Most people have the sense that they haven’t achieved everything they’re capable of (though many mature into reasonable perspectives about their decisions and their use of time, as well as a more accurate assessment of their talents relative to the wider world). People often feel possessed of energies that their ordinary lives prevent them from fully tapping into. That’s why libertarianism so often appeals to adolescents, and why there’s something perpetually adolescent about the doctrine: it arises from a self-centeredness—an affirmation of a strength seemingly ever-renewed in the face of external opposition—that young people feel daily. The simplification of society and the reduction of its ills to a single issue lends the doctrine further youth appeal. Ron Paul seems to speak with a clarity and directness that’s unusual for a political candidate—he does away with the complexities of life that other candidates, in a wide variety of ways, all confront.

Even now, when Paul talks economics, he often sounds as if he were drawing a spiritual distinction between the dubious bureaucratic trickery that might damn us and the hard, productive work—no bailouts, no subsidies, no easy credit—that will redeem us.

Traditional authority comes with a fist and can be rejected with a knife; the first-person recourse to resistance—and the obsession with weapons—is a part of the libertarian dogma. But most authority is actually unseen; the law seems to hang in the air like an invisible net. Taxes, foreign policy, and civil-rights laws are all ultimately enforced with the threat of physical violence (that’s the nature of government), but most of their regulations are enacted with a pen and put into practice with—well, with what? Usually, with changes in the behavior of citizens, from paperwork and check-writing to constraints on hiring practices, negotiations, and compromises, all of which the libertarian takes as an onerous encumbrance and even, at times, a collective mind-control. The fundamental trope of libertarianism is close to the paranoid mind-set of the person who thinks that his brain is being controlled by radio waves.

I’ve often described the Western as the philosophical genre par excellence, because it depicts a world in which social functions that modern society treats bureaucratically and abstractly are realized physically and immediately, as in the early chapters of Plato’s “Republic,” where Socrates creates the “city in speech” from nothing. Libertarians are nostalgic for the Wild West, for a world of first-person action and for a society that seems radically cut off from the world—a kind of City on the Hill that looks to itself alone for physical, moral, and cultural sustenance.

Yet, as Sanneh writes, Paul hasn’t shied away from collaborating with the American Civil Liberties Union when their interests coincide. And yesterday, while thinking about the late Barney Rosset, one of the great freedom fighters of modern times, and flipping again through “Girls Lean Back Everywhere,” Edward de Grazia’s impassioned history of the struggle against censorship, I got to thinking about freedom itself. There’s something inherently selfish about it. Collective freedom doesn’t exist; freedom is the right of an individual to pursue a particular activity. The freedom of William Burroughs to write “Naked Lunch,” and of Barney Rosset to publish it, goes along with that of a bookseller to sell it, and that of the reader to buy and to read it—as well as of a person not to buy it and not to read it. But the person in the latter category, who repudiates and despises the book for its explicit sexual descriptions, will nonetheless be living in a society in which others may be exposed to those representations and ideas—and in which one’s friends or next of kin or children may choose to read or see such things.

Conservatives tend to emphasize social fabric and shared values as a counterweight to individual freedom, and there are liberals (I consider myself to be one) who are ready to constrain other freedoms (such as the universal bearing of firearms or the practice of racial or ethnic discrimination) in the interest of other values. But the over-all point is that both liberals and conservatives see freedom as a fundamental social value—yet not the only one, because they define both freedom and society in complex, experience-based terms. Libertarianism, in its glorious simplicity, is the other face of authentically oppressive tyrannies that force life into the Procrustean strictures of pathologically anti-individualistic ideologies.

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.