It is no secret that Robert Heinlein is greatly beloved by many, if not most of those who label themselves or their political viewpoint "libertarian." My question is, why?

I pose this question not because I disbelieve that Heinlein was at least sympathic with the general notion of libertarianism, or that those who admire him for that quality are somehow wrong. It just seems to me that the question and the answer are mired in that swamp of "everybody knows" that has plagued so many other areas of Heinlein understanding. As we've seen, taking a good hard objective look at things "everybody knows" have turned up some surprising, often contrary conclusions.

Heinlein was a political chameleon. One assessment (the older "everybody knows" one) is that he was a socialist democrat in his earliest days, so far left that his fringes were distinctly pink... who then apparently morphed into a strong conservative, very right-wing, in later years. What seems to me to be a more thoughtful and realistic assessment is that established by Bill Patterson and others, that Heinlein's view and value set changed remarkably little over his lifetime, and that it was the political continuum that changed around him. (This can seem positively heretical to those who know politics only in our current, ultra-polarized present; if you aren't aware, for example, that the Democrats were until quite recently the party of racial oppression while the Republican party came into existence on a platform of abolitionism, or otherwise understand how much the political landscape shifts and heaves from era to era like any other living entity, you may not be able to contribute much to this discussion.)

Heinlein was certainly deeply involved with what are regarded as far-left movements in his earlier life (until he was about 40), and supported strongly right-wing candidates and positions later in life (from about 50 onwards.) There is also no question that Heinlein, in his later years, went out of his way to obscure his early political connections with the Social Democrats, Upton Sinclair, EPIC, etc. This is all background to the central question, though.

That question, as best as I can distill it, is this: Were Heinlein's political views at any time, especially in the latter third of his life, truly well-characterized as "libertarian"? Is the admiration that libertarians have for Robert Heinlein well-founded? As a collateral question, analyze why The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is so beloved of libertarians - this seems to be key to much of the perception of Heinlein's stance, and may lead to a fiction vs. fact dichotomy.

I'll state that I have no horse in this race: you can end up proving that Heinlein was anything from Communist to Fascist for all I care. (I find Heinlein's politics to be one of the least interesting areas of study, although I am evidently in some minority there.) I am just bothered, when it comes to the "libertarian" tag, by the rather sloppy "everybody knows" nature of the beliefs and attributions. I'd like to see the collective brain kick over a few rocks in pursuit of some more rigorous truth. I'd like it even more if the discussion relies more on facts supported by specific citations than on sweeping claims and generalizations.

I have placed this discussion in the Advanced forum not to discourage anyone from participating but to emphasize that I'm looking for the best this community can do in contributing to a definitive result.

My general opinion about Heinlein, politics, and fiction, not of particular relevance to libertarianism, but perhaps helpful in this discussion:

Heinlein enjoyed figuring out what he could do if he had a fission-powered rocket that heated liquid zinc, or a torchship that directly converted matter to m-c-squared and could swallow any working fluid, or a family space yacht that ran on "single-H." He covered butcher paper with calculations working out orbits, launch windows, Oberth maneuvers, and so forth. He had the necessary mental tools to speculate about spaceflight, and he loved doing so.

Same with governments.

He played around with variations and erected fictional governments in considerable detail. Beyond This Horizon. Starship Troopers. Double Star. They weren't consistent with one another. They weren't necessarily systems Heinlein wanted to live under. He was exploring them. And he wanted to get the reader to explore them too.

This culminates in the celebrated passage in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress where Prof tosses out half a dozen wacky ideas for a fresh Loonie government. They may not be practical, but they certainly bear thinking about.

To Heinlein, governments were toys. Rather like starships.

Continuation of reply to Jim Gifford

However, this is not a definition of libertarianism -- it is merely the indispensable, ground condition to be met. If your target does not meet this qualification, he/she/it is *something else.*

There are dozens of different kinds of libertarians, who concentrate on different aspects of theory and practice. The individualist anarchists who make up the radical MOLL wing of the movement, consider that the minarchists who make up the overwhelmingly predominant center of the movement are kidding themselves, and that once you give a state the right to claim sole right to regulate use of force (the technical definition of a state), then there is no pragmatic way to restrict it to the three functions most minarchists agree are "legitimate" functions of a state - police, courts, army.

So, having stated the groundwork, was Heinlein at any time in the last half of his life legitimately characterized as a libertarian that would be recognized as such by people in the movement?

As a side note, he characterized himself in letters as both a libertarian and as an "individualist anarchist" who does not call himself that for pragmatic reasons; and in person he introduced Neil Schulman around as a young writer, in the early 1970's (probably 1974-ish) saying "Neil and I are libertarians."

-no 30 -

Actually, Bill, both Republicans and Democrats were run by political machines -- it's just that the Democrats tended to do so in the big cities, because of the immigrant populations. There were also progressives in both the parties, as witness Woodrow Wilson, and the progressive reforms the Democratic-controlled Congress passed during his presidency.

Thanks for the link, Fred. It was an interesting article. It brought in some players that I wasn't aware of, who might have influenced Heinlein.

This popped back up, and I just want to mention that I pegged RAH as a Jeffersonian Republican, and Ginny fully agreed.

Also, his historian brother's Ph.D. was on Jefferson's Sec-Treasury, Albert Gallatin.

Where RAH is coming out of is the Real Whig tradition (Engish writers opposing the growth of patronage and a Crown Party in early 1700s England, who opposed what they saw as corruption, and provided the American Revolutionaries with their basic conspiracy plot: 1) beware debt, because it places government in service to the rich; 2) which then leads to higher taxes, which are taken from the middle and lower classes, because the rich are not going to get taxed to pay back money to themselves; 3) watch for the growth of the bureaucracy, because it will be filled with nepotism and flunkies as favors to the rich; and 4) beware the standing army, because it will be used in times of peace to remove your freedoms and liberties and force you to conform to the payment of the debt, the rise in taxes, and the growth of government.

Hence, what drove the American Revolution was this paranoid fear of what they thought the British government was trying to do, rather than, perhaps, what it actually was doing.

Jefferson lived his whole life fighting the American Revolution -- and I think this is a fair description of RAH -- and Ginny, as well.

Jefferson's liberal party, which morphed over time into the Democrats, was opposed violently to debt, to large government, and to taxes; it was highly in favor of farmers, education, and a spread to new frontiers. There is more to cite, but that's a good start.

The Jeffersonians were the party of the frontier, of the movement west, of independent educated yeoman farmers (and think of how often that forms the backbone of Heinlein's applause).

As they were also the party of slavery, one also has to be worried about how this tradition cannot be applied blindly to RAH.

Rather, it is the reforming spirit of Jefferson which left the party as it solidified into the party of slaveowners and immigrants under Jackson and his successors.

I think we can trace that spirit through the Freesoilers, the early Republican party, the freethought tradition of people like Robert Ingersoll, and most importantly, the farmers' movements of the Grange and the Populists, which also inspired the Progressive movement.

It is the Progressive movement that is the "matrix" that forms RAH's lifelong desire to find solutions to problems through research, logic, pragmatism, and group effort. Woodrow Wilson was the president of his childhood (and Wilson's racism was not as widely known as it is now)' the dream of the League of Nations became RAH's commitment to one world government, until the first world trip disabused him of the idea that most of the world understood democratic traditions necessary for a successful world government.

His supposed movement from the left to the right is more that he was standing firm in this classic liberal position, while the rest of the country moved WAY to the left (and, I must say, WAY to the right). RAH was deeply concerned in maintaining the American character, as defined largely by the strains I've outlined above. In the thirties, the problem was economic, and so, the Republicans' refusal to consider new solutions, and their wholesale abandonment of the Progressive "we can solve any problem" mindset led him to FDR -- who was, very much, Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson's successor. At the end of the forties, the problem became that of nuclear war and the end of the earth; he supported Truman, and JFK, in their firm opposition, and raged at Eisenhower -- most publicly! -- in his supposed failure to prepare for facing the Soviets. His turn to AuH20 is only surprising in that we forget that Goldwater came AFTER the Patrick Henry campaign -- and that RAH firmly rejected the John Birchers as well (when they told him what he could or could not read....).

I have often thought that his books from the fifties on are an increasingly intensifying effort to sustain, defend, and project the American character he saw as under serious threat -- and that he turned to whoever would serve that purpose, as well as assaulting whatever strains of the current political situation threatened that character (Farnham's Freehold attacks the communist/nuclear threat, but it also rejects any concept of character or power based on skin color, black or white; Bill once told me he couldn't understand why RAH wrote Job, until I pointed out the rise of Falwell and the Moral Majority).

I get the feeling I need to write all this up; clearly, it's been too long since I published something....lol....

A very good job of linking Heinlein's influences together, Robert. It certainly makes sense, and helps to dispel the notion that Heinlein's political thinking changed radically over time. Thanks for that. I do hope you find an appropriate forum to expand on your thoughts.

Might be helpful: on the semantic shift of the term "liberal" (from Jeffersonian classical liberalism to Wilsonian progressivism), see In my mind this jibes with Dr. James analysis above, and helps a great deal in understanding how Heinlein, like Mencken and many others, was perceived to shift position while actually standing firm.

Perhaps not so surprisingly, that book is on my desk this morning....I keep meaning to read it....

My conservative department chair dumped this article on my desk this morning, which led me to read it again.

There are some breathtakingly bad assumptions at the end of this; RAH specifically denied LeFevre was the model, and Ginny did not form the model for RAH's later beliefs. Like many, Riggenbach takes Asimov at his word. Sadly, the more I learn about Asimov, the more I realize how little he really understood nuance and human nature. And Asimov's politics were so engrained into him he never questioned any of his beliefs on that scale -- a liberal he was from day 1 to the end. While RAH did shift on a few positions, due to new information, Asimov was a New Deal liberal in almost all his public pronouncements. Leaving out, of course, his early flirtations, along with Pohl, of his Marxism....

Asimov also seems to have completely skewed our impression of Campbell as a guide; Campbell jokes in a letter that only Asimov ever took his guidance so thoroughly. Campbell offered ideas, and critical feedback; only with Asimov were the suggestions and training so thoroughly imbibed....

Robert

Is Riggenbach correct in saying that Asimov new Heinlein from the mid-30's onward? I'd be truly surprised to find out that they had any relationship at all before Heinlein published "Life-Line" Did they ever meet face to face before they both showed up working for the Navy in Philly during WWII?

I love that story about RAH slipping Asimov rum in his coke -- Asimov's character was such that RAH said something along the lines of "No wonder he doesn't drink...it shuts him up!"

By deny, I mean the idea that he was the sole model. IIRC, there are letters at the time which discuss the issue; RAH may well have told him that.

I will have to take a look at the correspondence.

Skimmed the thread. If I missed something relevant, apologies.

It seems to me that there was if not exactly a war between halves of Robert Heinlein, there were at least halves.

There was an aesthetic half, and a practical half.

The aesthetic half had preferences. The practical half tried hard to live in the real world as he found it, applying considerable intelligence to the problems it presented at the moment.

The aesthetic half preferred freedom, of practically any kind you can name that stopped short of damaging another. If you want to put the label of "libertarianism" on that, I won't argue --tho once you got into the nitty-gritty of this position or that, Robert certainly might have. I once watched a debate between Libertarians on repudiating military pensions and military health benefits "Come the Revolution". I think even Robert's aesthetic half would have peeled paint in response.

The practical half recognized there were limitations on when what the aesthetic half would prefer were practical to the situation.

This created, on the surface, contradictions. I don't find them so. I find them the compromises of an intelligent and feeling man depending on the context he was in at the moment. Context is incredibly important in Heinlein (as, indeed, it is in real life). If you don't get that, you'll always be frustrated in reading the entire Works and trying to make sense of them on a macro scale.

Later in life (and career) he put some effort into trying to reconcile aesthetic and practical by creating practical (in his view, at least --others my differ on his success) where his aesthetic could romp thru the fields of wildflowers. Actually, he tried early too (see FUTL), and learned the lesson that it wasn't yet time when he could get away with that and fill the station wagon with grocieries at the same time.

It doesn't just occur in economics either, in my view. You can see it in religion as well, if you've read the right letters. I don't know how you can reconcile the obvious (even without having read the right letters, tho they make it easier) duality of Heinlein-mysticism and Heinlein-hell-on-organized-religion without grokking the above.

I think what I would posit in place of Bill's assertion is this: anyone who is deeply spiritual (like Emerson) has a tendency to reject organized religion (like Emerson) because organized religion tends to substitute ritual for substance. When the ritual is paid more attention to than the substance it was meant to produce in the first place, you've got yourself a dead church.

Heinlein was opposed to dead churches, of all varieties -- and placed himself firmly against any organization or institution that prevented people from fully living. I honestly think this is why he applied the term "anarchist" to himself -- because he refused to follow any rules which prevented him from fully living, even as he clung to rules (like the military) which he accepted in their entirety.

Insofar as RAH believed every human being had the right to decide for himself how to live their life, he was a libertarian; when those actions impacted negatively on others, he rejected them (hence his hostility to pacifism and communism, as well as things like Comstock laws, censorship, and bad parenting...)

You have the freedom to fail -- but you have no right to have me pay for your freedom.

This is, I think, the essence of his libertarianism.

It is the end product of the lineages I traced above.

I believe in this case the exception may disprove the rule....

Organized Catholicism as a group has a LOT to answer for...but

My Uncle Johnny (Pere Jean to the rest of the world) has lived in the jungles of Haiti for over 50 years. He is a Catholic priest in a country that he wryly describes as 95% Catholic, 5% protestant and 100% Voodoo.

And for over 50 years he has been humbly trying to teach Haitians to read. Not in Port-Au-Prince with its palaces and rich people – he lives in the backwoods of Haiti – a three day donkey ride through the jungle. For Christmas we used to send him packages of pencils and paper because there was never enough for them there, until the postal system became so corrupt we could not send packages anymore. During the hurricane floods he swam out (he was pushing 80 years old) - we thought we had lost him. He arrived on dry land with no medicine, no passport, nothing.

And after he came home for a while to heal he went BACK. Over the STRENUOUS objections of his family.

During the earthquake he did not even come home - he was just very sad and tired and there was a very lot for him to do. At least this time he was able to be relatively safe.

When the thugs were driving around shooting at people during the Papa Doc stuff he stayed. And again for the Baby Doc stuff.

He told me once that the only way to have a democracy was to have a literate citizenry. So for all these years he has lived in the poorest country in the world in poverty that we can barely imagine, with decades of malaria and lately more serious diseases, and isolation from all of us for so long that he might as well have been living on a spaceship with no contact from earth in a lot of ways. And he did this because that is what he felt he needed to do. And in his case the Church was the vehicle for that.

Spirituality is not a function of organization - it is an earned (and by definition a HUMBLE) quality that demands a great deal. I would take Uncle Johnny's spiritualism in a heartbeat over any of the horde of loudly self-proclaimed “spiritual people” who never get off their ass and DO anything in the name of their faith, (or for any reason) whether organized or not.

I do not know if RAH ever met anyone from organized religion who was like my Uncle Johnny - but I am sure he would have recognized him for what he is. And if the Church made him into that, then that is fine with me.

There was a Maureen Dowd column recently that said this more eloquently than I can – but Uncle Johnny is MY lesson on condemning the whole for the acts of a few...so here you go.

Take care,

Audrey

Just as there are teachers for whom the system will not dissuade from actually teaching, there are Catholics for whom the system will not dissuade from actually believing....

Truly inspiring story!

I think it was the institutionalism more than the religion that Bill was talking about, and I agree there. The confrontation between St. Francis of Assisi and the pope in the movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon comes to mind. It works both ways: California is home to plenty of people who institutionalized hippie spirituality.

Great story about a great man, Audrey. I wish I'd known him. If Heinlein had known him, he'd have written about him, for sure.

Note to self: Telling someone how excellent their spouse is, turns out to be horrible failure as friendly trolling device.

CNN asks to joing the "spirituality but not religious" discussion here: http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/personal ... tml?hpt=C1

My first reaction is to bitchslap the jesuit priest who can make such a statement with a straight face without demanding the Vatican sell its art collection and historical documents/artifacts collection (hey, take hi-res images first, by all means) on the open market at the same time.

so did heinlein suport this project www.new-utopia.com ?since the founder to the name laazarus loong and talk abut a libertain island
or is the wolhoe thing just sued for fraud ?by some investoer or charter citizens ?(could not find any infomation on the internet for class action but some infor from 2005 say sombody would eh take action...and now when usa goverment got all those bank acunntes lisit from foermer tax shleter empolyers in bermuda and antigua..

it did before not just based on the ideas to ayn rand objecvists but also karl popper pilospher any simmlaer ideas ?

sorry i am from north europe i am not so mcuh into libertansim or the way amricans think abut goverment and the difrences between let say ross pero and sarah palin...

sorry enghlis are not my first lanuges

frank you're doing great ! welcome to the forum

To be absolutely clear about it, I think RAH considered libertarianism to be impossible when combined with a large, complex society and/or democracy. He liked to think about frontier societies, which ideally could be fairly libertarian. He liked to think about picking up and leaving once a society required ID cards. But he was quite capable of advocating policies that led to more liberty in a society that was not, at its base, libertarian.

The Loonies in MOON are an excellent example and I wish I hadn't posted my thinking about them in another thread. To be brief, when they had no choice, because a libertarian society was forced on them by authority (what an irony) They made a go of a very loose society, made it so attractive that many libertarians think of it as their ideal. When they had won their independence, they began a struggle to see whose vision of statism should prevail and left Hazel Stone complaining about their loss of liberty after they won their revolution.

Heinlein would have liked to be a libertarian. For practical reasons, he was simply another lover of liberty.

THANKS so he was some kind of survavlist ? what abut time enhug for love more metaphysic version of freedom then pracitcl ?
did try to read stranger in stranger land was a bit to long and a bit strange mix of magic realism and sf so did go back to johan morgan and paul machury

I just recently came across H.G.Wells Shape of Things to Come and started reading it again, 40 years or so from the first time. The first 1/3 or so of it is topical, even today and rang bells with me from "For Us, the Living".
Wells was SMART..I hadn't tumbled to that fact before. (duh!) Take a look if you've forgotten and tell me if you see what I might be there.

actually I meant on the .. economic theory the two seem to have in common.
I have always passed him by and never looked deeper than the popular stories. My loss.

eh i was thinking more of independent i am happy alone do my owen thing survalist thinking or are this just a mainstream western rual usa way of thinking ?
then evrything was better before and world go to hell attitude/wilderness kind of thinking nto that im a expert on survalism:) hmm medical technlogy?
i guss it would just be a frontier to move to a vrigin island or venuzulea that have good medecine but a bit eh forinter feeling or to thailand or inda that eh not have the reptuioan of law and order as a let say a western europen country or a north armarican state/province have
IT JUSt a quastion of build a gated comunity in a poor country ?
or give the local enhugt jobes to acsept you ?

(look at gated comunity of scandinves in spain they live ther but sont speak much espanjol and only give work to the african imigrantes that have papers and the condos mostly paid by drug mony...)
hmm dont most those survlist chas in ther gold when they get old to live in a gated coumntiy in nevada or arizaONA ?

sorry for maybe dobel posting but i guss its not that same discussen here?and aging sorry form my bad spelling and dyslistic amraicns say my langues are very ahrd to learn