Jeff Riggenbach

Jeff Riggenbach (1947–2021) was a journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and educator. A member of the Organization of American Historians and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, he wrote for such newspapers as the New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle; such magazines as Reason, Inquiry, and Liberty; and such websites as LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com, and RationalReview.com. His books include In Praise of Decadence (1998), Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism (2009), and Persuaded by Reason: Joan Kennedy Taylor & the Rebirth of American Individualism (2014). Drawing on vocal skills he honed in classical and all-news radio in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston, Riggenbach also narrated the audiobook versions of numerous libertarian works, many of them available on Mises.org.

Articles

Hazlitt as National Teacher

11/01/2010 Free Market Jeff Riggenbach

The Free Market 28, no.11 (July 2010) During the academic year that encompassed the fall term of 1964 and the spring term of 1965, I was a freshman in college. I was also in my first year of...

Gore Vidal and Revisionism

08/03/2012 Mises Daily Jeff Riggenbach

[This article is excerpted from One of the forces involved in the recent heating up of the perennial American-history wars was the brilliant critical and popular success, during the 1970s and early...

The Education of Robert Neuwirth

11/28/2011 Mises Daily Jeff Riggenbach

Robert Neuwirth is a journalist who is preoccupied with this question: What do people do when the state has made satisfaction of their wants, their natural desire to improve their lives, almost impossible? He’ll give you much to think about, and he’ll provide much contemporary evidence while he’s at it for something he really doesn’t yet believe or even fully understand.

Publications

Why American History Is Not What They Say

10/24/2012 Jeff Riggenbach

Jeff Riggenbach’s book is a godsend for anyone who needs a crash course in revisionist history of the United States. What is revisionism? It is the retelling of history from a point of view that differs from the mainstream, which always treats the

Media

Thomas Paine: From Pirate to Revolutionary

02/23/2010 Jeff Riggenbach

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...

John T. Flynn: Liberal

10/12/2010 Jeff Riggenbach

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...

C. M. Kornbluth (1923–1958)

06/09/2011 Jeff Riggenbach

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.