Are YOU the anti-protest libertarian?

Conor Gearty is eminent. This is, therefore, troublingly juvenile.

"There are two strands to the concept of liberty which are in opposition here. One is the libertarianism we have just been discussing, the "Englishman's home is his castle" school of thought. The other is the position of the civil libertarian who sees the freedom of protest as essential to the proper running of our democratic state because he or she ultimately believes in the power of the state to do good. The first wants to hide from society, the second wants to make it better. There is all the difference in the world between the individualism of the libertarian and the idealism of the political activist. The left naturally belongs with the second of these not the first."

This is a silly caricature of libertarians, who I suppose might choose to hide from society, but might equally want to participate in the thriving civil society they predict (usually at tedious length) will emerge from rolling back the state. Libertarians do believe in the power of the state to do good (as we can glean from useful hints like...um...their support of the existence of the state) but not that its doing good and doing more are endlessly identical. They mention this a lot.

But let's grant Gearty his straw man. It's a free country. We must still note, open-mouthed, that the two strands of liberty he has discovered are "in opposition".

This entails the conclusion that right-wing libertarians are against the right to protest - that in some way political activism is opposed to liberty. But who? Who are these people, locked up in their farms with only a copy of the Telegraph and a signed photo of Tony Martin for company, railing silently against the right to protest? What thinkers and opinion-formers have been putting this side of the libertarian argument?

The desire to remain a liberal while supporting an increasingly powerful state has caused intellectual contortions in many a great thinker of the last hundred years. But surely Guardian readers deserve a more credible enemy than this.