printWho is paleolibertarian? Yours truly argues political philosopher Jack Kerwick, in his New American column, “Ilana Mercer and the Paleolibertarian Ideal” :
“It is [first] the conviction … that a world in which men and women are free to order their lives in accordance with their own moral purposes, not those of the governments under which they live, is an ethical ideal worth aspiring toward.”
But that’s not all:
In addition, a paleolibertarian is someone who rejects “the contemporary Western temptation to indulge in abstractions,” and labors tirelessly “to remind us of something that this generation of liberty’s defenders are all too ready to forget: Liberty is as dependent upon historical and cultural contingencies as is any other artifact. And it is just as fragile.”
“The pursuit of the … paleolibertarian ideal,” concludes Kerwick, is the pursuit of “an ideal of liberty brought down from the clouds to the nit and the grit of the history and culture from which it emerged.”
The complete column, “Ilana Mercer and the Paleolibertarian Ideal,” is at The New American.
Jack also blogs at Belief.Net.