"The nation" vs. the State
 

Slobodian notes that it is an error to say that libertarianism is concerned only with "individualism"
 
He notes that libertarians "become immediately concerned with investigating and proposing the conditions under which individualism can exist and be protected. This includes attention to laws and rules, quite obviously, but also to other parameters such as culture and heredity." (62)
 
This is how you end up with people like Murray Rothbard, who vituperate against the State but rally in defense of "the nation"
 
Rothbard: "While the state is a pernicious and coercive collectivist concept, the 'nation' may be and generally is voluntary. The nation properly refers, not to the State, but to the entire web of culture, values, traditions, religion, and language in which the individuals of a society are raised" (qt'd by Slobodian, 62)
 
"the nation is understood as both a racial and an economic asset to the Far Right" (69)
 
Right-wing economist Peter Bauer (see 78-9) downplays the category of "country" in favor of the more generic "groups of people" (which plays in to the "dynamic of dissolution" Slobodian has observed elsewhere)

> from Quinn Slobodian's Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (2024)

> tagged with #collectivism, #race, #fuckwits, #culture, #liberty, #government

> created September 3, 2026 at 2:58:50 PM


> part of unfinished everything


search unfinished everything


unfinished everything is an original work / ongoing project (1997-present) by jeremy p. bushnell

selection, arrangement, and original text available for creative reuse under this licensing arrangement

authors' quoted words are their own.


home |@jpb.bsky.social