It was a fundamental principle of the Enlightenment that the nature of the human person can be adequately described without mention of social relationships. A person’s relations with others, even if important, are not essential and describe nothing that is, strictly speaking, necessary to one’s being what one is. This principle underlies all their talk about the “state of nature” and the “social contract,” and from it is derived the notion that the only obligations are those voluntarily assumed.

This was later summed up by Bentham, for whom the idea of “relation” is but a “fictitious entity,” though necessary for ‘convenience of discourse.’ And, more specifically, he remarks that “the community is a fictitious body,” and it is but “the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.”

Some amusing reviews of this woman’s work.

Libertarianism is an empty harbor lacking an answer to State-paternalism–both ideologies end up in the same place because they share an autonomous-ontology. Adherents to State-voluntarism view the State as the source and arbiter of human relations. Thus, while adherents to State-voluntarism may value “community,” they see community and solidarity as synonymous with bureaucratic expansion. Libertarians manly view any human relation or community as an intrusive threat and a possible gateway to Statism. Ontologically, both ideologies view the human person as naturally empty of any relations—to God, others and the natural world–and thus empty of any naturally given responsibility to God, others or the natural world.

As R.R. Reno often notes, the State-centric view of morality is an esoteric morality of “healthy choices.” Thus, State-voluntarist ethics are essentially bourgeois–centered on “success,” sentimental notions of altruism and “service,” and “open” to accommodate any deconstruction of morality. In effect, bourgeois ethics are a reduction of morality and human work that has proved as destructive as any outright deconstructionist ideology. Therefore, neither is conservatism–rooted in an essentially bourgeoisie ethic that shares Libertarianism’s and Statism’s autonomous ontological roots–a substantial answer to State-voluntarism. Conservatism has all but accommodated no-fault divorce which was a foot in the door that lead to other deconstructions of marriage and the familial/social integration that State-paternalism only exacerbates.

Too fat, in debt, few savings etc. are today the result of coercive and underhanded government policies that promoted sugary carbohydrates, misdirected investment with inflation, and penalize savings.

So the solution is…more of them?!

If, like Rousseau, one believes that freedom consists in a people obeying laws of their own making and magistrates of their own choosing, so that government action is the consummated result of the citizens’ own organized wishes, this has a sort of remorseless logic about it.