Georgetown U Topic: "Libertarianism"

For a rather lengthy article introducing the essential differences among right-libertarians and left-libertarians and socialist-libertarians, see this Karl Widerquist essay.
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Libertarianism

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The word “libertarian” in the sense of the combination of the word “liberty” and the suffix “-ian” literally means “of or about freedom.” It is an antonym of “authoritarian,” and the simplest dictionary definition is one who advocates liberty (Simpson and Weiner 1989). But the name “libertarianism” has been adopted by several very different political movements. Property rights advocates have popularized the association of the term with their ideology in the United States and to a lesser extent in other Englishspeaking countries. But they only began using the term in 1955 (Russell 1955). Before that, and in most of the rest of the world today, the term has been associated almost exclusively with leftists groups advocating egalitarian property rights or even the abolition of private property, such as anarchist socialists who began using the term nearly a century early, in 1858 (Woodcock 1962, p. 281). This entry distinguishes between three types of libertarianism, left, right, and socialist. It then considers the extent to which the policies of these three diverse groups overlap. The third section focuses on the policies right-libertarians, both because they have popularized their association with the name and because they have a more unified policy agenda.

Libertarianism: left, right, and socialist At least three distinct groups claim the name “libertarian” today. There is no clearly agreed terminology to distinguish the groups but the terms “left-libertarian,” “right-libertarian,” and “libertarian socialist” suffice. The three are not factions of a common movement, but distinct ideologies using the same label. Yet, they have a few commonalities.
 

Libertarian socialism: 

Libertarian socialists believe that all authority (government or private, dictatorial or democratic) is inherently dangerous and possibly tyrannical. Some endorse the motto: where there is authority, there is no freedom.  Libertarian socialism is also known as “anarchism,” “libertarian communism,” and “anarchist communism,” It has a variety of offshoots including “anarcho-syndicalism,” which stresses worker control of enterprises and was very influential in Latin American and in Spain in the 1930s (Rocker 1989 [1938]; Woodcock 1962); “feminist anarchism,” which stresses person freedoms (Brown 1993); and “eco-anarchism” (Bookchin 1997), which stresses community control of the local economy and gives libertarian socialism connection with Green and environmental movements. Modern libertarian socialists include Noam Chomsky (2003; 2004), Murray Bookchin (1986; 1997), Sam Dolgoff (Dolgoff 1986), Daniel Guérin (2005), Colin Ward (1973), and George Woodcock (1962). They take their defining influence from the early socialists who split from the Marxists because of their opposition to the authoritarian aspects of the dictatorship of the proletariat. These thinkers include Pierre Joseph Proudhon (Proudhon 1994), Michael Bakunin (Bakunin 1972), Peter Kropotkin (1995), Rudolf Rocker (Rocker 1989 [1938]), and Emma Goldman (1969 [1911]). To some extent anarchist forbearers also include Max Stirner, Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and the early liberal tradition (Woodcock 1962), although some anarchists are hostile to what could be called “bourgeois liberalism.”

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