Libertarianism's five pivotal figures

Libertarianism - The Stuggle Ahead David Boaz - April 25th, 2007

The libertarian movement has found its historian. He is Brian Doherty, an editor at Reason magazine and the author of Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, just out from PublicAffairs. In 620 pages, plus 90 pages of endnotes, he tells a comprehensive story of the growth and development of the American libertarian movement. He spent more than a decade on the project, interviewing more than 100 people and spending hundreds of hours in archives, and it shows. I am proud to say that he conceived the book years ago when he was a junior staff member at the Cato Institute.

Doherty organizes the story around five pivotal figures: the Nobel laureates F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, author of Britannica’s entry on money; the economist Ludwig von Mises, Hayek’s teacher; another Mises student, Murray Rothbard, who was a professional economist and also a movement builder; and the novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand. But he also delves into the lives and contributions and factional fights of some pretty minor characters, including some that I’d never heard of after 30 years steeped in libertarianism.

This is not a history of classical liberalism, but rather of one subset of that broad movement: the modern (beginning after World War I) American libertarian movement. It’s not a strictly intellectual history like George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, though Doherty does a good job of discussing the ideas of those great thinkers; it’s more comparable to Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein.

Doherty makes two claims about libertarianism that may seem to be in tension: First, as the title proclaims: “The most significant thing about libertarianism, the element that distinguishes its unique place in modern American thought, is that it is radical. It takes insights about justice and order and the fight between liberty and power farther and deeper than most standard American liberals, patriots, or Jeffersonians.”

But he also says: “Libertarians can believe, with some justification, that we are in some sense already living in their world….We are not living in Karl Marx’s world….We live in a world energized and shaped by the beliefs of Marx’s political-economic rivals and enemies—the classical liberals, the thinkers who believed a harmony of interests is manifest in unrestricted markets, that free trade can prevent war and make us all richer, that decentralized private property ownership helps create a spontaneous order of rich variety.”

And later: “It’s hard not to see a world that is well worth celebrating—perhaps even reveling in—to the extent that it runs on approximately libertarian principles, with a general belief in property rights and the benefits of liberty.”

Can these two sentiments—libertarianism as radicalism and the modern West as an essentially libertarian society—be reconciled? I think so. After centuries of struggle many of the aims of liberalism have been realized in the United States, Western Europe, and an increasing part of the world. Our world largely runs on the basis of property rights, markets, religious freedom, free speech, and the rule of law. But that “largely” remains a provocation to libertarians, who understandably focus on the ways that governments fall short of liberal or libertarian ideals. In a review 10 years ago of Charles Murray’s What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Fareed Zakaria made that point:

“The reason that libertarians seem extreme and odd is not that they are a furious minority, angry at a world that seems to have passed them by, but rather the opposite. They are heirs to a tradition that has changed the world. Consider what classical liberalism stood for in the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was against the power of the church and for the power of the market; it was against the privileges of kings and aristocracies and for dignity of the middle class; it was against a society dominated by status and land and in favor of one based on markets and merit; it was opposed to religion and custom and in favor of science and secularism; it was for national self-determination and against empires; it was for freedom of speech and against censorship; it was for free trade and against mercantilism. Above all, it was for the rights of the individual and against the power of the church and the state….
“The reason that libertarianism seems narrow and naive is that having won 80 percent of the struggles it has fought over the last two centuries, it is now forced to define itself wholly in terms of the last 20 percent. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice if you were in Prussia in the 1850s, but in America in the 1960s? Libertarianism has become extreme because the world has left it no recourse.”

I think that’s mostly on target, and Doherty has the story right. But most people will read Radicals for Capitalism for its wealth of detail. It’s going to be the standard history of the libertarian movement for a long time. I hereby add it to the bibliography of my Britannica entry on libertarianism. Britannica Blog Posts by David Boaz