Particular person liberty lies on the coronary heart of the libertarian custom. On this custom, self-determination is known as an emanation of particular person liberty, slightly than with no consideration vested within the “nation” or the “state” as a collective unit. In his guide Liberalism, Ludwig von Mises explains,
To name this proper of self-determination the “proper of self-determination of countries” is to misconceive it. It isn’t the suitable of self-determination of a delimited nationwide unit, however the suitable of the inhabitants of each territory to resolve on the state to which they belong.
It’s on this context that the “rugged individualism” of the American frontiersmen, as they fought for independence in each the Revolutionary Conflict and Lincoln’s Conflict, needs to be understood—as a battle by every particular person for his personal liberty and proper to self-determination. In his guide Born Preventing: How the Scots-Irish Formed America, James Webb depicts the Scots-Irish frontiersman as a self-reliant individualist, quoting Vernon Louis Parrington:
They have been desperately poor; the accessible lands close to the coast have been already preempted; so armed with axes, their seed potatoes, and the newly invented rifle, they plunged into the backwoods to change into our nice pioneering race… A vigorous breed, hardy, assertive, individualistic, thrifty, skilled within the democracy of the Scottish kirk, they have been the fabric out of which later Jacksonian democracy was to be original, the creators of that western kind which in politics and business turned in the end the American kind.
Webb describes the Scots-Irish as “radical individualists” who by no means exhibited the collective group-identity that dominates at the moment’s socialistic id politics, the place individuals declare to have rights based mostly on their race or intercourse. To the Scots-Irish individualists,
Of their insistent individualism they don’t seem to be more likely to put an ethnic label on themselves after they debate social points. A few of them don’t even know their ethnic label, and a few who do don’t notably care. They don’t go for group-identity politics any greater than they like to affix a union.
Webb explains how this understanding of the person as impartial from the group got here to be regarded extra broadly as the standard hallmark of American individualism. He additional observes that the Scots-Irish had “a tradition of isolation, laborious luck, and infinite stubbornness.” He provides that their impartial spirit was such that they even “rejected” what they noticed as “Virginia’s Tidewater ‘Cavalier’ aristocracy”—an angle that was consistent with their “defiance of authority.” Subsequently, as political battle escalated between the New England and Southern states within the years main as much as secession and struggle, it may appear stunning to trendy observers that the these individualists, recognized for his or her “tradition of isolation,” would rally to defend a Southern “nation” spurred by occasions in South Carolina and Virginia that have been in some ways far faraway from their very own every day lives. Most of them weren’t rich planters, nor did they personal any slaves that might trigger them to have a private stake within the abolitionist debates.
Webb describes his personal Accomplice great-great-grandfather who “owned no property and the worth of his possessions totaled ten {dollars}, neither of which was uncommon in these hills [of western Virginia].” Why, then, did they rally behind the Accomplice banner? Webb explains that, removed from being stunning, this response mirrored the exact same spirit of independence and defiance of authority: “Of their eyes, an outdoor pressure was not solely telling them the right way to dwell their lives, but in addition threatening to pressure options on them in the event that they disagreed. They’d remedy their very own issues, if issues there have been.” That is the purpose that individuals fail to understand after they ask why the South seceded for independence—they ask, “Independence to do what?” and “States rights to do what?” The reply is, independence to unravel their very own issues, and liberty to find out their very own future.
Webb’s guide highlights an vital side of individualism that deserves extra consideration. The best of particular person liberty has much less to do with atomistic or self-regarding character traits, and extra to do with independence from collective management. Individualism within the American custom represents the conviction that every particular person is the writer of his personal life and isn’t topic to the desire or management of the federal government. Webb describes the Scots-Irish historic rootedness in “the primary wild resolute indignant overwhelmed Celt who tromped into the hills slightly than bend a knee to Rome two thousand years in the past,” who had “a fierce resoluteness that discovered itself all the time in a pitch in opposition to demise.”
He quotes Wilbur Money, who additionally commented on “essentially the most intense individualism” of the Accomplice troopers who, when federal troops invaded the South after the secession of South Carolina, enlisted to defend what they more and more thought to be their Southern nation. Webb describes how these males “rose like a sudden wind out of the little cities and scattered farms of a nonetheless unconquered wilderness.” He focuses on the motivation of every particular person who enlisted, asking,
How did all this confusion current itself contained in the thoughts of a typical younger man referred to as into motion to struggle for the Confederacy? First, the chances are overwhelming that he didn’t personal slaves in any respect. Was he then merely a pawn, a easy agent of those that did? These have been loyal and uncomplicated individuals, however their historical past might by no means mark them as both silly or passive.
He concludes:
It may appear odd in these trendy occasions, however the Accomplice soldier fought as a result of, on the one hand, in his view he was provoked, intimidated, and in the end invaded, and, on the opposite, his leaders had satisfied him that this was a struggle of independence in the identical sense because the Revolutionary Conflict… The tendency to withstand exterior aggression was bred deeply into each coronary heart – and nonetheless is at the moment.
This attribute of individualism emphasizes freedom from state coercion. Because the historian Walter Fleming observes, Southerners “have been Democrats of the Jeffersonian college, believing within the largest potential liberty for the person and in native administration of native affairs.” Comparable beliefs are mirrored in libertarian philosophy. For instance, Ludwig von Mises depicts particular person liberty as the perfect of residing with out state interference:
The distinctive precept of Western social philosophy is individualism. It goals on the creation of a sphere by which the person is free to assume, to decide on, and to behave with out being restrained by the interference of the social equipment of coercion and oppression, the State. All of the religious and materials achievements of Western civilization have been the results of the operation of this concept of liberty.
In his guide In Protection of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, Frank S. Meyer criticizes “New Conservatives,” for misunderstanding the perfect of “individualism.” Meyer argues that, removed from being atomistic, every particular person is a social animal who sees the worth of his fellow man:
It’s true, in fact, that there could be no political or social establishments, nor any that means to political inquiry, if males lived as single remoted people. To insist, as I do, that the person is the criterion by which establishments and political theories needs to be judged is to not deny the fast and apparent that means of the phrase, “man is a social animal,” that’s, that every man has a multifarious set of relationships with different males.
That is typically ignored by those that assume individualism to be a risk to cohesive society. They deem it to be an idea that encourages disregard for one’s fellow man or the self-worship of oneself as a self-reliant one who neither wants nor values no person else. The person doesn’t stand aside and distant from society. Quite the opposite, as Friedrich von Hayek emphasised, society is the idea of interplay between people, and it’s by way of the interplay of free males that free societies flourish. Mises understood this notion of individualism to be important to liberty, explaining that, “The idea of freedom all the time refers to social relations between males.”
