I.
Libertarianism is the conspiracy theory that there’s such a thing as a legitimate State.
Thatcherism made this conspiracy more palatable by introducing the claim that there’s no such thing as *society*. This claim is false in Durkheim and true in Luhmann; but even in the absence of fancy citations, it’s a respectable *political* claim, as it lunges into the competing claim that the social is the stuff (the matter, the hylos) of politics and government. Thatcher gets bonus points for not mentioning Arrow’s Terrible News. But it stops short of libertarianism by attacking government rather than State. Good girl Thatcher! She imbues right-liberal politics of the ensuing half decade with the same smooth qualities of the soft-serve ice cream she’s credited with inventing.
There’s a leap in reasoning from “there’s no such thing as society” to “no overarching structure can ever re-present, speak for, simulate its constituent men and women”. This leap is in full bijection with the gap between the legitimacy invested by normal people in the State and the desert-of-the-real claimed by libertarians. On both sides of this leap are axiological matters (even if only due to the is-ought firewall). But to the extent that they can be characterized as matters belonging to *different axiologies*, they amount to *political foundations* to the idea, core to “asemic horizon” but always just short of intelligible, that there *are* different axiologies.
Particularly salient here is how strongly parameterized this bijection is by the idea of *representation*. In a way, the core problem is passing from social representation (it may be worthwhile here to recall Latour’s golden formula relating *society* to *association*) to legitimate representation (implicitly, of *legitimacies*). In philosophy alone there’s a whole spectrum of potentially relevant frameworks for this, from Plato’s cave to Deleuze’s open-ended immanence. But here, as everywhere else, philosophy meets the world with the infuriating dynamic of teasing — nay, edging — us with relevance and applicability, never leading us past the finish line. This is where philosophy and theory part ways. The kind of abstract sexuality of tease-and-denial is an intense lived experience, whether for degenerates, scholars or monks. But theory is distance. Theory is waiting.
II.
Libertarianism is, then, the conspiracy theory that (1) there are right and proper grounds for the operation that maps, passes and translates the (social) representation of associations to the (legitimate) association of legitimacies and (2) there’s a rather narrow space of possible social configurations where this operation is possible.
I’m giving (1) a short name by initially abusing a math word, “functoriality”. Sooner or later we’ll find that functoriality gives rise to a concept of abstraction that sort-of-not-rigorously rhymes with the right and proper concept of abstraction posed by category theory. (Eat my shorts, Mr. Sokal; I’m not afraid.) The short name affords us a shorter formula: libertarianism is the conspiracy theory that legitimacy only enjoys functoriality on certain conditions — soon to be explicated by your fellow local libertarian.
There’s a shorter formula still: libertarianism is the conspiracy theory that the quability conditions on functoriality can be given. This one makes me dizzy because the latter concept is a frotteur, it brushes on the most formal ideas of mathematics; meanwhile, the former is unformalizable, as argued many times before. The real trouble, of course, is the vertigo of general axiology: somehow, we’ve done away with politics and legitimacy in a quick sleight of hand. Libertarianism is suddenly not just libertarianism, but a rhetorical move that translates, in both directions, a relation between an axiological move (from a calculus of social formations to one of legitimacies) and a claim about the possibility of knowledge.
III.
A sufficient account of the bijection has probably to deal with this double-pincer dynamic; it has to sustain the typical vertigo-inducing drive to axiological genericity with a kind of functorial *groove* (a looping section that makes sense only in repetition) that pulls back all the parallelisms (communication, reproduction, representation, legitimacy, God) to double-entry bookkeeping’s reach. This is the move towards genericity that will eventually give us General Axiology — this move towards the asemic horizon, from the piercing issue of social policy to spiraling and functorial relations (and more, sketches of such relations).
IV.
Let’s step back a little.
Libertarianism is the conspiracy theory that the only legitimacy available lies in the inherent qualities of men and women. This is why it typically drifts to the Right: such inherent qualities are racist, yo, and sexist af. There’s, indeed, science (as credible and reproducible as sciences of the human come) that people of different makeups — even as grouped by observable features — would lead different mental lives if suspended in *The Matrix*-like pods. But how different is this from saying people with longer legs than mine can run farther before tiring? There are bikes and buses; and the argument that civilization would collapse if not for the long-legged is questionable — the very spatial breadth of our lives has grown along our means of transportation, and not the other way around!
If this comparison sounds insane, it’s because of a clear break of functoriality — the legitimacy of human consciousness, the legitimacy of human legs — with what we were previously discussing. This attempted abstraction doesn’t work, and the reason is as follows: long-leggedness is incommunicable, while consciousness catches on as wildfire. Margot Robbie’s legs die with her, Goethe’s romantic conception of science continue to animate our world. (Goethe tramples past philosophy and *finishes*, resulting in uncountable *pregnancies*). In the newspeak of libertarian economists, civilization is an externality; it’s the ongoing spirit that rolls along despite our schemes to fabricate a society that meets the libertarian fantasy.
V.
Finally, and maybe most importantly.
Libertarianism is the conspiracy theory that there are men and women — conceived as continuous sites of agency. One is often led to conclude that libertarians have never been drunk. Search your souls, review your past couple of hours, your past 15 minutes! There’s no length of time in which you can’t find a sub-interval where you “weren’t yourself”. The problem with this is, again, Arrow’s Terrible News. There’s no coherent choice in a small group of individuals, *and* there’s no coherent choice within any individual, once properly understood as a flock of tendencies and partial blackouts. Von Mises gets a consolation prize for trying to tie this down to *action* (something that does distinguish fleeting lust from marital infidelity), but one suspects the man has never been drunk either.
These and other issues are differently illuminated (and, to my ear, dissolved) by the concept of interfacticity. But interfacticity is an abhorrent concept to as-now-existing political praxis, whatever their overt features. Interfacticity is anti-identitarian, anti-individualistic and anti-collectivistic at once; nondenumerable when democracy is a game of counts, only fleetingly intelligible when political formulas must sell themselves (whatever they’re like behind closed doors) as uniformly intelligible.
People sometimes tell me — this is dangerously close to Heidegger, a Nazi. A great soul, Heidegger touched on many ideas adjacent to ours, but had the misfortune of living before the onset of General Axiology. We’re all at risk of making similar mistakes! The matter of General Axiology is urgent!!