Libertarians for whom individualism is important cannot avoid discussions of culture, conformism, and social structure. Not every threat to liberty is backed by a government gun. Convention creates boundaries as thick as any border wall and ubiquitous as any surveillance state...A door is as good as a wall if we cannot imagine walking through it. It ought to seem obvious that a philosophy devoted to political liberty would concern itself with building a freedom-friendly culture. But the state-wary social conservative flinches when his li
bertarian friends celebrate the power of culture itself to liberate: the liberty of the pill, of pornography, of 600 channels where once there were three. The social conservative will refer to these wayward anti-statists as "cultural libertarians," by which he means libertines. And it will always be in his interest to argue that the libertarian, qua libertarian, should stay mute on issues of culture.
Culture and social norms are still overlooked in libertarian thought, but also in political philosophy more generally. Part of it is structural-- political philosophy is focused on politics, and people think of politics as constrained by the state, so they focus on states. Part of it is also probably because there is a concern that people will hear libertarians saying "people should do X" as "people should be legally required to do X" or concern that commenting on cultural issues is excessively moralistic or paternalistic in some way. But these concerns are unpersuasive, for reasons Howley describes:
As it turns out, all libertarians are cultural libertarians. We just don't share the same agenda. Some prefer to advance their agenda by pretending it doesn't exist: that social convention is not a matter of concern for those who believe in individual liberty. But when a libertarian claims that his philosophy has no cultural content—has nothing to say, for instance, about society's acceptance of gays and lesbians—he is engaging in a kind of cultural politics that welcomes the paternalism of the mob while balking at that of the state.
I think the core of libertarianism/anarchism is the belief that the state isn't morally special-- public officials should live by the same standards of permission and obligation as the rest of us. But that argument is only a first step. We should also ask, by what standards should the rest of us live?