The rhetoric of freedom and the practice of power: decontesting liberty from classical liberalism to contemporary libertarianism

Libertarian and anti-authoritarian vocabulary is increasingly used by actors who at the same time concentrate private or executive power. This paper asks how the same conceptual tradition can support both. Building on the morphological analysis of ideologies, it argues that the liberal tradition from Locke to Hayek came to understand liberty primarily as noninterference and treated formal consent as the main test of legitimacy. Private hierarchies, in turn, received little systematic attention. This conceptual architecture is a standing condition for what the paper calls the inversion of liberty. In such an inversion, the language of freedom is used to justify concentrated authority. Historical context and political rhetoric do not create this possibility on their own; they activate a possibility that is already built into the concepts. The argument is developed through the history of economic and political thought and through three contemporary cases: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Javier Milei. The analysis concerns the structure and use of concepts, not the motives of these actors. The paper concludes that a realistic liberalism must retain the institutional and moral embedding that classical thinkers attached to liberty. Otherwise, the tradition risks undermining its own purpose with its own vocabulary.