The Authoritarian/Libertarian Hybrid1

We usually think of authoritarian and libertarian tendencies in politics as incompatible opposites. By authoritarian, I will mean here a condition in which the will of a leader is the dominant force in an organisation, a movement or a whole society. Such a regime may be based on coercion, but in many examples of political authoritarianism the leader has been democratically elected and has the emotional allegiance of a large number of citizens. They share a state of mind in which they are intensely identified with the leader, and with the group which the leader represents. An ideological code, demanding certain beliefs and behaviours, may also substitute for the person of a single leader. So the term ‘authoritarian’ needs to refer to a state of mind as well as to a regime. Freud's 1921 essay on group psychology was intended as a general theory of groups, but tends towards describing the state of mind of a member of an authoritarian group. Karl Figlio (2023) refers to this Freudian model of the group as a ‘super-ego community’, since in Freud's analysis it is the superego (as it came to be called) which is the part of the mind, in each individual group member, most involved in the tie to the group. An image of the leader, group or ideology comes to colonise the citizenly part of the superego, and so individuals concede their political agency to this occupying force and are at the bidding of the leader/group.

In contrast, I take libertarian to mean an ideological stance, and a state of mind, in which the dominant value is the freedom of individuals to pursue their own desires, with minimal restriction by the state or any other societal authority, or by pressure from any social group. As an ideological principle, libertarianism is a central presence in bohemian counter-cultures (e.g. the hippie ‘counter-culture’ of the 1960s) and also in the economics and politics of neo-liberalism. As a state of mind, it is the apparently opposite one to authoritariani