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."

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. Szasz and Leary often chose somewhat different public issues to speak out on, but both displayed an unwavering commitment to human liberty.

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."