25To avoid any misunderstanding, it might be useful to point out that the predicted rise in discrimination in a purely libertarian world does not imply that the form and extent of discrimination will be the same or similar everywhere. To the contrary, a libertarian world could and likely would be one with a great variety of locally separated communities engaging in distinctly different and far-reaching discrimination. Explains Murray N. Rothbard:
In a country, or a world, of totally private property, including streets, and of private contractual neighborhoods consisting of property-owners, these owners can make any sort of neighborhood-contracts they wish. In practice, then, the country would be a truly "gorgeous mosaic,". . . ranging from rowdy Greenwich Village-type contractual neighborhoods, to socially conservative homogeneous WASP neighborhoods. Remember that all deeds and covenants would once again be totally legal and enforceable, with no meddling government restrictions upon them. So that considering the drug question, if a proprietary neighborhood contracted that no one would use drugs, and Jones violated the contract and used them, his fellow community-contractors could simply enforce the contract and kick him out. Or, since no advance contract can allow for all conceivable circumstances, suppose that Smith became so personally obnoxious that his fellow neighborhood-owners wanted him ejected. They would then have to buy him out—probably on terms set contractually in advance in accordance with some "obnoxious" clause. ("The 'New Fusionism': A Movement For Our Time," Rothbard-Rockwell Report 2, no. 1 [January 1991]: 9-10)
Notwithstanding the variety of discriminatory policies pursued by different proprietary communities, however, and as will be further argued in the following above, for the sake of self-preservation each of these communities will have to recognize and enforce some strict and rather inflexible limitations with respect to its internal tolerance; that is, no proprietary community can be as "tolerant" and "nondiscriminatory" as left-libertarians wish every place to be.
Moreover, true conservative libertarians—in contrast to left-libertarians—must not only recognize and emphasize the fact that there will be a sharp increase in discrimination (exclusion, expulsion) in a libertarian society wherein private property rights are fully restored to the owners of private households and estates; more importantly, they will have to recognize—and conservatives and conservative insights can be helpful in achieving this—that this ought to be so: that is, that there should be strict discrimination if one wants to reach the goal of a private property anarchy (or a pure private law society). Without continued and relentless discrimination, a libertarian society would quickly erode and degenerate into welfare state socialism. Every social order, including a libertarian or conservative one, requires a self-enforcement mechanism. More precisely, social orders (unlike mechanical or biological systems) are not maintained automatically; they require conscious effort and purposeful action on the part of the members of society to prevent them from disintegrating.26
VI
The standard libertarian model of a community is one of individuals who, instead of living physically separated and isolated from one another, associate with each other as neighbors living on adjacent but separately owned pieces of land. However, this model is too simplistic. Presumably, the reason for choosing neighbors over isolation is the fact that for individuals participating in and partaking of the benefits of the division of labor, a neighborhood offers the added advantage of lower transaction costs; that is, a neighborhood facilitates exchange. As a consequence, the value of an individually owned piece of land will be enhanced by the existence of neighboring pieces of land owned by others. However, while this may indeed be true and constitute a valid reason for choosing a neighborhood over physical isolation, it is by no means always true. A neighborhood also involves risks and may lead to falling rather than increasing property values, for even if one assumes, in accordance with the model under consideration, that the initial establishment of neighboring property was mutually beneficial, and even if it is further assumed that all members of a community refrain from criminal activity, it might still happen that a formerly "good" neighbor turns obnoxious, that he does not take care of his property or changes it so as to negatively affect the property values of other community members, or that he simply refuses to participate in any cooperative effort directed at improving the value of the community as a whole.27 Hence, in order to overcome the difficulties inherent in community development when the land is held in divided ownership, the formation of neighborhoods and communities has in fact proceeded along different lines from those suggested in the above mentioned model.
26See on this in particular Mises, Human Action, esp. chap. 9; Joseph T. Salerno, "Ludwig von Mises as Social Rationalist," Review of Austrian Economics 4 (1990).
Rather than being composed of adjacent pieces of land owned in severalty, then, neighborhoods have typically been proprietary or covenantal communities, founded and owned by a single proprietor who would "lease" separate parts of the land under specified conditions to selected individuals." Originally, such covenants were based on kinship relations, with the role of the proprietor performed by the head of a family or clan. In other words, just as the actions of the immediate family members are coordinated by the head and owner of the household within a single family household, so was the function of directing and coordinating the land uses of groups of neighboring households traditionally fulfilled by the head of an extended kinship group.29 In modern times, characterized by massive population growth and a significant loss in the importance of kinship relations, this original libertarian model of a proprietary community has been replaced by new and familiar developments such as shopping malls and "gated communities." Both shopping centers and gated residential communities are owned by a single entity, either an individual or a private corporation, and the relationship between the community proprietor and his renters and residents is purely contractual. The proprietor is an entrepreneur seeking profits from developing and managing residential and /or business communities which attract people as places where they want to reside and/or carry on their business. "The proprietor," elaborates Spencer MacCallum,
27See on this Spencer H. MacCallum, The Art of Community (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970). "So long as individuals have ownership in parts less than the whole," notes MacCallum,
their interests will collide with the interests of others and with the common interest in any proposal that would affect land values unevenly. Yet, to avoid such measures would be to throw out planning and coordination of land uses completely, and with it ultimately all land value.... Aggravating the situation further is the absence of effective leadership to arbitrate the conflicts or to salvage the best of the bad situation. Lacking is someone who, while not identified with any special interest in the community, is at the same time strongly concerned for the success of the community as a whole, (p. 57)
[Property in land cannot be moved to an environment more favorable for its use. Its value as an economic good is a function of its surroundings. Its higher use therefore depends upon rearranging the environment to conform to it. . . . Since the possible uses of a site depend on surrounding land uses (ultimately, all human action is land use of one kind or another), it is essential for its most productive use that the uses of accessible surrounding land be coordinated. Seldom can this be done effectively under a multiplicity of separate authorities. If surrounding sites are owned in severalty, the several owners may or may not be able to accommodate their various uses to a comprehensive plan, depending on many, often fortuitous, factors affecting the ability and wishes of each. They are neighbors of circumstance, not of convenience. (p. 78)
28To avoid any misunderstanding, the term "lease" is used here to include the sale of anything less than the full title to this thing. Thus, for example, the proprietor may sell all the rights to a house and a piece of land, except for the right to build a house over a certain height or of other than a certain design or to use the land for any other than residential
purposes, etc., which rights are retained by the proprietary seller. See on this Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 146.
builds value in the inventory of community land chiefly by satisfying three functional requirements of a community which he alone as an owner can adequately fulfill: selection of members, land planning, and leadership.... The first two functions, membership selection and land planning, are accomplished by him automatically in the course of determining to whom, and for what purpose, to let the use of land. The third function, leadership, is his natural responsibility and also his special opportunity, since his interest alone is the success of the whole community rather than that of any special interest within it. Assigning land automatically establishes the kinds of tenants and their spatial juxtaposition to one another and, hence, the economic structure of the community. . . . Leadership also includes arbitration of differences among tenants, as well as guidance and participation in joint efforts [Indeed], in a fundamental sense the security of the community is a part of the owner's real estate function. Under land planning, he supervises the design of all construction from the standpoint of safety. He also chooses tenants with a view to their compatibility and complementarity with other members of the community and learns to anticipate in the leases and to provide in other ways against disputes developing among tenants. By his informal peacemaking and arbitrating, he resolves differences that might otherwise become serious. In these many ways he ensures "quiet possession," as it was so admirably phrased in the language of the Common Law, for his tenants.30
29"[T]he proprietary community is not unique to our time and culture," explains MacCallum.
Its roots are deep in human history. . . . Within households, in the primitive world, land is commonly administered by an elder male in the line of property succession. For groups of households, it may be administered by a clan or lineage or other group head who is commonly an elder male of the kin group of widest span. And similarly at the village level. This is "the familiar pattern," in anthropologist Melville Herskovits' words, "of village land ownership held in trust and administered by the village head in behalf of its members, native or adopted, and family ownership, for which the head of the family is trustee." The system is sometimes called seignorialism since the distributive authority is exercised by a senior member of the kin group at the span or level of organization in question. (The Art of Community, p. 69)
Clearly then, the task of maintaining the covenant entailed in a libertarian (proprietary) community is first and foremost that of the proprietor. Yet he is but one man, and it is impossible for him to succeed in this task unless he is supported in his endeavor by a majority of the members of the community in question. In particular, the proprietor needs the support of the the community elite, i.e., the heads of households and firms most heavily invested in the community. In order to protect and possibly enhance the value of their property and investments, both proprietor and the community elite must be willing and prepared to take two forms of protective measures. First, they must be willing to defend themselves by means of physical force and punishment against external invaders and domestic criminals. But second and equally important, they must also be willing to defend themselves, by means of ostracism, exclusion and ultimately expulsion, against those community members who advocate, advertise or propagandize actions incompatible with the very purpose of the covenant: to protect property and family.31
30MacCallum, The Art of Community, pp. 63,66,67. Moreover,
[o]nce the ownerships are organized as participation in a single property, it becomes the common interest of the owners to redevelop and manage the whole as a unit in the most productive way, even to replanning the formerly fixed pattern of streets and common areas. It becomes their single interest to provide not only optimum physical environment, but optimum social environment as well—through an effective manager who can serve inconspicuously as expediter, peacemaker, and active catalyst to promote the freest possible conditions for the occupants to pursue their respective interests, (p. 59)
31"On all levels of society, both primitive and modern" notes MacCallum on the importance of exclusion for the maintenance of social order, "exile is the natural and automatic remedy for default and fraud."
[B]y dispossession he [the village head] exiles individuals who have made themselves intolerable (exactly as a shopping center manager fails to renew the lease of an incompatible tenant). However infrequent in the village, as compared with modern proprietary communities, membership control is still a functional requisite of community life for which there must be regular provision, (p. 70)
In this regard a community always faces the double and related threat of egalitarianism and cultural relativism. Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property. Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference. And cultural relativism is incompatible with the fundamental—indeed foundational—fact of families and intergenerational kinship relations. Families and kinship relations imply cultural absolutism. As a matter of socio-psychological fact, both egalitarian and relativistic sentiments find steady support among ever new generations of adolescents. Owing to their still incomplete mental development, juveniles, especially of the male variety, are always susceptible to both ideas. Adolescence is marked by regular (and for this stage normal) outbreaks of rebellion by the young against the discipline imposed on them by family life and parental authority.32 Cultural relativism and multiculturalism provide the ideological instrument of emancipating oneself from these constraints. And egalitarianism—based on the infantile view that property is "given" (and thus distributed arbitrarily) rather than individually appropriated and produced (and hence, distributed justly, i.e., in accordance with personal productivity)—provides the intellectual means by which the rebellious youths can lay claim to the economic resources necessary for a life free of and outside the disciplinary framework of families.33
The enforcement of a covenant is largely a matter of prudence, of course. How and when to react, and what protective measures to take, requires judgment on the part of the members of the community and especially the proprietor and the community elite. Thus, for instance, so long as the threat of moral relativism and egalitarianism is restricted to a small proportion of juveniles and young adults for only a brief period in life (until they settle back into family-constrained adulthood), it may well be sufficient to do nothing at all. The proponents of cultural relativism and egalitarianism would represent little more than temporary embarassments or irritations, and punishment in the form of ostracism can be quite mild and lenient. A small dose of ridicule and contempt may be all that is needed to contain the relativistic and egalitarian threat. The situation is very different, however, and rather more drastic measures might be required, once the spirit of moral relativism and egalitarianism has taken hold among adult members of society: among mothers, fathers, and heads of households and firms.
And in a footnote to this, he adds:
Anthropologist Raymond Firth records an expression of exile from the Pacific island society of Tikopia that evokes in its simplicity the pathos of the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Wanderer." Inasmuch as all land was owned by the chiefs, an exiled person had no recourse but to canoe out to sea—to suicide or to life as a stranger on other islands. The expression for a person who is exiled translates that such a person "has no place on which to stand." (The Art of Community, p. 77)
32See on this Konrad Lorenz, Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), chap. 7; also Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989).
33See also Helmut Schelsky, Die Arbeit tun die anderen. Klassenkampf und Priesterherrschaft der Intellektuellen (Munich: DeutscherTaschenbuch Verlag, 1977).
As soon as mature members of society habitually express acceptance or even advocate egalitarian sentiments, whether in the form of democracy (majority rule) or of communism, it becomes essential that other members, and in particular
the natural social elites, be prepared to act decisively and, in the case of continued nonconformity, exclude and ultimately expel these members from society. In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one's own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They—the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism—will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.
VII
It should be obvious then that and why libertarians must be moral and cultural conservatives of the most uncompromising kind. The current state of moral degeneration, social disintegration and cultural rot is precisely the result of too much—and above all erroneous and misconceived—tolerance. Rather than having all habitual democrats, communists, and alternative lifestylists quickly isolated, excluded and expelled from civilization in accordance with the principles of the covenant, they were tolerated by society. Yet this toleration only encouraged and promoted even more egalitarian and relativistic sentiments and attitudes, until at last the point was reached where the authority of excluding anyone for anything had effectively evaporated (while the power of the state, as manifested in state-sponsored forced integration policies, had correspondingly grown).
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