Ayn Rand's books sell between eight hundred thousand and a million copies a year. Her first novel We the Living was admired by Mencken. Night of January 16th opened on Broadway. Her major novel The Fountainhead (1943) was "masterful". Atlas Shrugged (1957) was Rand's magnus opus.
The Libertarian Tradition
A podcast by journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and educator, Jeff Riggenbach (1947–2021).
In Ayn Rand and the World She Made Heller goes to bat for Rand as a fiction writer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns is a poorer book because it is confused.
Spooner was an American individualist anarchist with radical opinions on everything. His true calling was writing pamphlets and books on issues of the day. His most famous work was The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. No Treason is his most anarchistic political tract (1867).
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is thought to be the greatest work of the 20th century with 150 million readers. The book's thesis - Evil power cannot be defeated by power - is libertarian.
Autodidactic influential libertarian, Isabel Paterson is best known for The God of the Machine (1943). Ayn Rand contributed ideas to it but continued to learn from Paterson both politics and history. Rand rescued the book and promoted it.
Obama's White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is run by Cass Sunstein. Sunstein and Vermeule's paper on conspiracies theories, e.g. JFK, TWA 800, global warming fraud, MLK killed by feds,concludes that some theories create problems for government to solve.
Ultimately, he and the woman are caught, imprisoned, and tortured. In the end, he is sincerely repentant of his crimes and is completely devoted to the all-encompassing government that has done him all this harm.
Paine became a privateer in 1753 to locate and rob enemy ships in order to escape his family business - corset making. The blunt but brilliant Paine was helped by Benjamin Franklin to join the American Revolution as editor and writer. Common Sense was a huge success...
Five figures starred in Radicals for Capitalism by Brian Doherty: Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard. But, by the 1970s the irrepressible Rothbard became the indisputable Mr. Libertarian.
Browne is known as the libertarian investment guru who wrote books like How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. Galambos was the unknown libertarian, but those who met him and the students in his courses seemed profoundly effected by him and his Free Enterprise Institute.
Textbook commissions, especially from Texas, decide what ideas will be within any book. Political pressure now makes textbooks promote special interest groups.
Ferris' book The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature is about the symbiotic relationship between science and liberalism. He thinks science caused liberty. Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights posits that rights are self evident. She thinks the novel caused liberty.
Ultimately, when Rose died — it was in 1968, she was 81 — Roger MacBride inherited everything she owned, including the fabulously valuable rights to the Little House books ostensibly written by her mother...
Tucker was a proponent, in the 19th century, of American individualist anarchism. He opposed war because it destroyed liberty, but he favored the allies. Tucker's contribution was as much through his publishing as his own writing.
"Holt, in effect, reasoned his way to libertarianism from his relentless, dogged analysis of what worked and didn't work in education, in the schoolroom."...
Do we have perennial libertarian problems, like losing our freedoms year after year? The long view of liberty shows that overall Americans are more free, but getting our ideas out there is required. The remnant exists and they will find us.
"I ought to exercise my talents for the benefit of others; but that exercise must be the fruit of my own conviction; no man must attempt to press me into the service." —William Godwin
"Some may wonder why it took Hess 20 years to notice all this, why it took a man this obviously intelligent so long to grasp that the Republicans were pretty much the same as the New Deal Democrats he opposed, but with window dressing."...
But because of his interaction with Robert LeFevre in Colorado in the '50s and '60s, libertarian ideas were among those he toyed with and dramatized in certain of his stories...
Liberty does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the liberty of a single human being.
The fact is that, exactly as Mark Lilla fears, when people distrust authority in a generalized way and start thinking for themselves, often without much relevant information to guide them, they'll make many decisions that they'll later regret. But whose decisions are they to make?...
Freethought, de Cleyre wrote, was "the right to believe as the evidence, coming in contact with the mind, forces it to believe. This implies the admission of any and all evidence bearing upon any subject."...
One doesn't have to read far into the works of George Orwell to discover that he had no understanding of economics whatsoever and was not personally a libertarian in the sense we have in mind when we use that word today...
"In 1982, Vince moved on to building a nonprofit organization to host a series of international libertarian conferences — the Libertarian International."
No other woman in America ever had to suffer such persistent persecution.
What Thoreau was defending here, in 1849, was essentially the same concept the English philosopher Herbert Spencer defended two years later, in his book Social Statics , as "the right to ignore the State."...
American libertarians would be particularly interested in Peake's great novel, since the perspective on the individual and society that pervades it is very libertarian in the broadest sense of that word...
"The more controls and taxation a State imposes on its people," Sam wrote, "the more they will evade and defy them...
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...
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.
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...
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...
Milgram reflected on Etienne de La Boetie's key insight about the politics of authority, the will to bondage, and the eager embrace of voluntary servitude. He devised an ingenious test for their influence on the ordinary individual...
"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."...
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...
It is Republicans, not libertarians, who favor handouts to and special privileges for big corporations. And Republicans are not libertarians.
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."
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."...
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.
Flynn was a liberal - a classical liberal. He held to the delusion that the state can be reformed. He gradually became more libertarian, more individualist. He was considered a member of the old right, while never being on the right...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Reclaiming the Mainstream was Joan's book that placed the origins of the American feminist movement in the abolitionist movement of the 19th century...
Christopher Beam did his homework in authoring The Trouble With Liberty, but he needs a firmer grasp of history. Bombs are not libertarian.
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.
Sci-fi novels are an important means of spreading the libertarian anti-state word.The Great Explosion by Eric Frank Russell and the Weapon Shops of Isher by A.E.van Vogt are two that deserve notice.
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.
Warren rejected Owen's communist colonies like New Harmony, Indiana, because he saw that the individual would be stifled by the common property scheme...
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...
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As the fastest good writer, Bock was an intellectual libertarian doing the daily heavy lifting required to engage in the war of ideas.
Chartier credits Rothbard more than Rand in shifting him from a statist to an anarchist. He deliberately does not use the L-word...
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.
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.
Psychologist Timothy Leary held LSD to be therapy. Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz held that mental illness was a myth. Both libertarians opposed the war on drugs.
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.
Ronald Hamowy and Ralph Raico were the best libertarian journalists. Their efforts included the quality publications New Individualist Review and Inquiry...
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.
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.
Historians must use Rand's sense of life to make their best guess of how things happened when the past facts are lost.
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.
