It is not clear to me how the position that “...a fulfilling life is never an achievement of the isolated individual, but always of individuals working and living together with others…” contradicts the position that “...the only role the government should play in the lives of individuals is to ensure that no one constrains the [sic] their freedom.”  Isn’t the libertarian response that government mediation actually deadens our social relationships by making us beholden to an abstract bureaucracy rather than each other?

The libertarian party in the United States seems less concerned about the deadening of social relationships than about the maximization of individual freedom in the negative sense indicated above.  To quote from their website: “Each individual has the right to control his or her own body, action, speech, and property.  Government’s only role is to help individuals defend themselves from force and fraud.”

You bring up, however, an important point here: the libertarian position understands government as divorced from the individual citizens that adopt and empower it.  To see government as an “abstract bureaucracy” that “deadens our social relationships” is to adopt a political stance that is fundamentally anti-democratic. For at the core of democracy is the recognition that the people are the government and that the institutions we establish are created by us and for our benefit.

This, of course, does not mean that we agree with everything that our government does; but it does mean that if we don’t it is incumbent upon us to work to improve ourselves. The problem comes, as it does now, when improvement for some means to limit government to the defense of individuals against force and fraud. In this case, an argument about a more positive conception of freedom is required. This argument, it seems to me, is best made by asserting the central importance of human interdependence.

Even if we can agree, to quote again from the Libertarian Party website, that “... each individual is unique” and that we “want a system which respects the individual and encourages us to discover the best within ourselves and develop our full potential”, we might disagree that government can play a positive role in both affirming the uniqueness of each and the potential of all.

I believe it can and, for all its limitations, in fact it very often does.

Chris, I’m sympathetic to this line of inquiry, but I think your response to Brunson may be inaccurate. You write:

“To see government as an “abstract bureaucracy” that “deadens our social relationships” is to adopt a political stance that is fundamentally anti-democratic.”

Yet political theorists on the left and the right have tended to say that, in fact, government -has- become increasingly bureaucratic and increasingly distant from everyday human affairs. What we now speak of when we speak of politics is a kind of partisan cheerleading for different ideological positions, different policy platforms whose planks are not always well-joined, while the actual work of government remains the filling out of forms, the careful gathering of data, and the enforcement of highly technical rules, which our politicians have deputized a vast bureaucracy to accomplish.

This fact about the world is fundamentally anti-democratic, but it is possible to adopt a stance vis-a-vis the fact of bureaucracy that -is- democratic: specifically, to wish to submit more of our decisions to forms of accountability like the town halls. Yet I’m really -not- sure we should want to take back the authority we have granted to bureaucracy, which is fairer and more efficient than our messy political life or the frequently ignorant citizens who most wish to steer it. My own small-d democratic posture is one that feels very awkward, uncertain, and poorly grounded. That I continue to hold this posture in the face of evidence is perhaps the least rational thing about me!

Nowhere has democracy ever worked well without a great measure of local self-government, providing a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders.  It is only where responsibility can be learnt and practised in affairs with which most people are familiar, where it is the awareness of one’s neighbour rather than some theoretical knowledge of the needs of other people which guides action, that the ordinary man can take a really part in public affairs because they concern the world he knows.  Where the scope of political measures become so large the the necessary knowledge is almost exclusively possessed by the bureaucracy, the creative impulses of the private person must flag.

-Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 241-242 [1944]