…The libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate, in part because it did not fully knit the human considerations and joint cooperative activities it left room for more closely into its fabric. It neglected the symbolic importance of an official political concern with issues or problems, as a way of marking their importance or urgency, and hence of expressing, intensifying, channeling, encouraging, and validating our private actions and concerns toward them. Joint goals that the government ignore completely—it is different with private or family goals—tend to appear unworthy of our joint attention and hence to receive little. There are some things we choose to do together through government in solemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the fact that we do them together in this official fashion and often also by the content of the action itself.

“It’s all very well,” someone might say, “to mark human solidarity through official action, but we do that through respecting the rights of individuals not to have their peaceful lives interfered with, not to be murdered, etc. and this is sufficient expression of our human respect for our fellow citizens; not only is there no need to interfere any more greatly in citizens’ lives in order to bind them more closely to their fellows, that interference with individual autonomy itself denotes a lack of respect for it.” Yet our concern for individual autonomy and liberty too is itself in part an expressive concern. We believe these valuable not simply because of the particular actions they enable someone to choose to perform, or the goods they enable him to aquire, but because of the ways they enable him to engage in pointed and elaborate self-expressive and self-symbolizing activities that further elaborate and develop a person. A concern for the expression and symbolization of values that can best and most pointedly, not to mention most efficiently, be expressed jointly and officially—that is, politically—is continuous with a concern for individual self-expression. There are many sides of ourselves that seek symbolic self-expression and even if the personal side were to be given priority, there is no reason to grant it sole sway. If symbolically expressing something is a way of intensifying its reality, we will not want to truncate the political realm so as to truncate the reality of our social solidarity and humane concern for others. I do not mean to imply that the public realm is only a matter of joint self-expression; we wish also by this actually to accomplish something and make things different and we would not find some policies adequately expressive of solidarity with others if we believed they would not serve to help or sustain them. The libertarian view looked solely at the purpose of government, not at its meaning; hence, it took an unduly narrow view of purpose, too…

— Robert Nozick, from “The Zigzag of Politics”

2:30 pm  •  24 September 2010  •  1 note  •  View comments