Liberalis in English

How are You feeling?

I’m feeling very pleased with these two days and I thought it went extremely well and the local organisation was superb and Nicolai (Barczentewicz) and You and all the people who worked for the organisation did a great job, so… Everybody I’ve talked to think it was one of the most successful conferences we’ve had, so it’s very good, I’m very pleased.

Thank You. This is Your first time in Poland?

No, no, I’ve been to Poland many times. In the early days after the… the post-Soviet era – ’92-’93, and again more recently, not to Warsaw but to Krakow – so I can see, certainly in Warsaw, how the city has changed between 1992-1993 and today. It’s very spectacular. At the time it was grey, it was drab, it was really… it had the feeling of a very boring place. Today, and today’s not sunny and so on, but it’s certainly a vibrant place full of colour, full of young people in the street, advertising, you know, shops, things like that. No, it’s great, absolutely great. And the old buildings have been redone and the appear in all their glory, it’s wonderful.

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Q: Your site, LewRockwell.com is greatly popular and is still growing. The internet has proven to be an invaluable tool in the hands of libertarians. What has your experience shown you to be the most important for a growing movement: individual blogs, professional sites with an abundance of materials, like Mises.org, or something of a collective effort, like LRC?

A: The movement is growing beyond belief, in all sectors of society and in nearly all countries, so far as I can tell. The web has been important, obviously. Libertarians have always believed that getting the ideas out there is the most important step we can take. Any media that get our message out are thrilling, especially the media that are not highly controlled by government. The government made a mistake with the internet, from its own point of view. It controlled radio, television, and much of the print media by default. But the web took off before the government got its hooks in it.

Q: Now that so many great leaders of the movement, like Hess and Rothbard are gone, what can we, as a movement do to compensate for that loss? Do you see any leaders of such a caliber emerging on the horizon? Or maybe we don’t really need a unifying figure?

A: More often than not, leaders emerge in retrospect. They aren’t something you seek out but rather emerge out of the fabric of a movement. In many ways, I think we are surrounded by them. But it will take time to know what thinkers are the most influential for the long run. Another point to consider is that the leaders of the past are not dead because the most important part of their lives, namely their ideas, thrive now as never before.
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Hello, professor Long. Welcome to Poland. Is this Your first time here?

It Is.

So how’s it been as of yet?

Oh, it’s been great. I’ve been walking around Poland, we went up to the castle today. Yesterday I had my session at the conference. I’ve been just walking around on the streets. It’s really beautiful.

And about the paper. It was on Spooner, right?

Yes, Lysander Spooner, on his theory of natural law and legal interpretation.

You’re known as one of the major exponents of left-libertarianism around the world. So, could You give me a brief description of what left-libertarianism is and how it relates to other tenets of libertarian thought.

Okay, well I guess it represents an integration, or I’d argue, a reintegration of libertarianism with concerns that are traditionally thought of as being concerns of the left. That includes concerns for worker empowerment, worry about plutocracy, concerns about feminism and various kinds of social equality – that kind of thing. And it goes back to – in the nineteenth century, a lot of people like Benjamin Tucker and so on – the individualist anarchists were very much a part of things like the feminist movement, the labour movement, the anti-racist movement – but approached these from a pure free market position and not advocating any kind of State control as a solution – in fact they saw State control as a problem, as something that helped to reinforce these other forms of oppression or was justified by the same kind of (mistakes?) as the other forms of oppression.
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