A Bleeding Heart Libertarian Blog

Andrew Sullivan says : "The gulf between the Obama administration's campaign rhetoric and governing record on civil liberties shows that building the left-libertarian alliance is more important than ever".

I’ve created this blog as a forum for academic philosophers who are attracted both to libertarianism and to ideals of social or distributive justice. Labels are often a greater source of confusion than insight in academic discourse, and no doubt most of the contributors to this blog will wish to qualify the sense in which they fit this description. Some, for instance, will qualify their libertarianism with a label – “left-libertarian,” or perhaps “liberaltarian." Others might prefer to think of themselves as “classical liberals” or even “market anarchists.” But libertarianism, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is a broad intellectual tradition bound together more by rough agreement than by meeting a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. What we have in common on this blog is an appreciati0n for market mechanisms, for voluntary social cooperation, for property rights, and for individual liberty. But we appreciate those things, in large part, because of the way they contribute to important human goods – and especially the way in which they allow some of society’s most vulnerable members to realize those goods.

Beyond this, there is almost certainly a tremendous range of disagreement among our participants, not only regarding labels but regarding deep substantive issues as well. I hope the conversation on this blog, both among our authors and among our commentators, will help to explore these disagreements, as well as our points of commonality.

Bleeding Heart Libertarians