Reactionary Libertarianism

Reactionary Libertarianism or Reactbert, for short (Not to be confused with Reactionary Liberalism or Reactlib) is an economically far-right, Libertarian, and reactionary ideology inspired by Belgium political philosopher, Frank Van Dun, who in an article |The 'Reactionary' Libertarianism of Frank Van dun written by Richard Storey shows extracts from Frank's correspondence with him outlining the case that the Church was in fact the greatest limitation to the rise of states in Northern Europe.

Beliefs
It primarily believes that Christianity and the Christian church, despite many believing it to be so, didn't bring about centralized government nor  Statism, but quite the opposite, it managed to hindrance the growth of centralization for some time.

They call that, rather, centralization was brought about by the English system from the Conquest onward; it was virtually impossible to achieve on the continent. However, because royal absolutism did not last as long in England as it did on the Continent, “English freedom” became the model to follow in the 18th century.

It also criticizes the and its tailor-made “ideology of Enlightenment”, which (as so much of later progressive ideology) had a vital interest in obliterating everything that was associated with the stateless order of the medieval period and the role of the church in formal education in said period of time.

Among many things Frank criticizes in previously mentioned extracts, he criticized how Rothbardianism remained virtually silent on the statelessness of the medieval system, besides some very few mentions, while actively presupposing some form of (what he called) Lutheran individualism, upon which is superimposed a structure of property and contract relations but which does not pay much, if any, attention to questions of responsibility and justificatory arguments.

The Origin of the State
First we need to define the state. ‘State’ derives from the Latin ‘status’. In the 15th century, however, it began to be used in Italian principalities and cities to refer to their “political economy” (the realm considered as a single household). However, even today there remains an ambiguity: the state as a single economy (now usually called ‘a society’) and the state as the apparatus of rule and government within society (which puts every inhabitant of a country inside or outside the state apparatus).

Frank, though, believes that the term has been overly [mis]applied in the modern times, calling any system of rule a state, whether or not the rulers even claimed to have the right to govern anything but their household and whether or not they ruled by customary prerogative or governed by “the rights of conquest” (the former excluding, the latter including the “rights” to legislate and to tax at will).

It is also important to define Statism. Frank defines it as the idea that the ruler should have not only the power to rule (as supreme commander in times of war, as diplomat, and as judge in some but not necessarily all disputes among his subjects) but also the power to govern. A medieval king ruled his realm but did not govern anything within it except his own household. Government (as distinct from rule) was a matter of private housekeeping.

Frank Van Dun believes the state (in the west) was a gradual transition from medieval rule to the modern political government, the latter reaching its full expression from the 16th century onwards (After the disasters and wars of the 14th century and the wars of the 15th century) when some major medieval kings became monarchs and the idea that the monarch's power to govern extended as far as imperium started being standarized.

This, then, lead to the formal organization of regular departments of government and their bureaucratization, in other words, the separation of the purely administrative aspects of government from the purely political aspects. Thus the previous coceived idea that kings were first among equals with special prerogatives but no superior rights was as good as dead.

Statelessness of the medieval system
Frank raised the case of the Medieval system as Libertarian or  Anarchist, saying that it was not only anarchistic in the sense that it was situated in a stateless environment but also in the sense that it was intended to be anti-state.

In the words of Frank Van Dun the church was not only a protector of “private law systems” but rather the great protector of it. Without the church these systems wouldn't have been able to develop. Frank says that in medieval times, free cities, universities, mercantile associations, large estates, etc... developed their own systems of private law-keeping or, in other words, private systems of governance. These were more or less closed (private) economies (households or associations of households).

The Church insisted on their support for natural law, which kept those “private systems” compatible with each other as to basic principles and prevented them from turning into separate collections of special-interest privileges.

To put it in simpler terms, the Church oversaw the integrity of the system without interfering in the internal ordering of individual households or associations of households, unless they threatened to take over by forcefully eliminating the independence of other households.

Not having an army of her own, the Church had to rely on the good will of others, i.e. on her moral and theological prestige and authority (her intellectual capital). In diminishing the Church’s authority and by robbing her of much wealth and income (and by implication, bargaining power), the Protestant crisis certainly undermined the major pillar of support for the medieval “private systems of governance.”

Friends

 * Reactionary Liberalism - You are almost the same as me.
 * National Capitalism - Literally me!
 * Confessionalism - " I was screamin' at my dad, he told me, "It ain't Christ-like"
 * Conservatism - Cool but you've got to REACT!

Frenemies
WIP

Enemies
WIP

Articles
The 'Reactionary' Libertarianism of Frank Van Dun by Richard Storey