Consistency: Point/Counterpoint: Emerson, Rand, Kinsella

by Stephan Kinsella on October 1, 2026

Circular Reasoning in the Law

Emerson:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with the shadow on the wall. Speak what you think [90]now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day.—”Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.”—Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras[186] was misunderstood, and Socrates,[187] and Jesus, and Luther,[188] and Copernicus,[189] and Galileo,[190] and Newton,[191] and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ¹

Ayn Rand:

You might claim—as most people do—that you have never been influenced by philosophy. I will ask you to check that claim. Have you ever thought or said the following? “Don’t be so sure—nobody can be certain of anything.” You got that notion from David Hume (and many, many others), even though you might never have heard of him. Or: “This may be good in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.” You got that from Plato. Or: “That was a rotten thing to do, but it’s only human, nobody is perfect in this world.” You got that from Augustine. Or: “It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” You got it from William James. Or: “I couldn’t help it! Nobody can help anything he does.” You got it from Hegel. Or: “I can’t prove it, but I feel that it’s true.” You got it from Kant. Or: “It’s logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality.” You got it from Kant. Or: “It’s evil, because it’s selfish.” You got it from Kant. Have you heard the modern activists say: “Act first, think afterward”? They got it from John Dewey.

Some people might answer: “Sure, I’ve said those things at different times, but I don’t have to believe that stuff all of the time. It may have been true yesterday, but it’s not true today.” They got it from Hegel. They might say: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” They got it from a very little mind, Emerson. They might say: “But can’t one compromise and borrow different ideas from different philosophies according to the expediency of the moment?” They got it from Richard Nixon—who got it from William James. ²

But see Mendehall:

Emerson’s nonconformist ethic opposed habits of thinking, which society influenced but did not determine. Emerson famously stated that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. What he meant, I think, is that humans ought to improve themselves by tapping into intuitive truths. Nature, with her figures, forms, and outlines, provides images that the individual can harness to create beauty and energize the self. Beauty therefore does not exist in the world; rather, the human mind makes beauty out of the externalities it has internalized. Beauty, accordingly, resides within us, but only after we create it. ³

Kinsella: On consistency, see Legal Foundations of a Free Society, Preface, p. xxi; ch. 1, p. 6; ch. 2, pp. 27 et seq.:

CONSISTENCY AND PRINCIPLE

Not only libertarians are civilized. Most people give some weight to some of the above considerations. In their eyes, a person is the owner of his own body—usually. A homesteader owns the resource he appropriates—unless the state takes it from him “by operation of law.”^[38] This is the principal distinction between libertarians and non-libertarians: libertarians are consistently opposed to aggression, defined in terms of invasion of property borders, where property rights are understood to be assigned on the basis of self-ownership, in the case of bodies, and on the basis of prior possession or homesteading and contractual transfer of title, in the case of other things (plus transfers for purposes of rectification).

This framework for rights is motivated by the libertarian’s consistent and principled valuing of peaceful interaction and cooperation—in short, of civilized behavior. A parallel to the Misesian view of human action may be illuminating here. According to Mises, human action is aimed at alleviating some felt uneasiness.^[39] Thus, means are employed, according to the actor’s understanding of causal laws, to achieve various ends—ultimately, the removal of some felt uneasiness.

Civilized man feels uneasy at the prospect of violent struggles with others. On the one hand, he wants, for some practical reason, to control a given scarce resource and to use violence against another person, if necessary, to achieve this control. On the other hand, he also wants to avoid a wrongful use of force. Civilized man, for some reason, feels reluctance, uneasiness, at the prospect of violent interaction with his fellow man. Perhaps he has reluctance to violently clash with others over certain objects because he has empathy with them.^[40] Perhaps the instinct to cooperate is a result of social evolution. As Mises noted,

There are people whose only aim is to improve the condition of their own ego. There are other people with whom awareness of the troubles of their fellow men causes as much uneasiness as or even more uneasiness than their own wants.^[41]

Whatever the reason, because of this uneasiness, when there is the potential for violent conflict, the civilized man seeks justification for the forceful control of a scarce resource which he desires but which some other person opposes. Empathy—or whatever spurs man to adopt the libertarian grundnorms—gives rise to a certain form of uneasiness, which gives rise to ethical action. Civilized man may be defined as he who seeks justification for the use of interpersonal violence. When the inevitable need to engage in violence arises—for defense of life or property—civilized man seeks justification. Naturally, since this justification-seeking is done by people who are inclined to reason and peace (justification is after all a peaceful activity that necessarily takes place during discourse),^[42] what they seek are rules that are fair, potentially acceptable to all, grounded in the nature of things, and universalizable, and that permit conflict-free use of resources. Libertarian property rights principles emerge as the only candidate that satisfies these criteria. Thus, if civilized man is he who seeks justification for the use of violence, the libertarian is he who is serious about this endeavor. He has a deep, principled, innate opposition to violence, and an equally deep commitment to peace and cooperation.

For the foregoing reasons, libertarianism may be said to be the political philosophy that consistently favors social rules aimed at promoting peace, prosperity, and cooperation.^[43] It recognizes that the only rules that satisfy the civilized grundnorms are the self-ownership principle and the Lockean homesteading principle, applied as consistently as possible.

And as I have argued elsewhere, because the state necessarily commits aggression, the consistent libertarian, in opposing aggression, is also an anarchist.^[44]

^[38] State laws and constitutional provisions often pay lip service to the existence of various personal and property rights, but then take them back by recognizing the right of the state to regulate or infringe the right so long as it is “by law” or “not arbitrary.” See, e.g., Constitution of Russia, art. 25 (“The home shall be inviolable. No one shall have the right to get into a house against the will of those living there, except for the cases established by a federal law or by court decision”) and art. 34 (“Everyone shall have the right to freely use his or her abilities and property for entrepreneurial or any other economic activity not prohibited by the law”); Constitution of Estonia, art. 31 (“Estonian citizens shall have the right to engage in commercial activities and to form profit-making associations and leagues. The law may determine conditions and procedures for the exercise of this right”); Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 17 (“Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.… No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”); art. 29(2) (“In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society”).

^[39] Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Scholar’s ed. (Auburn, Ala: Mises Institute, 1998; https://mises.org/library/human-action-0), pp. 13–14, et pass.

^[40] For further discussion of the role of empathy in the adoption of libertarian grundnorms, see note 22, above.

^[41] Mises, Human Action, p. 14.

^[42] As Hoppe explains, “Justification—proof, conjecture, refutation—is argumentative justification.” Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, p. 384; also ibid., p. 413; and Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 155 et pass.

^[43] For this reason Henry Hazlitt’s proposed name “cooperatism” for the freedom philosophy, has some appeal, to me at least. See Kinsella, “The new libertarianism: anti-capitalist and socialist; or: I prefer Hazlitt’s ‘Cooperatism,’” StephanKinsella.com (June 19, 2009).

^[44] See “What It Means to Be an Anarcho-Capitalist” (ch. 3); also Jan Narveson, “The Anarchist’s Case,” in Respecting Persons in Theory and Practice (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002; https://perma.cc/2P24-H4JL). ⁴