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Ruth Arundell, "Machan Versus Locke: Is "Pure" Liberalism Possible?", Res Publica III/2 (1997), 149-163: This paper responds to a paper by Tibor Machan - "Does Libertarianism Imply the Welfare State" - in the same issue. In that paper Machan defends libertarianism as merely the purified and fully consistent conceptualization of Lockean "rights", arguing that as such it has the necessary moral foundations to be a contender for the status of the just or good human polity, and one which would engender less "innocent" poverty than does the welfare state. I argue that libertarianism cannot claim Lockean foundations. Either Locke's political philosophy is firmly grounded in natural law theory, in which case it cannot be "purified" of this without undermining its moral foundations or it is a composite position which, stripped of elements unwanted by libertarianism, reduces to a Hobbesian radical individualism which is ultimately subjectivist and cannot therefore support the claims Machan makes. Machan's attempt to redeploy statistics reflecting high levels of material inequality in the United States of America in service of the argument that people in less "libertarian" countries are worse off than even the poorest people in the U.S.A. fails, since arguments about the relative poverty of people in different countries need to take account of not only their income, but also their different social needs. e-mail: rma3@ukc.ac.uk

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