and one’s own property"
↑ John Locke (1689). "State of Nature (Chapter 2.6)"(PDF). Second treatise on government, Book II. Citation: "But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions." Locke understands liberty as liberty right instead of a physical freedom, for example freedom is bound by one's obligations (nobler purpose) like satisfying one's contracts, compensating for caused property damages and let the owner peacefully apply his purpose when he calls for it.
↑ Thomas Hobbes (1651). "Of the first and second Natural Laws, and Contracts C(Chapter 14)"(PDF). Leviathan. p.101. Citation: "And when a man hath in either manner abandoned, or granted away his Right; then is he said to be OBLIGED or BOUND, not to hinder those, to whom such Right is granted, or abandoned, from the benefit of it: and that he Ought, and it is his DUTY, not to make void that Duty that voluntary act of his own: and that such hindrance is INJUSTICE, and INJURY, as being Sine Jure; the Right being before renounced, or transferred." Hobbs introduces contractual claim rights analogous to Hofeld-Newcomb's liberty and claim rights. The logical existence of contract claim rights, in contrast to mere reciprocity, must presuppose some preexisting claim right (usually self-ownership) of the authorizing party of the contract (the obligated) that can be punished in case the contract is violated, which otherwise would be inviolable.
↑ Murray Rothbard. For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. Citation (p. 33) "The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to 'own' his or her own body; that is, to control that body free of coercive interference." Citation (p. 27) "... that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. ... 'Aggression' is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else ... is therefore synonymous with invasion."
1 2 3 Murray Rothbard. Ethics of Liberty. Citation (p. 216): "... define negative liberty as the absence of physical interference with an individual's person and property, with his just property rights broadly defined." Citation (p. 215): "liberty is the absence of physically coercive interference or invasion of an individual's person and property." Citation (p. 60): "The simplest case, of course, is property in persons. The fundamental axiom of libertarian theory is that each person must be a self-owner, and that no one has the right to interfere with such self-ownership. From this there follows immediately the total impermissibility of property in another person." Citation (p. 77) "To say that someone has the absolute right to a certain property but lacks the right to defend it against attack or invasion is also to say that he does not have total right to that property." Rothbard's and Berlin's concept of negative liberty corresponds to Howowy's and Block's negative claim right. Citation (p. 101): "Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so." Rothbard acknowledges that the zygote obtained inviolability rights not to be harmed, so the parents property rights on the egg cell and the sperm cell are based on a legal norm that incapacitates all people but the zygote at conception to claim bodily overlapping property by a naked legal fact/act (involuntary legal norm). Citation (p. 150) "any physical force used against another to keep him from homesteading is an act of criminal assault against him, and aggression may not be used to establish a homestead right (just as one would-be homesteader may not use force to prevent someone else from getting to a piece of land first)." This formulates the right to appropriate or interfere with everything that is unowned. Appropriated resources do not have to be claimed as property or can be disposed of immediately after. Neither appropriation without property claim nor property disposal immunizes the previous owner of liability, but absence of reasonable forseeability and avoidability of possible harmful violation does.
↑ Lysander Spooner (1852). "Trial By Jury"(PDF). Let's Abolish Government. Citation (p179) "If one man commit a trespass upon the person, property or character of another, the injured party has a natural right, either to chastise the aggressor, or to take compensation for the injury out of his property."
↑ Herman-Hans Hoppe (2020). Economics and Ethics of Private Property. p.424. Citation: "In the same vein, the fact of self-ownership is a praxeological precondition of argumentation. Anyone trying to prove or disprove anything must be a self-owner."
↑ Spooner, Lysander (1852). "Trial By Jury". Let's abolish government. p.86. Citation (p. 86) "The only real 'sovereignty' or right of 'sovereignty' in this or any other country, is that right of sovereignty which each and every human being has over his or her own person and property, so long as he or she obeys the one law of justice towards the person and property of every other human being. This is the only natural right of sovereignty, that was ever known among men. All other so-called rights of sovereignty are simply the usurpations of impostors, conspirators, robbers, tyrants, and murderers." Citation (p81) "What, then, is a 'sovereign' government? It is a government that is 'sovereign' over all the natural rights of the people. This is the only 'sovereignty' that any government can be said to have. Under it, the people have no rights. They are simply 'subjects' – that is, slaves. They have but one law, and one duty, viz., obedience, submission." Citation (p. 208) "There is no particle of truth in the notion that the majority have a right to rule, or to exercise arbitrary power over, the minority, simply because the former are more numerous than the latter. Two men have no more natural right to rule one, than one has to rule two." Spooner understands sovereignty to mean the negative sovereignty of property rights but says that this is the only sovereignty, so rejecting positive sovereignty of ruling power.
↑ Rand, Ayn (1988). The Ayn Rand lexicon: objectivism from A to Z. Penguin Publishing. p.204. ISBN9780452010512. Citation: "the ruler of the individual – as a sovereign authority (with or without supernatural mandate), an authority logically antecedent to the citizen and to which he must submit. The Founding Fathers challenged this primordial notion. They started with the premise of the primacy and sovereignty of the individual."
↑ Rand, Ayn (1982). "The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made". Philosophy: Who Needs It. Bobbs-Merrill. p.40. ISBN0-672-52725-1. "Citation: this is in his exclusive, sovereign power. Man is neither to be obeyed nor to be commanded."
↑ Stefan, Molyneux (2013). "What Is True". On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion, Free Version. p.5. Ref: Freedomain radio show 2013, Molyneux: "The parental care duty is similar to the duty for a rental car."
↑ Rothbard, Murray (1963). The Anatomy of the State. p.34. Citation (p34): "(Charles) Black admits that this means that the State has set itself up as a judge in its own cause, thus violating a basic juridical principle for aiming at just decisions. He brusquely denies the possibility of any alternative." Citation (p. 54) "...the State always makes sure that it seizes and retains certain crucial “command posts” of the economy and society. Among these command posts are a monopoly of violence, monopoly of the ultimate judicial power,..."
↑ Nozick, Robert (1974). "Is the Dominant Protective Association a State?". Anarchy, State, and Utopia. p.41. Citation: "Writers in the tradition of Max Weber treat having a monopoly on the use of force in a geographical area, a monopoly incompatible with private enforcement of rights, as crucial to the existence of a state. As Marshall Cohen points out in an unpublished essay, a state may exist without actually monopolizing the use of force it has not authorized others to use;... Nor need everyone grant the legitimacy of the state’s claim to such monopoly,... because as revolutionaries they believe that a given state lacks this right,..."
Hallgrimsdottir, Helga Kristin; Benoit, Cecilia (2007). "From Wage Slaves to Wage Workers: Cultural Opportunity Structures and the Evolution of the Wage Demands of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor, 1880–1900". Social Forces. 85 (3): 1393–1411. doi:10.1353/sof.2007.0037. JSTOR4494978. S2CID154551793.
Anarcho-capitalism is an anti-statist, libertarian political philosophy and economic theory that seeks to abolish centralized states in favor of stateless societies with systems of private property enforced by private agencies, based on concepts such as the non-aggression principle, free markets and self-ownership. Anarcho-capitalist philosophy extends the concept of ownership to include control of private property as part of the self, and, in some cases, control of other people as private property. In the absence of statute, anarcho-capitalists hold that society tends to contractually self-regulate and civilize through participation in the free market, which they describe as a voluntary society involving the voluntary exchange of goods and services. In a theoretical anarcho-capitalist society the system of private property would still exist, as it would be enforced by private defense agencies and/or insurance companies selected by property owners, whose ownership rights or claims would be enforced by private defence agencies and/or insurance companies. These agencies or companies would operate competitively in a market and fulfill the roles of courts and the police, similar to a state apparatus. Some anarcho-capitalist authors have argued that slavery is compatible with anarcho-capitalist ideals.
Individualist anarchism is the branch of anarchism that emphasizes the individual and their will over external determinants such as groups, society, traditions, and ideological systems. Although usually contrasted with social anarchism, both individualist and social anarchism have influenced each other. Mutualism, an economic theory sometimes considered a synthesis of communism and property, has been considered individualist anarchism and other times part of social anarchism. Many anarcho-communists regard themselves as radical individualists, seeing anarcho-communism as the best social system for the realization of individual freedom. Some anarcho-capitalists claim anarcho-capitalism is part of the individualist anarchist tradition, while others disagree and claim individualist anarchism is only part of the socialist movement and part of the libertarian socialist tradition. Economically, while European individualist anarchists are pluralists who advocate anarchism without adjectives and synthesis anarchism, ranging from anarcho-communist to mutualist economic types, most American individualist anarchists of the 19th century advocated mutualism, a libertarian socialist form of market socialism, or a free-market socialist form of classical economics. Individualist anarchists are opposed to property that violates the entitlement theory of justice, that is, gives privilege due to unjust acquisition or exchange, and thus is exploitative, seeking to "destroy the tyranny of capital, — that is, of property" by mutual credit.
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology and social outlook that emphasizes the intrinsic worth of the individual. Individualists promote realizing one's goals and desires, valuing independence and self-reliance, and advocating that the interests of the individual should gain precedence over the state or a social group, while opposing external interference upon one's own interests by society or institutions such as the government. Individualism makes the individual its focus, and so starts "with the fundamental premise that the human individual is of primary importance in the struggle for liberation".
Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory. Rights are of essential importance in such disciplines as law and ethics, especially theories of justice and deontology.
Lysander Spooner was an American abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, natural rights legal theorist, pamphletist, political philosopher, Unitarian and writer often associated with the Boston anarchist tradition.
Some philosophers distinguish two types of rights, natural rights and legal rights.
Anarchist economics is the set of theories and practices of economic activity within the political philosophy of anarchism. Many anarchists are anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist, with anarchism usually referred to as a form of libertarian socialism, i.e. a stateless system of socialism. Anarchists support personal property and oppose capital concentration, interest, monopoly, private ownership of productive property such as the means of production, profit, rent, usury and wage slavery which are viewed as inherent to capitalism.
The nature of capitalism is criticized by left-wing anarchists, who reject hierarchy and advocate stateless societies based on non-hierarchical voluntary associations. Anarchism is generally defined as the libertarian philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary and harmful as well as opposing authoritarianism, illegitimate authority and hierarchical organization in the conduct of human relations. Capitalism is generally considered by scholars to be an economic system that includes private ownership of the means of production, creation of goods or services for profit or income, the accumulation of capital, competitive markets, voluntary exchange and wage labor, which have generally been opposed by most anarchists historically. Since capitalism is variously defined by sources and there is no general consensus among scholars on the definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category, the designation is applied to a variety of historical cases, varying in time, geography, politics and culture.
The non-aggression principle (NAP), also called the non-aggression axiom, is the philosophical position that states that any person is permitted to do everything with his property except aggression, defined as the initiation of forceful action, which is in turn defined as 'the application or threat of' 'physical interference or fraud ', any of which without consent. The principle is also called the non-initiation of force. The principle incorporates universal enforceability.
Left-libertarianism, also known as left-wing libertarianism, or social libertarianism, is a political philosophy and type of libertarianism that stresses both individual freedom and social equality. Left-libertarianism represents several related yet distinct approaches to political and social theory. Its classical usage refers to anti-authoritarian varieties of left-wing politics such as anarchism, especially social anarchism, communalism, and libertarian Marxism, collectively termed libertarian socialism. A portion of the left wing of the green movement, including adherents of Murray Bookchin's social ecology, are also generally considered left-libertarian.
Propertarianism, or proprietarianism, is a political philosophy that reduces all questions of law to the right to own property. On property rights, it advocates private property based on Lockean sticky property norms, where an owner keeps their property more or less until they consent to gift or sell it, rejecting the Lockean proviso.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy that upholds liberty as a core value. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, emphasizing equality before the law and civil rights to freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of choice. Libertarians are often skeptical of or opposed to authority, state power, warfare, militarism and nationalism, but some libertarians diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems. Various schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power. Different categorizations have been used to distinguish various forms of Libertarianism. Scholars distinguish libertarian views on the nature of property and capital, usually along left–right or socialist–capitalist lines. Libertarians of various schools were influenced by liberal ideas.
According to the definition of Karel Vasak and Joseph Raz negative and positive rights are rights that oblige either inaction or action. These obligations may be of either a legal or moral character. The notion of positive and negative rights may also be applied to liberty rights. The Raz-Vašák definition of negative and positive rights are rights that oblige either omission or action. This definition makes both types of rights the same, because the omission of X i.e. the set of all action that does not involve doing X, is also an action. Grammatically inaction, namely omitting all action, makes no sense, because anyone can create a sentence having someone act.
Right-libertarianism, also known as libertarian capitalism, or right-wing libertarianism, is a libertarian political philosophy that supports capitalist property rights and defends market distribution of natural resources and private property. The term right-libertarianism is used to distinguish this class of views on the nature of property and capital from left-libertarianism, a type of libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian approach to property and income. In contrast to socialist libertarianism, right-libertarianism supports free-market capitalism. Like most forms of libertarianism, it supports civil liberties, especially natural law, negative rights, the non-aggression principle, and a major reversal of the modern welfare state.
Individualist anarchism in the United States was strongly influenced by Benjamin Tucker, Josiah Warren, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lysander Spooner, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Max Stirner, Herbert Spencer and Henry David Thoreau. Other important individualist anarchists in the United States were Stephen Pearl Andrews, William Batchelder Greene, Ezra Heywood, M. E. Lazarus, John Beverley Robinson, James L. Walker, Joseph Labadie, Steven Byington and Laurance Labadie.
The law of equal liberty is the fundamental precept of liberalism and socialism. Stated in various ways by many thinkers, it can be summarized as the view that all individuals must be granted the maximum possible freedom as long as that freedom does not interfere with the freedom of anyone else. While socialists have been hostile to liberalism, which is accused of "providing an ideological cover for the depredation of capitalism", scholars have stated that "the goals of liberalism are not so different from those of the socialists", although this similarity in goals has been described as being deceptive due to the different meanings liberalism and socialism give to liberty, equality and solidarity, including the meaning, implications and norms of equal liberty derived from it.
Libertarianism is variously defined by sources as there is no general consensus among scholars on the definition nor on how one should use the term as a historical category. Scholars generally agree that libertarianism refers to the group of political philosophies which emphasize freedom, individual liberty and voluntary association. Libertarians generally advocate a society with little or no government power.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to anarchism:
Natural-rights libertarianism is the theory that all individuals possess certain natural or moral rights, mainly a right of individual sovereignty and that therefore acts of initiation of force and fraud are rights-violations and that is sufficient reason to oppose those acts. This is one of the two ethical view points within right-libertarianism, the other being consequentialist libertarianism which only takes into account the consequences of actions and rules when judging them and holds that free markets and strong private property rights have good consequences.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to libertarianism:
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