Left Libertarian Alliance

Georg Haslam, Blog Co-Editor

“Live free or die”. These were the closing words of my co-editor Mor’s introduction to individual sovereignty. (It is truly excellent. If you are not already familiar with the concept of individual sovereignty, pause here and read her article first.)

This sentiment captures the basic human desire to break free from all chains of oppression and live without undue interference. The desire to govern one’s own life and resist the impingement of power from above is both persistent and, once achieved, liberating.

Not convinced? Imagine a world where every decision that one individual could make is instead made by a central authority. Not just political decisions. Every decision. What you eat for breakfast. What you wear. Which career you pursue. Who you speak to. Where you go. For most, this would be intolerable. This scenario may seem absurd, yet it reflects a growing reality in many aspects of day-to-day life: rigid housing markets making it harder to own your own home, opaque algorithms curating your social media feed, bureaucratic and inflexible education and healthcare systems, a corporate world that values profit over personhood. Decisions are increasingly made not only by centralised authorities disconnected from the average person, but also by complex AI codes that do not even have the experience of being human. Without the capacity to live freely, the very nature of what it means to be a person – creativity, individuality, resilience – is diminished. At the centre lies a fundamental question: who has legitimate authority to make decisions for you, if not you? Subsidiarity offers a compelling answer. Every decision, where possible, should be made at the lowest administrative level.

I. Subsidiarity & Sovereignty

Catholic Social Teaching may be an odd place for a left-libertarian to start, but subsidiarity as a tenet of the Catholic Church dates back to a time before Western liberalism was well-established. It was particularly asserted as a key principle in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, continuing a legacy that dates back to Aquinas and Aristotle, where he emphasised that decisions should not be centralised – instead, social hierarchy should give preference to actions at an individual or community level, rather than those decreed by corporations or states. To those today critical of top-down mandates, this seems amenable.

“Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry, […] so is it an injustice […] to assign to a greater and higher association what less and subordinate organisations can do.” (QA, par. 79).

Beyond Catholicism, subsidiarity’s emphasis on decentralisation, autonomy, and resistance against top-down authority resonates with libertarians. Its implications function more concretely as a method of governance, rather than only as a moral guide. In a secular world, religious is however insufficient to demonstrate either the validity or the benefit of organisation based on subsidiarity. Religious belief alone is not enough to give subsidiarity legitimacy, and its principle must be updated for the modern day.

Unlike the emphasis on hierarchical authority that is presented in Catholic Social Teaching, which can be used to rationalise intervention against an individual on moral or religious grounds, libertarian thought instead contends that such assertions falter in modern society, where consensus around personal ethics is elusive. Libertarians instead give significance to the Non-Aggression Principle, which resolves that no individual or collective may initiate coercion or force against another. Allowing the free exercise of an individual’s sovereignty, where that individual is of sound mind, is a manifestation of this non-aggression. As such, libertarians reject the legitimacy of higher-order institutions, such as states and churches when they try to override an individual’s sovereignty without said individual’s explicit consent.

Despite its ancestry in Catholic paternalism, subsidiarity nonetheless finds a natural ally in the libertarian tradition, albeit libertarians strip it of its hierarchical underpinning. Whether a higher authority, political or ecclesiastical, deems an action to be morally permissible holds no relevance if it involves aggression against another. Libertarians frame this sovereignty as self-ownership. As the sole owner of one’s mind and person, one has a right to live according to their own values, so long as they do not aggress against another.

Subsidiarity is a powerful tool to fulfil individual sovereignty. Why? Because, if sovereignty entails that an individual has the right to govern their person and property, subsidiarity codifies this control within institutions. Decisions should be kept at the closest possible level to the individual and not escalated without reason. Where there is debate or dispute, the most local and most voluntary means of resolution is often the most viable and the most legitimate.

Yet this results in an obvious problem. Moving authority closer to the individual does not, on its own, necessitate that that authority is less coercive than a centralised state. In some instances, a small community can be considerably more intrusive, especially if formal law is substituted with social pressure. It is not then as simple as “smaller is better”. Does this mean, therefore, that, where a local community fails, a central authority should become involved? If this is the case, what gives that central authority legitimacy, and what constitutes a localised failure?

II. Non-Aggression, Participation, & Empowerment

The libertarian response, then, is not necessarily intervention by a higher authority, but the preservation of an exit right. Individuals must have the capacity to disengage from ineffective arrangements and seek alternatives, be that through advocating for different governance models, joining or founding different voluntary associations, or seceding from larger sociopolitical entities. The Non-Aggression Principle ensures that this exit must remain peaceful, and that no individual can be compelled to remain in an arrangement they find oppressive. This chimes with independence movements fighting for self-determination worldwide, from Scotland to Kurdistan.  Without this formalised exit option, a system of free association risks reverting back to either centralised authority or the suppression of plurality through majority without recourse to alternative associations. Both of these outcomes themselves oppress the sovereignty of an individual.

Crucial to sovereignty as non-aggression is consent. An action towards a person without their consent is both immoral and illegitimate – this applies even when the aggressor is a collective or an institution. All social and political arrangements must be entered into voluntarily, and individuals must have the ability to associate and disassociate as they please, provided that they do not initiate force in doing so. This extends to governance itself. For any institution to exert authority over an individual, it must have their explicit or implicit consent. Yet, in modern society, implicit consent is a fiction. Even if one does not consent to the authority imposed upon them by an institution, one currently has no practical capacity to exit the system and remain a free individual.

Subsidiarity, applied alongside the Non-Aggression Principle, offers a solution by allowing for polycentric governance. Multiple jurisdictions can coexist and overlap, and each individual may freely associate within them. Individual sovereignty therefore does not mean social isolation or the erosion of community bonds. Nonetheless, individuals do not have to live under the oppression of forced association; rather, their sovereignty allows them to form communities, without the constraint of groups in which they no longer feel part.

With the ability to associate at will, subsidiarity becomes a tool for participation and empowerment. This reflects a broader libertarian critique of top-down governance, where policies are decided by elites distanced from the communities they serve. Friedrich Hayek demonstrated this in The Road to Serfdom, where he argued that centralised planning inevitably leads to inefficiency and oppression. His argument is not primarily about individual sovereignty, but about the limits of centralised knowledge. When relevant information is dispersed throughout society, much of it is embedded in the particular circumstances and experiences of individuals. A central authority cannot easily gather and process all of this knowledge, meaning that decisions made further from the circumstances they affect can be less responsive to local conditions. The argument for subsidiarity can, ergo, be made epistemically. Decisions should often be made as close as possible to the people who possess the knowledge necessary to make them.

There is a notable distinction, however, between Hayek’s argument and mine. Hayek’s concern is primarily whether decisions can be made effectively; my concern is also whether the authority to make those decisions is legitimate. A local institution may know more than a central government and still exercise that knowledge coercively. Decentralisation therefore cannot, by itself, establish freedom. It has to be combined with the principles of consent and non-aggression developed above. Hayek consequently strengthens the case for subsidiarity without providing its complete justification. Whilst his account explains why centralised decision-making can fail, individual sovereignty explains why decision-making should, where possible, remain with those directly affected by it.

If Hayek explains why decisions should remain close to those who possess the relevant knowledge, the next question is why those people should have the authority to act on that knowledge. Empowerment goes beyond participation to imply ownership. Individuals who are free to make their own choices are more invested in the outcomes and less reliant on coercive or punitive enforcement mechanisms. This is the essence of self-determination, a principle central to both liberty and contemporary democracy. Subsidiarity is, as such the natural extension of individual sovereignty (chs. 12-13). If one holds that an individual has sovereignty over themselves, it follows that decisions concerning them should be made by either that individual or the closest to them capable of making such a decision, and that the impact of the decision should be felt most directly by the person who reaches it.

Up to here, the argument looks distinctively right-libertarian. If sovereignty is simply the right to exclude others from decisions pertaining to an individual, subsidiarity does little to address the conditions that make this autonomy possible. Yet many on the left advocate specifically for subsidiarity as a methodology through which the sovereignty of the individual can be enacted, and the conditions which grant this sovereignty can be enabled. Proudhon, in The Federative Principle (Ch. 2) in 1863, proposes “government of each by each”. His philosophy of mutualism emboldens a similar principle to subsidiarity, placing emphasis on organising social relations as locally and voluntarily as feasible. His advocacy therefore extends to the left-libertarian understanding of the optimal social order; whereby harmonious society can be achieved through peer-to-peer cooperation more effectively than through the imposition of authority. Here, cooperatives pose one option for subsidiary organisation. His vision of governance specifically emphasises an individual’s autonomy, and, resultantly, their empowerment.

Subsidiarity as the road to empowerment is about trusting people to govern themselves. It rejects the paternalistic assumption that only experts can make the “right” decisions. Instead, the closest people to a problem have the largest say over its solution and the individual is empowered to become the expert through the repeated practice of decision-making. It is not for me to say what is best for you, nor you for me, and any institution that claims to be granted such ability without consent infringes on the individual.

III. Subsidiarity & Entitlements

So, libertarian society relies on consent over coercion, and individual freedom empowers them to be sovereign. A common critique of sovereignty lies on the assumption that allowing individuals absolute freedom over their actions therefore allows for murder, injury, and other reprehensible harms. A theory focused on consent already addresses this, as these transgressions are determined unjust due to the absence of consent, and as such maximal sovereignty facilitated on the basis of non-aggression safeguards against this.

If individual sovereignty is understood as a property right over oneself, as is a common libertarian framing, the theory of entitlements posited in Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Ch. 2) becomes thus applicable. Nozickian entitlements traditionally govern the just acquisition and transference of property and how injustices can be rectified. Nozick’s starting point is itself self-ownership, where he asserts that individuals have rights that trump collective goals. Consequently, an individual cannot legitimately be coerced to act against their will (such as through conscription or forced labour), the use of their mind or body cannot be dictated (such as through restrictions on their freedom of speech or mandated assimilation), and a share of their labour cannot be claimed (such as through many forms of tax). For a system based on sovereignty and non-aggression, these entitlements would therefore establish important limits on what individuals and institutions can legitimately do.

This is where my argument differs substantially from Nozick’s. Whilst Nozick focuses primarily on entitlements that exist as fixed rights prior to social organisation and the state, I am treating them as arrangements that people construct together. Subsidiarity reframes entitlement theory itself. Without relying on natural rights, it suggests that entitlements are nonetheless consistently produced through cooperation and commitment to non-aggression. For example, housing can be managed through community land trusts, employment can be organised through workers’ cooperatives, and natural resources can be stewarded directly by communities. Subsidiarity, as the structural backbone of these entitlements, opposes both state overreach and the concentration of private authorities, without requiring a normative claim of absolute ownership. The legitimacy of an entitlement instead depends on whether those affected by it have control over it, and whether those arrangements can be sustained without coercive domination.

Localism is not about atomising communities into disconnected individuals, nor about replacing national majoritarianism with a local one. Instead, subsidiarity institutionalises non-domination in a way that is reciprocal. This localism can then be scaled through free associations and federalised organisation, allowing for coordination across larger regions whilst preserving individual autonomy.

The entitlements produced through these arrangements are dynamic and contextualised, and can evolve through ongoing negotiations. Therefore, both reconciliation of past injustices and the prevention of future ones becomes a responsive, community-led initiative, rather than opaque and dogmatic procedures led by nation-states. Cooperatism, workplace democracy, and resource commons embed sovereignty in daily life, whilst retaining the necessities to sustain life and wellbeing. Freedom may thus be secured through collective self-determination, grounded in the day-to-day experience of those it empowers. The result is distinctly left-libertarian: autonomy is preserved through building institutions around practices that allow people to have a voice in all of the decisions affecting their lives.

IV. The Future of Governance

Subsidiarity requires experimentation. Different communities will find different ways of organising themselves, whilst preserving an individual’s capacity to leave or challenge those arrangements. The result is not one decentralised system imposed universally, but a diverse network of communities that each affirm their own members’ sovereignty. Left-libertarian entitlements, grounded in consent, offer a compelling argument for social organisation that prioritises subsidiarity. To govern a community must be to balance individual freedom and responsibilities that collectives take on. True autonomy requires the presence of enabling conditions, like land, food, and decision-making capacity, in order for an individual’s freedom to be given purpose. Subsidiarity provides a way to ensure these conditions are met at the most localised levels, whilst nonetheless facilitating free associations and nested governing structures when coordination and solidarity are required at a larger scale. The result is polycentric, but unified under the principle that no person or institution may claim authority over an individual without their consent.

This is not just a utopia. It is already being realised by global worker cooperatives, land stewardship in the Zapatista communities, and participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre. These examples demonstrate that subsidiarity works when governance is democratic, transparent, and rooted in lived realities. The future can become an ongoing experiment in freedom. An experiment that continually asks who decides, who benefits, and who is granted autonomy. There is no easy answer to the tension between individuals, communities, and wider responsibilities. Subsidiarity does not pretend to have an easy answer; instead, it changes the question. Rather than asking how much power a centralised authority should hold, it asks why that authority is needed at all.