Has Libertarianism Lost Its Link to Individualism?

 

I. Austro-Libertarian Anti-War Analysis Feels Dangerously Keynesian: An Introduction

In the pantheon of libertarian principles, few shine as brightly as the commitment to peace. From classical liberals who denounced imperial adventures to modern libertarians who marched against Vietnam and Iraq, the movement has consistently positioned itself against the machinery of war. This stance flows naturally from our core beliefs: if initiating force against peaceful individuals is wrong, then war, the ultimate expression of organized violence, must be among the gravest evils.

Something curious has happened within certain corners of the libertarian anti-war movement.

Yet something curious has happened within certain corners of the libertarian anti-war movement. In their laudable zeal to oppose conflict, some have begun employing arguments that contradict fundamental libertarian principles. The same thinkers who instantly reject collectivist reasoning in economics sometimes embrace surprisingly similar logic when discussing war. Those who normally insist on individual responsibility can suddenly shift to speaking in aggregates: counting bodies, tallying destruction, and declaring moral equivalence between all parties to a conflict.

This essay offers an internal critique, a friendly intervention from within the libertarian tradition itself. The goal is not to weaken the anti-war cause but to strengthen it by ensuring our arguments remain consistent with our deepest principles.

The specific concern is this: some contemporary Rothbardian anti-war rhetoric has drifted from methodological individualism (the idea that only individuals act and are morally accountable) into macro-aggregative, morally symmetrical language that treats all sides in a conflict as equivalent by focusing only on collective outcomes instead of individual agency and actions.

This shift represents a curious parallel to the Keynesian macro-logic that libertarians reject in economics. Just as Austrian economists criticize GDP and aggregate demand for obscuring individual choices and market processes,[1] we should be wary when anti-war arguments rely heavily on aggregate death tolls while ignoring the crucial distinction between who initiated force and who acted in defense.

 

II. Rothbard’s Anti-War Foundations

Murray N. Rothbard was one of the most vehement anti-war voices in modern libertarianism, viewing war as a brutal instrument of state power. He famously summed up the libertarian ethos with: “War is mass murder. Conscription is slavery. Taxation is robbery.”[2] In Rothbard’s view, war and the state are inextricably linked: “It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.”[3]

For Rothbard, the very nature of interstate war, conducted through taxation, conscription, and mass bombardment, almost inevitably violates the nonaggression principle on a colossal scale. “The very nature of interstate war puts innocent civilians into great jeopardy, especially with modern technology,” Rothbard observed.[2] Even a war fought for an ostensibly good cause can transgress libertarian ethics if it targets innocents or relies on coercive means.

Rothbard anchored his anti-war stance in methodological individualism and natural rights theory. Only individuals act; thus, only individuals are morally responsible for acts of aggression. The Non-Aggression Principle forbids the initiation of force against persons or property; force is only justified as defensive or retaliatory against an aggressor.[4]

This led Rothbard to a very high standard for a “just war.” In “War, Peace, and the State,” he argued that if a defending nation’s government conscripts unwilling soldiers or bombs civilian areas while fighting off an aggressor, it commits new crimes as grave as those of the original aggressor.[5] As Rothbard put it, “War, then, is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals. We may judge for ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have met this criterion.”[2]

Rothbard tended to treat any violation of rights as equally condemnable, regardless of who started the conflict.

By focusing on the libertarian principle in isolation, Rothbard tended to treat any violation of rights as equally condemnable, regardless of who started the conflict. The result is an optics of moral symmetry: both sides committed unforgivable acts against innocents, so both sides were criminal to some degree.

What began as a rigorous application of the NAP can slide into a pacifist narrative that makes no moral distinction between, say, the Allies and the Axis. The agency of those who initiate force fades from view when every violation of rights is tallied on the same ledger.

 

III. From Individuals to Aggregates

Libertarians pride themselves on methodological individualism. As Ludwig von Mises articulated, “all actions are performed by individuals,” and collective entities operate only through the intermediary of individuals.[6] Austrian economists reject macroeconomic aggregates as the primary datum; instead, they explain economic phenomena by the choices and actions of individuals.

The Austrian critique of macro-aggregates provides a powerful analogy. These aggregates obscure individual plans, ignore heterogeneity, conceal causal processes, and lead to flawed policy recommendations.[7] As Hayek’s “fatal conceit” argument suggests, the belief that a central planner can possess the dispersed knowledge necessary to manage an economy through aggregates is fundamentally flawed.[7]

Paradoxically, some libertarian anti-war arguments abandon that individualist lens and sound strikingly macro, focusing on aggregate outcomes like total casualties. One often hears slogans such as “Don’t trade one dead baby for another.” The intent is heartfelt, but notice the framing: it treats deaths as commensurate units to be weighed equally. The implicit message is that once bombs are falling and children are dying, it no longer matters who is doing what; all that matters is the body count.

This reasoning mirrors the macro-aggregative approach libertarians criticize elsewhere.

This reasoning mirrors the macro-aggregative approach libertarians criticize elsewhere. When some libertarians say “War killed 100 of their children and 100 of ours; we must stop the cycle of violence,” they are adopting a similar lens, tallying deaths like a grim GDP, focusing only on quantities of tragedy, rather than qualitatively distinguishing murder from self-defense.

Contemporary Rothbardian anti-war discourse often focuses on perceived aggressions of the United States and its allies. Scott Horton has argued that the United States “provoked” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through NATO expansion.[9] Ron Paul’s “blowback” theory attributes events like 9/11 to prior U.S. government actions in the Middle East.[10]

To illustrate, consider a recent commentary defending “moral equivalence” between deaths on opposing sides of a conflict. The author argues it’s “misguided” to claim “a fundamental moral difference between how Hamas and the IDF kill children,” positing that “the children die all the same.”[13] In this view, what matters morally is the aggregate fact that children are being killed; any difference in intent or cause is deemed secondary.

This aggregate-style moral accounting effectively treats war as a clash of collectives, not of individual actors making choices. Gone is the libertarian’s usual insistence on disaggregating the collective. We hear talk of “trading lives” or “exchanging one atrocity for another,” as if morality were a zero-sum ledger.[14] The libertarian emphasis on pinpointing the aggressor recedes. Instead of asking, “Which persons launched attacks and which responded?” the macro approach just counts corpses.

 

 IV. The Problem with Moral Equivalence

Libertarian ethics holds a clear distinction: the initiator of force (aggressor) versus the responder to force (defender). Aggression is categorically illegitimate, while defensive force is legitimate, even though regrettable.[4] This distinction lies at the core of libertarian justice. As Stephan Kinsella’s estoppel theory elucidates, an aggressor is “estopped” from objecting to defensive force being used against them.[15]

However, pacifist rhetoric blurs this line. By treating all uses of violence as equal, it commits a grave moral error: it equates murder with self-defense, and thereby gives the aggressor a free pass.

Why is defense ≠ aggression such an important distinction? Because without it, the entire libertarian theory of rights crumbles. A crime victim who fights off his attacker is using force, but to call him equally guilty of “violence” as the attacker is a profound injustice.

As Alan Futerman aptly put it: “Many libertarians are unfortunately conflating two concepts. One is aggression and the other is the use of force. Defense involves the use of force, but it does not entail aggression . . . self-defense involves the use of force but is the opposite of aggression.”[16]

When pacifist discourse focuses only on outcomes (“people are dying”) and ignores who made that outcome necessary, it effectively flattens moral reality. As Sam Harris noted, “Counting dead bodies isn’t sufficient . . . you must count intentions to judge the morality. We [must consider] who rejoices in massacres vs. who seeks to avoid killing innocents.”[31]

Moreover, pacifist moral symmetry has a perverse practical effect: it incentivizes aggression. If an aggressor knows that any retaliation will earn equal moral condemnation for the defender, the aggressor gains a one-sided advantage.

1. A. Hayek understood that absolute pacifism can enable tyranny. In The Road to Serfdom, he warned: “As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself.”[17] This suggests that absolute pacifism that allows tyranny to flourish could lead to a greater evil than a defensive war undertaken to preserve liberty.

When defensive forces inadvertently harm innocents, the moral onus for such tragedy still lies with the side that initiated the aggression and created the deadly situation. Golda Meir captured this sentiment: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

Pacifist moral equivalence ignores agency, context, and initiation of force, three things libertarians usually emphasize. The surest way to minimize total violence is to deter and defeat aggressors, not to handcuff defenders and let aggressors carry on unopposed.

 

 V. Clarifying the Positive Model: Block, Mises, and Hayek

Not all libertarians have succumbed to moral symmetry. These thinkers show it’s possible to abhor war’s carnage while still saying: this side is in the right (defensively), and that side is in the wrong (aggressively).

Walter Block emphatically rejects the notion that libertarianism entails pacifism.

Walter Block emphatically rejects the notion that libertarianism entails pacifism. “Libertarianism doesn’t require pacifism. It’s compatible with it, but it doesn’t require it,” he explains.[19] In the Israel-Hamas conflict, Block points out that Hamas explicitly aimed to massacre civilians, whereas the Israeli Defense Force has sought to avoid killing innocents.[16] He contends it is a crucial moral difference that Israel’s military “drops leaflets warning civilians to evacuate” and tries to target combatants, whereas “Hamas purposefully aims at civilians.”[16]

Block famously stated: “Whenever there’s a war, there’s got to be collateral damage. And if you say collateral damage means genocide, well, then you’re a pacifist.”[20] Equating unintended collateral damage with purposeful genocide is a category mistake. Block’s clarity has led him to support the idea that complete victory over aggressors can be the most humane outcome in the long run.[16]

Ludwig von Mises strongly championed liberal internationalism but was not a naive pacifist. He understood that peace sometimes must be defended by force. One of Mises’s most powerful statements differentiates the people’s desires from their rulers’ ambitions: “Nations are fundamentally peaceful. . . . They accept war only in self-defence; wars of aggression they do not desire. It is the princes who want war.”[18]

During World War II, Mises supported the Allied war effort as necessary to destroy totalitarianism.

During World War II, Mises supported the Allied war effort as necessary to destroy totalitarianism. In Omnipotent Government (1944), he praised the Allied cause: “This aim alone can elevate the present war to the dignity of mankind’s most noble undertaking. The pitiless annihilation of Nazism is the first step toward freedom and peace.”[24] Mises maintained both an anti-war ideal and recognition that when war is forced upon you by aggressors, you must fight decisively.

Friedrich A. Hayek recognized that “peace at any price” attitudes ironically made war more likely. He certainly did not believe it would have been better for Europe to surrender to Nazi Germany to avoid conflict. Hayek’s consistent liberalism held that peace is the highest ideal, but not an unconditional one. A “peace” that is merely the absence of resistance to tyranny is no peace at all; it is slavery.[26]

The common thread among these voices is clarity: they identify who the aggressor is and do not shy from saying that aggression is the root of evil. They focus on individual actions and stress proportionality, but crucially understand that when innocents tragically die in a defensive effort, the ethical analysis must track back to who lit the fuse.

 

 VI. Anticipating and Rebutting Objections

Objection 1: “All state warfare is immoral. States are aggressors against their own people, so how can we side with any state in war?”

Rebuttal: While states are institutionalized aggressors in many ways,[28] not all wars are morally equal. Even accepting states’ flaws, in a given war one state may be clearly the aggressor while the other’s forces perform a defensive function. If we reflexively declare “all government wars unjust” without context, we arrive at absurd implications, that it was unjust for the U.K. to fight Hitler’s Germany. One can consistently hold that the state is an aggressor in general and that in a particular war, that state’s military might be repelling a greater aggressor.

Objection 2: “Both sides are killing innocents now. Isn’t a life an absolute value? Doesn’t the fact that innocents will die mean we must call for an immediate ceasefire?”

Rebuttal: Consider the logical consequence of saying “nothing is worth the death of a child, therefore stop fighting immediately.” If an aggressor is still committing atrocities, halting defensive operations will not save lives in the long run; it will cost many more. Sometimes, tragically, the only way to ensure more children don’t die in the future is to take decisive action now. It is harsh but true: sometimes inaction in the face of aggression results in far greater slaughter of the innocent. Mises wrote about “the pitiless annihilation of Nazism” as a terrible but necessary step to secure a future peace.[24]

Objection 3: “By picking a side, aren’t we sliding into nationalism or statism?”

Rebuttal: There is a difference between sober moral analysis and jingoistic cheerleading. Saying “in this conflict, side X is in the right because it is acting in self-defense” is not nationalism; it’s principle. We are advocating conditional support for the individual rights being defended against aggression. When a different conflict arises where, say, Russia invades Ukraine, we logically apply the standard: Russia is the aggressor, Ukraine’s defense is justified. That doesn’t make us flag-wavers; it makes us consistent defenders of the non-aggression principle.[29]

Objection 4: “Libertarians should be pacifists. Doesn’t violence always beget more violence?”

Rebuttal: Libertarianism is a philosophy of non-aggression, not non-violence per se. We abhor the initiation of violence but uphold the right of self-defense.[4] Nonviolent resistance works under certain conditions, mainly when the aggressor has moral scruples. Against a totally ruthless opponent, unarmed protest will simply be massacred. As Walter Block noted, pacifism is compatible with libertarianism but not required.[19] The proper ethical stance is that initiating force is wrong, but using force to thwart a wrongdoer is a virtue.[30]

Objection 5: “Austrians cite aggregates all the time. Rothbard used stagflation statistics to critique Keynesianism. Similarly, citing war casualties doesn’t constitute methodological collectivism.”

Rebuttal: When Rothbard used stagflation data against Keynesianism, he wasn’t treating aggregates as primary theoretical constructs but as symptoms of underlying individual actions. The methodological error occurs when casualty figures become the primary basis for moral judgment, divorced from individual agency and intent. When analysis reduces to “both sides killed 100 children, therefore both are equally culpable,” it ignores who initiated force, who targeted civilians versus who sought to avoid them, and who bears responsibility for creating the conditions of violence. As Hayek noted, even Keynes understood his theory addressed specific conditions rather than universal truths.[32] Just as Austrian economists use data without becoming Keynesians, war analysis can cite casualties without becoming collectivist, but only by maintaining focus on individual agency, choice, and moral responsibility. Recent voluntaryist scholarship reinforces this by examining both mens rea (intent) and actus reus (act) in defensive actions.[33]

 

VII. Final Thoughts

Libertarianism is, at its heart, a philosophy of peace. We seek a world where individuals interact through voluntary exchange, not through force. In that sense, authentic libertarianism is deeply anti-war. However, being anti-war must not mean abandoning logic, context, and principle.

What I set out to critique was the internal contradiction that arises when some libertarians drift from methodological individualism to a kind of macro-collectivist pacifism, talking about aggregate death tolls without reference to who is doing what to whom. It’s the equivalent of a libertarian economist suddenly embracing GDP planning: it just doesn’t fit our framework.

Restoring libertarian rigor to anti-war arguments means reemphasizing the primacy of the individual.

Restoring libertarian rigor to anti-war arguments means reemphasizing the primacy of the individual, both as the moral unit and the unit of analysis. We judge actions, not collectives. We care who started an altercation and who retaliated. We value intentions and qualitative choices, not just quantitative outcomes.

By injecting this clarity, libertarians can avoid the moral faux pas of false equivalence. We can stand firmly against interventions and aggressive wars while still affirming that not all violence is morally equal. A libertarian community confronted by a criminal gang should defend itself. These are not betrayals of peace, but defenses of it.

Libertarians must remember that the individual, not the death toll, is the truest moral unit. Every war is tragically made up of individual crimes (by aggressors) and individual acts of courage (by defenders). Just as Austrian economists understand the limitations of aggregate statistics while still using them carefully, libertarians can oppose war while maintaining moral clarity about who bears responsibility for violence.

We should neither collectivize guilt (“all soldiers are equally murderers”) nor collectivize victimhood (“war victimizes everyone equally”). Instead, we assign guilt and victimhood as the facts warrant. By keeping our focus on individual agency and the distinction between aggression and self-defense, we can offer an anti-war perspective that is passionately pro-peace yet intellectually honest.

Let us reclaim the narrative: libertarians are the fiercest opponents of war because we refuse to blur moral lines. We know that only by clearly identifying and condemning aggression can we ever hope to eliminate war. We don’t “see no difference” between sides; we see the crucial difference between violating rights and defending them.

Ultimately, our vision is a world where all conflicts are resolved without violence. To get there, we need moral clarity in the here and now. That means supporting the innocent against the aggressor, every time. Peace and liberty thrive when justice is done, and justice demands we never equate the aggressor and the defender. By avoiding that internal contradiction, libertarians can provide a consistently principled anti-war voice that truly advances the cause of peace grounded in freedom and responsibility.

 

 

This essay is a condensed version of the essay “Did Methodological Individualism Get Lost in a Sea of Body Counts?” published on the author’s Substack.

 

 

 

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