The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues
Abstract
Andrew Koppelman’s new book Burning Down the House is a guide to some of the late stages of the libertarian collapse. It’s a book whose many virtues include its clear and simple prose style. As a result of that style, and its generally straightforward exposition, I think this book will be of real use to many people, perhaps especially to free-thinking former libertarians who are engaged in a project of self-deprogramming. The book makes a nice holiday gift to the former libertarian or wavering libertarian in your life who would like to learn more about the arc of how it all went wrong. Perhaps with that sort of audience in mind, Koppelman meets the semi-libertarian or ex-libertarian reader partway—in my view, considerably more than partway—offering an argument about how much was right with libertarianism before it went so spectacularly wrong. The result is an improbable love letter to Friedrich Hayek.
Hayek’s thought is nuanced and interesting. Rather than brushing away all contradictions, Hayek sometimes frankly acknowledges them. Koppelman leans into Hayek’s nuances. In Koppelman’s narrative, Hayek functions both as a bridge to the libertarian or libertarian-curious reader and as something grander: the avatar of the good version of libertarianism, the illustration of what libertarianism was like before it produced the likes of Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Charles Koch. In Koppelman’s narrative, Hayek stands for libertarianism without the “corruption and greed,” the indifference to real-world evidence, the general dogmatism. However, it is not clear that Hayek can bear the weight that Koppelman’s narrative assigns him. And there is a deeper problem. Koppelman’s decision to make Hayek his hero results in a book that endorses and celebrates, rather than deconstructing, the central error of libertarian thought that Hayek exemplifies. In other words, Koppelman’s aim seems to be to coax his reader to get off the libertarian train, and that is a worthy aim, but the book itself gets off the train too late.
Volume
26
Issue
2
Start Page
467
Faculty Editor
Steven Smith & Maimon Schwarzschild
Recommended Citation
Fishkin, Joseph
(2025)
"Freedom from Libertarianism,"
The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues: Vol. 26:
Iss.
2, Article 5.
Available at:
https://digital.sandiego.edu/jcli/vol26/iss2/5
