Princeton-Humboldt Project to Explore a Global Libertarian Movement

Shamus Khan, the Willard Thorp Professor of Sociology and American Studies, studies America’s elite class through the lens of their schools and institutions. He, along with Humboldt University sociologist Daniel Bultmann, is now working on a PIIRS-funded project called “Global Sociology of Transnational Elites, Inequalities and Values,” that will examine growing libertarian political movements throughout the world, particularly in the United States and Europe. Khan discusses his work, the many shapes libertarianism takes around the globe, and why PIIRS partnerships, such as this one, are so important.

How did you get started with studying the elite class in America?

In 2003, a very famous paper came out in the Quarterly Journal of Economics by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, showing that most inequality was driven by rich people, not poor people. Since the ’60s, poor people have been economically locked in place, and what this helps us see is that poor people have nothing to do with inequality, because they're not moving. The people who are moving around the economic spectrum are the rich people. And rich people are getting richer — so that made me super interested in studying elites.

How do you go about studying elites?

I tend to take qualitative approaches, which means going to places, hanging out with people, and seeing how they navigate their everyday lives. I studied a super elite boarding school by watching the students. The result was my book called Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. I've worked with elite institutions, for example, the New York Philharmonic, to track over time who's been going to classical music concerts. Also, where do people sit in the hall in relation to where they live in town? How are those two things related to each other over time? 
I'm writing a book now on the history of the Astor family using this historical approach and trying to understand the dynamics of elites in American society, and to a certain degree, globally as well. That work is the foundation of why researchers at Humboldt wanted to work with me. Humboldt sociologist Daniel Bultman reached out to me to do something together, but on a more global scale. 

Elites think that there's a lot of mobility in the United States and that there are more possibilities for economic opportunity. They are right about themselves, but not about the general United States.

In a few years’ time, one expected outcome of this collaboration is a joint paper. What will it be about?

I think a major portion of that paper is going to look at the dissemination of ideas among varieties of libertarians. There has been a large-scale movement of libertarians to undermine the idea of the value of state power and state capacity. A libertarian’s premise is that it's better not to have regulations and to let markets run unconstrained. This has turned into somewhat of a global movement. We see it in Brazil, throughout Africa, and of course in the United States. 
We're interested in seeing how libertarian communities have had impacts across the world. It's grown in power in a wide range of places, and it's very different from classic conservatism. Our work will attempt to also capture and evaluate this idea that there's been a shift in the political winds and in right-wing movements of some kind. Who are these groups and how do they relate to one another? 

How does Libertarianism appear in European politics?

That’s one thing we’ll be looking at: How do Libertarians fit in with other conservative movements within the space that they live in? It's hard to be a libertarian in Norway, but there are some. So if you're a libertarian in Norway, what are your coalitions, because libertarians shouldn't necessarily be super pro borders, right? And yet, a lot of conservative movements in Scandinavia and right-wing movements are obsessed with borders. This gets really interesting the in the European case, especially when you consider their parliamentary democracies, where all political parties need to have alliances with other groups. In the European case, libertarians can be a political party. Then where do they align themselves? This is a question for all political parties. You must give up some of your principles to align with certain kinds of political actors, or at least say that these principles are more important to us than others. So viewing those tradeoffs becomes really interesting and important. 
Also in Europe, there are a lot of conservative movements that are not quite anti-capitalist but are much more pro-family — family in a conservative sense. For example, the thought is that a good economic arrangement is one where men make a sufficient amount of money so women can be in the home. Libertarians would not, in their political philosophy, subscribe to this kind of orientation. Yet they may find themselves in a context where they have to align or ally with conservative political movements that, to a degree, are anti-market inasmuch as they don't actually think that markets should be broadly open to all people. There are other institutions, like families, that are more important. So this leads to interesting dynamics. 
There are certain unities, for instance, the tech bro culture and libertarianism, that really align well with one another, as tech culture tends to evade regulation. Libertarianism becomes a helpful political philosophy because it says that regulation is morally bad and therefore should be avoided, as it leads to worse outcomes. If you are an AI startup that is the perfect political philosophy for you, because you don't want your product regulated. You may even want to resist monopoly claims, or any suggestion that the state should intervene in markets in any way.
Finally, there's the interesting question of, if you fundamentally don't believe in the value of the state, what does it mean to start engaging in the state through politics? And that is fascinating. 

Why are these kinds of scholarly international partnerships important?
We scholars have a huge bias relative to the information available to us. For example, elites think that there's a lot of mobility in the United States and that there are more possibilities for economic opportunity. They are right about themselves, but not about the general United States. If you look at elites today, huge portions of them — especially compared to the 1960s — are immigrants. They are new-wealth people and are much more mobile than they would have been years ago. If you look at the wages of elites, they've skyrocketed. When they think, “I live in a world with a lot of opportunity where if you just work hard, you can get ahead,” they're absolutely wrong on a national level, but they are not wrong on their own little level. They see a huge amount of economic growth and possibilities, and so they're susceptible to availability bias and end up making assumptions. 
We do the same as scholars. I know a lot about some areas, and I tend to assume that the things that I know a lot about are generalizable beyond that context. Having other scholars who don't live in the second Trump administration and are thinking about other kinds of questions is super helpful. The Germans are going to have a different perspective. That different perspective offers a glimpse at the peculiarity and particularity of our own approach, and that is a valuable thing.