We may as well call Laozi an “anarchist” as a “libertarian”; he seems rather more interested in a classless society than a market-driven one.
I think that anarchists are contained within libertarianism; yes, he doesn’t look like an anarchocapitalist or a minarchist or so on, but that doesn’t mean he’s not libertarian. (I don’t think it’s quite fair to say “libertarianism in the modern American sense means anarchocapitalism,” but that may be because I’m more familiar with the variation in the modern strands of American libertarianism than the median American.)
Lots of people like to find old forerunners to their modern beliefs!
Well, I think that’s because there are lots of old forerunners to modern beliefs. Ecclesiastes has it almost right:
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
There is a cottage industry in going back to old academic works and finding the ideas that were before their time—that is, ‘modern’ discoveries that were discovered before and not recognized as important (or underdeveloped in some crucial way). It seems to me that we should suspect similar, if not greater, levels of reinvention in philosophy as math, and that we should also be unsurprised when it’s direct influence instead of reinvention.
I think that anarchists are contained within libertarianism; yes, he doesn’t look like an anarchocapitalist or a minarchist or so on, but that doesn’t mean he’s not libertarian. (I don’t think it’s quite fair to say “libertarianism in the modern American sense means anarchocapitalism,” but that may be because I’m more familiar with the variation in the modern strands of American libertarianism than the median American.)
Well, I think that’s because there are lots of old forerunners to modern beliefs. Ecclesiastes has it almost right:
There is a cottage industry in going back to old academic works and finding the ideas that were before their time—that is, ‘modern’ discoveries that were discovered before and not recognized as important (or underdeveloped in some crucial way). It seems to me that we should suspect similar, if not greater, levels of reinvention in philosophy as math, and that we should also be unsurprised when it’s direct influence instead of reinvention.