The Libertarian Tradition

Ayn Rand objectivists are more neocon than libertarian.Podcast episode for 11 August 2011.

Wilson's best known work was Illuminatus - an arcane conspiracy-based cult classic that won libertarian futurist awards. Wilson referred to his own beliefs as generalized agnosticism about everything.The biggest success of his freelance career was this three-volume satirical novel.

Historians must use Rand's sense of life to make their best guess of how things happened when the past facts are lost.All history is partly conjectural, because our knowledge is always limited.

Riggenbach's review of Mitchell's book is mixed because he does not find a fit with the political perspectives described as individualist or paleolibertarian.

Nathaniel Brandon and Sharon Presley saw the importance of psychology and the self-esteem movement for libertarians. People who lack self-confidence aren't likely to support efforts to achieve a free society, or even to understand why a free society is a desirable goal.

Ronald Hamowy and Ralph Raico were the best libertarian journalists. Their efforts included the quality publications New Individualist Review and Inquiry.It is not uncommon to see mainstream journalists accused of not bothering to read Hayek before they sit down to write about him.

Forerunner of the Austrian School, Bastiat contributed high quality popularization of such legal and economic ideas as legalized plunder, everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else and the fable of the broken window in which what is not seen is as important or more than what is seen.Ludwig von Mises opined in the 1920s that Bastiat's "critique of all protectionist and related tendencies is even today unsurpassed. The protectionists and interventionists have not been able to advance a single word in pertinent and objective rejoinder."

As the protege of Albert Jay Nock, La Follette's thinking reflected much of his own. Her valuable book Concerning Women stressed that the interests of the state are opposed to the interests of society and that economic freedom was needed for all not just for women. She was a rigorous opponent of all government interventionism.She had loved working with and for Albert Jay Nock. She had learned so much from him.

Although as a young man Kornbluth held leftist political views, he grew to share Rothbardian-style sentiments about the state. To Kornbluth the state was obviously just another criminal gang. His book The Syndic won the Libertarian Futurist Society's Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1986.Libertarian science-fiction fans under 40 are probably at least a little unclear on just who or what the Futurians were.

Chartier credits Rothbard more than Rand in shifting him from a statist to an anarchist. He deliberately does not use the L-word. Libertarians in their teens and twenties could do far worse than to let their own attention be captured by Gary Chartier's book.

As the fastest good writer, Bock was an intellectual libertarian doing the daily heavy lifting required to engage in the war of ideas.

The State manuscript and Bourne's famous phrase within it - War is the health of the state -was only discovered after his death. Bourne's radical anti-war views earned him the focused wrath of the pro-war group. The Randolph Bourne Institute and the website Antiwar.com are his memorial.His radically antiwar views on the eve of the US government's intervention in World War I got him fired from the New Republic . He stuck to his principles and produced some of the best antiwar and antistate writings of the 20th century. Bourne speaks to us today.

Goldfield's book fails at revisionism. The author does not grapple with the truth that the Civil War was not about slavery, that war does not boost an economy, and that Lincoln did not need to wage that war anyway.

Jacobs was a libertarian whether she knew it or not. The conclusions she drew were Misesian, just in a different way. Jacobs has also been compared to Hayek. Her The Death & Life of Great American Cities told essentially the same story as Hayek's The Use of Knowledge in Society. A city is a marketplace that cannot be planned.In the works of Jacobs, the order present in a well-functioning urban area emerges as the result of human action but not human design. It arises from a myriad of individuals each pursuing their own interest and carrying out their own plans, within a framework of rules.The basic logic of Jane Jacobs's work must lead an attentive reader inexorably to a libertarian view of human social relations.

Neither Sumner nor Herbert Spencer were social Darwinists - a moniker hung upon them both. What Social Classes Owe to Each Other answers that question with to take care of his or her own self. Minding other people's business is dangerous and wrong. Yet Sumner did think people owed each other compassion and assistance.There is considerable evidence that the entire concept of "social Darwinism" as we know it today was virtually invented by Richard Hofstadter. It certainly didn't apply to Sumner, who was a great libertarian. The description "social Darwinist" was never made of his views during his lifetime.

LeGuin, in The Dispossessed, and Delany, in Triton, explore various social arrangements in the search for happiness through the genre of utopian science fiction novels.The first half of the 1970s was a heady time for libertarians.

Seeing a Hayekian angle in William Gibson's science fiction novel, Pattern Recognition, may lead more thinkers to Hayek's The Use of Knowledge in Society and his other work.When Hayek came into Mises's employ, he favored the democratic-socialist politics of Wieser, his mentor at the university.

Andrew's contribution to anarchist thought was fleeting. He was a zealot in perpetual search of a movement. "Andrews seems to have been one of those people whose mind is so open that all his brains fall out." However, Andrew did lucidly elaborate on the thought of Josiah Warren.

The Clarence Darrow of 1902 was on pretty much the same wavelength as the Murray Rothbard of 80 years later. They both rejected the statist means. A criminal lawyer, Darrow held that "No condemnation is just, and no judgment is righteous. All violence and force are cruel, unjust and barbarous, and cannot be sustained by the judgment of men."

Author Jill Lepore's view is that it would be better if the Tea Partiers got their facts right. They seem to be just disaffected Republicans. The problem with the tea partiers is that their version of history is not radical enough.

Riggenbach finds individualism and anti-state themes in the works of four authors who would not call themselves libertarians: Anthony Burgess of A Clockwork Orange fame, Philip K. Dick in four of his novels, G. William Domhoff in Who Rules America, and Carroll Quigley in Tragedy & Hope...

Kropotkin, the founder of anarchist communism, defended the key ideas of libertarianism - social cooperation and rejection of coercion - and was the chief influencer of Murray Bookchin. Kropotkin is one of the half-dozen cases of anarchocommunists that are worth a second look.

Warren rejected Owen's communist colonies like New Harmony, Indiana, because he saw that the individual would be stifled by the common property scheme. "Peace, harmony, ease, security, happiness, will be found only in Individuality ."

Thaddeus Russell's Renegade History is highly recommended for showing, among many other things, that both individualism and Puritanism thrived in America even while they were political antagonists.In Russell's revisionist view of American history, you see, there is "an enduring civil war" between these two factions — the "renegades" and the "moral guardians," whom he also calls the "disciplinarians."

If you abjure all violence, you must abjure the state. Thus, while not all libertarians are pacifists, all pacifists are libertarians, whether they realize it or not (and, admittedly, a great many pacifists have not realized it). Gandhi, it appears, did realize it.

Christopher Beam did his homework in authoring The Trouble With Liberty, but he needs a firmer grasp of history. Bombs are not libertarian. Beam's chief problem, and the basic nature of New York magazine's ignorance, is a certain degree of historical illiteracy. But that's commonplace in our society. It is, therefore, one of the chief things we have to focus on.

Reclaiming the Mainstream was Joan's book that placed the origins of the American feminist movement in the abolitionist movement of the 19th century. Joan Kennedy Taylor first became involved in the libertarian movement in the early 1960s, when she was a student at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in New York City. As a student of Objectivism, she espoused the political views of Ayn Rand.

Childs was mightily impressed by what he read inside the covers of Rothbard's books and by what he heard from Rothbard himself in that famous living room. And he was determined to pass his enlightenment along to the students of Objectivism.

Joan Kennedy Taylor first became involved in the libertarian movement in the early 1960s, when she was a student at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in New York City. As a student of Objectivism, she espoused the political views of Ayn Rand.

You have only a few years to live and cannot hope to remake society in so short a time. Nobody now living will see a free society in America. But, in fighting for it, one can have a lot of fun. Consider the effort as a legacy to your great-grandchildren.

If we don't seek to use the vote to steer American society away from the direction in which it has been moving for all these many decades, what do we do instead? For Chodorov, that was a question very easily answered: we put our efforts into education.

Joan Samson was a Depression baby, born in 1937. In 1975, the year before her death, she published her only novel, The Auctioneer . This seems to be just about the sum total of what is publicly known about her, and that is a damn shame.

If Scott can excoriate most of his fellow historians for confounding "civilization" with "state-making," he himself can be excoriated for confounding statelessness with lack of government.

Ira Levin died just over three years ago, on November 12, 2007, at the age of 78, the largely unsung author of one of the top half-dozen libertarian novels ever published in our language. This Perfect Day has been out of print in recent years, so largely unsung is it.

When he was in his 20s, having newly discovered libertarian ideas, having read Rand, Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, and others, having met Rothbard and conversed with him at length, Nozick was fired up with excitement.

R.C. wouldn't tolerate news stories that referred to the "public schools," for example. His reporters were required to refer to them as "government schools." R.C. himself preferred the phrase "gun-run schools" and used it liberally on the editorial page.

Part of the experience of reading Newsweek in the early 1960s was a weekly column called "Business Tides." It offered wide-ranging and insightful commentary on just about anything that had anything to do with the economy or with economics.

Though he devoted much of his life to writing, editing, publishing, and political activism, it isn't really for any of these activities that Jo Labadie should be remembered fondly by libertarians in the 21st century. Rather it was his tendency never to throw anything away.

John T. Flynn was, if not the very first, then one of the very first few, of the revisionist journalists to write about the New Deal, focusing on both its domestic and its foreign policies. He is the beginning of historical revisionism where the New Deal is concerned.

Flynn was a liberal - a classical liberal. He held to the delusion that the state can be reformed. Wide differences existed on just what state coercion was permissible. Liberals did see that any government interference menaced freedom, but intervention was believed to increase security. A stateless society terrified liberals. A community without rulers was an unknown to them.Flynn gradually became more libertarian, more individualist. He was considered a member of the old right, while never being on the right.

The wave of bombings and assassinations perpetrated by anarchists during the 1890s was largely a fiction. To some extent, it was frankly invented by sensation-mongering writers who hoped to sell newspapers.

Mencken saw the implications of where his thinking was leading him and he acknowledged those implications frankly. "I am," he wrote in The Smart Set in 1922, "a libertarian of the most extreme variety."I suppose you might call it elitist individualism. It's the sort of individualism that is focused on self-realization and self-expression, and Mencken never makes any secret of the fact that he is primarily concerned with the self-realization and self-expression of what he calls "the superior man," that is, the individual of substantially above-average intelligence. "There are minds which start out with a superior equipment, and proceed to high and arduous deeds," he wrote in 1926, in the very book Walter Lippmann was reviewing when he called Mencken "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people."

Rocker was awful on economics, but his focus was not on that. He wrote about nationalism and culture, and here Rocker is fantastic. "States create no culture; indeed, they are often destroyed by higher forms of culture."

It is Republicans, not libertarians, who favor handouts to and special privileges for big corporations. And Republicans are not libertarians.

Friedenberg was among those who regarded US participation in the Vietnam War as an abomination. He had begun expressing his outrage in print in the mid-'60s, though most of it was directed at American public schools rather than at American foreign policy...

"As long as the easy, attractive, superficial philosophy of Statism remains in control of the citizen's mind, no beneficent social change can be effected, whether by revolution or by any other means."The sphere of government begins, where the freedom of competition ends, since in no other way can equal liberty be assured. But within this line I have always opposed governmental interference. I have been an active, consistent and absolute free trader and an opponent of all schemes that would limit the freedom of the individual.

Nonetheless, by reflecting further on Etienne de La Boetie's key insight about the politics of authority, the will to bondage, and the eager embrace of voluntary servitude, and by devising an ingenious test for their influence on the ordinary individual, Stanley Milgram made an important contribution to the libertarian tradition.

Fahrenheit 451 acknowledges that powerful impulses toward mindless conformity and suppression of deviation exist in the population itself — that, on a deep level, many, many people want to be "protected" by the state from the risk of being offended and from the necessity of thinking. Bradbury never makes it perfectly clear whether the utter mindlessness of television in the world of Fahrenheit 451 is a result of government censorship or an outcome of market processes. It unquestionably might be the latter. One of his characters, a retired English professor and secret lover of books named Faber, speaks contemptuously of "the solid unmoving cattle of the majority," and it is, of course, majorities that markets serve best.

But the most effective mechanism ever devised for making effective pooling of our faculties as easy as it can be — the free market — is also the natural result of reducing general laws to a bare minimum and leaving people free to make their own choices about their own values. "Politically," he wrote, "individuality is fundamental. If we did not possess individuality we would all have the same tastes in eating, drinking, reading, art, music, religion, and all other pursuits and would willingly submit to regimentation and censorship in all matters."

Whatever their motives may have been, whatever at any given moment they thought of themselves as doing, Anthony Ashley Cooper and John Locke advanced the libertarian idea, just as John Lilburne did. All three of them are part of the libertarian tradition.

As Barnes noted, there were a number of "middle-class writers" who took more or less this line, but "by far the most influential" of them "was the 17th-century English philosopher, John Locke. Many of his theories were taken up and popularized in America by Thomas Jefferson...This brings us to the question Barnes's account of political developments in 17th-century England poses for us. For it seems clear that the theory Barnes depicts as having been developed to "justify" the economic and political program of the middle class is none other than what we call today by the name "libertarianism." And John Locke is, of course, one of the major heroes of the libertarian intellectual pantheon. But should we regard Locke in this way? Was he one of the pioneers in the effort to discover and work out the implications of libertarian principle? Or was he merely a clever propagandist — a composer of "justifications" for political policies actually designed to benefit the middle class economically?