Cardozo School of Law professor Ekow N. Yankah disagrees, asserting that it’s through the state that we achieve virtue. Thus not only does libertarianism undermine our quest for virtue, but it is also “totally at odds … with social science, our most ancient philosophical thinking about the nature of human virtue and most strikingly, our everyday experiences.”

If true, that makes libertarianism sound rather bad. Fortunately for libertarians, Yankah’s argument doesn’t work. Parsing exactly what that argument is, though, proves difficult. Conceptual confusions abound, and much of the essay amounts to assault on a straw man. So much is packed into what Professor Yankah’s written that I can’t cover all of that in just one post. But it’s all worth covering, because Yankah’s essay neatly encapsulates an all‐​too‐​common caricature of libertarianism and captures well the utopian thinking about the state that may be biggest barrier to a freer world.

So in this post, I’ll look only at Yankah’s distorted picture of libertarians as anti‐​social hermits who take “the romantic view that standing alone is virtuous.”

According to Yankah, libertarians are–or aspire to be–“self-sufficient and virtuous frontiers[men],” which he contrasts with a truer picture of “human beings as deeply social and political animals.” Our idealization of self‐​sufficiency leads us to reject the idea that “the best things we do depend on countless joint legal and political commitments.” We fail to recognize that “distinctly human virtues can only be developed when we act together to pursue a shared vision of a good live [sic].” And thus libertarianism stakes out a politics that would cut us off from the “heights of our capacities,” which “can only be reached by supporting the good life through our law and politics.”

So a libertarian is someone who thinks self‐​sufficiency is the highest virtue, rejects social ties, finds no value in shared conceptions of the good life, and sees no need for law or political commitments.

I don’t know about you, but this picture of libertarians certainly doesn’t match my experience. And it by no means describes me. Let’s start with the rejection of law.

Given that most libertarians are not anarchists, most libertarians agree that laws and a state to enforce them are necessary for a well‐​functioning society. Even anarchists see a need for law, but claim it can arise and be enforced without a state–that is, without an organization that “upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order,” to quote Max Weber.

Libertarians want laws to protect our rights, and also laws to facilitate our working together on projects we can’t accomplish alone. This means libertarians don’t just see the need for a criminal code (prohibitions on assault, theft, murder, etc.), but also a system of contract law, property, and civil suits to allow us to live well with each other and feel secure in our persons and projects.

The idea that libertarians reject social ties and also the virtues found in working together for a common cause is even more baffling. The entire underpinning of the free market economics, so central to the libertarianism world view, is that by working together we can accomplish amazing things far beyond what any of us could do on our own. Professor Yankah offers this hypothetical as an example of the sort of thinking libertarians, he believes, reject: