From Chomsky, "Class Warfare" (1995):
"The founders of classical liberalism, people like Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is one of the great exponents of classical liberalism, and who inspired John Stuart Mill -- they were what we would call libertarian socialists, at least that ïs the way I read them. For example, Humboldt, like Smith, says, Consider a craftsman who builds some beautiful thing. Humboldt says if he does it under external coercion, like pay, for wages, we may admire what he does but we despise what he is. On the other hand, if he does it out of his own free, creative expression of himself, under free will, not under external coercion of wage labor, then we also admire what he is because he's a human being. He said any decent socioeconomic system will be based on the assumption that people have the freedom to inquire and create -- since that's the fundamental nature of humans -- in free association with others, but certainly not under the kinds of external constraints that came to be called capitalism."
Individualism of a sort, perhaps - the best sort, I'd say - but hardly fundamentally conventional.
Cf. "Notes on Anarchism" (1973): <http://www.chomsky.info/books/state01.htm>.
On 5/1/11 8:02 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On May 1, 2011, at 8:56 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> Cf. his lecture from 40 years ago, "Government in the Future" (Seven Stories Press 2005):
>>
>> "I think that the libertarian socialist concepts - and by that I mean a range of thinking that extends from left-wing Marxism through anarchism - are fundamentally correct and that they are the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society."
> Classical liberalism? Really? You like this, Carl? This only confirms my worst suspicions about anarchists - they're individualists of a fundamentally conventional sort.
>
> Doug
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