The Free Society.

• Author: Narveson, Jan

This engaging and intelligent book offers a general defense of a fairly thoroughgoing political libertarianism. It opens with an extraordinarily interesting account of moral foundations, proceeds to a central section on liberty and government, including a very perceptive chapter on the U.S. Constitution, and concludes with a substantial section on liberty a,nd economics informed by important recent scholarship. Lansing Pollock argues that government programs designed to promote health, education, or welfare not only defeat freedom, but do not promote health, education, or welfare. The tendency to deal with perceived problems by mounting another government program, supported by taxes, is counterproductive. Moreover, Pollock has specific recipes for what to do about it. We could, if Pollock is right, undo the damage of the past sixty years in perhaps thirty, and long before those thirty have elapsed be well on our way to enjoying a far more prosperous, happier society.

Because I agree with the author on the major points, and am impressed by his program as well, I will take modest issue with part of his methodological framework and with his defense of even the very limited state he supports. The reader may find these modest criticisms of largely theoretical interest. Nothing I say, moreover, is intended to discourage perusal. Quite the contrary: this is definitely a book to be read, both by those of us who immerse ourselves professionally in these matters and, perhaps even more so, by the intelligent layman.

Pollock says only a little about contractarian theory. He notes that John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon, and I come to different conclusions about what rational persons would contract for. This disagreement hardly shows that contractarianism is misguided. Pollock later proposes as a major criterion of appraisal of an ethical theory that it have "explanatory power." One can hardly quarrel with that, but one can quarrel about just what is to be explained: our intuitions about what is right and wrong, for instance? And if those do not coincide, then what? Does this disagreement evince a lack of explanatory power? (One might argue that one of the things to be explained is that some moral disagreements are not easy settled; one might take the continuing disagreement of contractarians on some matters as evidence of the theory's explanatory power about that!)

Libertarianism rests on the freedom principle, as Pollock calls it. Its "underlying idea is that interaction should (ideally) be based on mutual consent" (p. 10). I agree with that; but notice that to do so is virtually to accept the social contract. I have argued that the social contract will settle on the freedom principle. That argument seems to me more powerful than just affirming the principle and conjecturing that it has...