Philosophical Libertarianism

I’ve been working for a while on a entry on libertarianism as a political philosophy for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It’s meant to explain the theory and some of the most common objections to it to a undergraduate/graduate student audience. My main goal in writing it was to move beyond the standard Nozickian/self-ownership varities of libertarianism and provide an overview of consequentialist versions of the theory as well. Some mention is also made of teleological and contractarian approaches as well, but mostly just to alert the reader that they exist. At any rate, I think the piece does better than most existing summaries at reflecting the diversity of libertarian theories, even if it isn’t always able to go into great depth regarding the arguments for and against.

The work is still under some revision, so I’d be happy for any feedback I can get. If you think it’s a useful resource for your students, please feel free to share it with them (and I’d be happy to hear about it!). If you think it’s horribly biased, poorly written, conceptually sloppy, etc., I guess I’d be happy in some sense to hear that too.

The article is not up yet on IEP, but can be accessed off of SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1069042.

Thanks!