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1 Res Publica 3 (1995)

handle is hein.journals/respub1 and id is 1 raw text is: Res Publica Vol.1 no.1 [19951 INDIVIDUALISM VERSUS CLASSICAL LIBERAL POLITICAL ECONOMY by TIBOR R. MACHAN* Is Individualism a Monkey on the Back of Classical Liberalism? Perhaps the most significant charge against the classical liberal order has been that it is unjustifiably individualistic. The charge cuts directly against the role of private property rights in the free market - it is in fact an attack on the very possibility of independent personal initiative for which credit may be taken and reward may be received. This charge repeats what Karl Marx held against the bourgeois era, in his famous essay, On the Jewish Question,1 a charge being repeated by the current champions of the most recent version of palatable collec- tivism, namely communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Bellah, Amitai Etzioni, Thomas Spragens and Richard Rorty. It is con- tained in this remark by Willard Gaylin: We have created an artifact, the isolated self, that does not exist in biological truth.2 This problem of being closely linked with individualism has plagued classical liberal theory, whether advanced by John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, and even those modern and truncated forms of liberalism favoured more recently by John Maynard Keynes and John Rawls. The central charge is that such individualism as liberalism em - bodies is simply incapable of making room for morality. Even many supporters of the free market find fault with it on these grounds - Irving Kristol, for example, made the point in his essay, When Virtue Loses All her Loveliness, some years ago in an address to the Mt. Pelerin Society, the most distinguished international scholarly society devoted to exploring the philosophy of freedom, as well as in his point - * Auburn University, Alabama. 1 Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 53ff. 2 Willard Gaylin, On Being and Becoming Human (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 264.

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