Symposium  

Where Libertarians Come From

Brian Doherty's "Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement" (PublicAffairs) came out this spring. The book is a subject of major interest for people in the individualist movement. We asked two experts to assess the book; then we asked the author for his response. There's obviously a lot to debate in the history of the movement — so I hope you enjoy debate!

— Stephen Cox

At least this book was written by a libertarian. If the author were one of these snotty liberals, he could have called it "Zanies for Capitalism." Libertarians have done some libertine and loopy things over the years, and Brian Doherty, whose previous book is about the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, has included all the best of them in his "Freewheeling History."

There was Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Education, one-time manager of the L.A. Chamber of Commerce, bringing his businessmen high-rollers into the orbit of a spiritualist guru — and maybe (though Leonard denied it) some experiments with LSD; the novelist Ayn Rand, and her Nietzschean adultery with Nathaniel Branden; the political theories of Andrew Galambos, which were so proprietary that no paying customer was permitted to disclose what they were; the survivalists of the Vonu movement, who wanted to disappear into the woods, and did; and the various attempts to start a new country in the Bahamas, on a South Pacific reef or on a concrete barge.

I knew about some of this stuff already, and I expect that most of it is true. I am not old enough to remember things from the 1940s and 1950s, but I was in on a bit of it in the 1970s, and Doherty has the flavor of it right.

I remember, at age 18, driving with three other University of Washington students from Seattle to Los Angeles to attend the Left-Right Festival of Liberation, Feb. 28, 1970, on the campus of the University of Southern California. We were fans of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises, fascinated by ideas we found in the world of books; and all the libertarians we knew could have been counted on our fingers.

At USC there was a crowd to hear the speakers. And what speakers! Some were respectable professors of free-market economics, such as the Chicagoite economist Harold Demsetz, who said, "If you're worried about being misinformed, stay away from the polling place; take the marketplace."

Others were more fringy, to use a word from those times. A few had strange names, such as Skye d'Aureous (now Durk Pearson and a contributing editor of Liberty), speaking on "Alternatives to the State," and Filthy Pierre (also known as Erwin Strauss, at present the publisher of Libertarian Connection), speaking on "Proposals for Living on the Sea." Two men made presentations about "gay liberation," a concept I had not heard, or expected to hear, discussed at a public forum.

There was a soft-spoken man named F.A. Harper who talked about the dark days of the 1940s, when libertarians such as Garet Garrett could not get published, and how the outlook in 1970 was much, much better for liberty. There was a Fidel Castro-like man named Karl Hess, who had been a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater and who claimed the future for anarchism. Hess came with a squad of black-clad groupies, who would raise their fists and chant, "Right on!" — a phrase new to me — whenever Hess said something profound, like, "No crime is so grave or repulsive that I would cooperate with the police. My rule is that if it oinks, it is your unalterable enemy — the hired mercenary of the State." (This from my notes.) There was also Philip Abbott Luce, who had been a communist, and Dana Rohrabacher, who would become a Republican congressman.

That conference is not in Doherty's book, but the milieu of it is. The average libertarian was younger in those days, more radical and less connected with institutions trying to look respectable.

The book doesn't start out with all this. It begins with such distant ideological relations as Benjamin Constant, Josiah Warren, and Gustave de Molinari. Doherty should have left them out. He is trying to explain the genealogy of the libertarian idea, and that is not necessary for this book. A "Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement" should begin with the New Deal and World War II, against which the arguments of Rand, Mises, Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Friedrich Hayek — the modern founders — presented an antithesis.

But the book is freewheeling. That is its attraction and its affliction. It drops a hundred names — picks them up and drops them. Writing about the fantasist Robert Anton Wilson, Doherty says, "One can become a Wilson Head without reaching his libertarianism. Through Wilson's influence one might become an Aleister Crowleyan, a Wilhelm Reichian, an old-fashioned Tuckerite, a techno-future-optimist in the manner of Buckminister Fuller or Timothy Leary." The head spins.

Some of the characterizations are sloppy: to call Rand, Paterson, and Lane "the three furies of libertarianism" is not really accurate. Maybe Rand was a "fury," and Paterson was some of the time, but Lane was not. She was the most radical of the three, and the sweetest.

Much is fascinating: Hayek and his internationally influential Mont Pelerin Society; Read, the radical who believed in persuasion, one mind at a time; Robert LeFevre, who built some log houses in the Colorado Rockies and proclaimed them Rampart College; Murray Rothbard and his Circle Bastiat; and so on. There are the money men: Harold Luhnow and the Volker Fund, which financed a university spot for Mises and paid travel expenses to Mont Pelerin; also the Koch family, the oilies who provided seed money for the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute. Money matters in a movement which, as Doherty points out, is trying to sell something the world is not clamoring to buy.

Doherty's story includes careerists and amateurs. This is always an issue for anyone with a cause. Do you make your living at it, or do it on the side? Milton Friedman did it on the side (in a big way), and was enormously influential. His day job was being a college professor — a position from which he could not be fired for his opinions. He could be radical but not nutty. Some of the early libertarians, like Galambos, were niche-market entrepreneurs who could be radical and, by conventional standards, nutty. Their flavor was different. Doherty is an employee of Reason, a magazine which is avowedly libertarian but aimed at an audience outside of libertarians. Liberty is written for libertarians. Each of these has different institutional constraints, and tends to attract a different kind of mind.

One of the virtues of Doherty's book is that he often tells how these people were first turned on. You can see the libertarian idea replicating itself, a kind of virus of the mind. What spread it was an individual who could express it colorfully and forcefully, which also meant radically. Hayek, who considered himself pretty radical, was about as moderate as the movement allowed. Mises was more hardcore, Rand more still, Rothbard, in a political sense, even more. In inspiring people to become libertarians, radicalism works. But it works mainly on those never inoculated by prior commitment.

Radicalism also comes much of the time with the edgy machismo of "I'm more radical than you." Doherty treats this posturing with some humor, at one point quoting professional rightist Grover Norquist about libertarians who insist on staking out a position that alienates everyone. Their attitude, he says, seems to be, "Then I win!" He asks: "Win what? 'Most Pure Person in the Room' award? A cookie?"

Reading this book, one naturally wants to compare the figures who have taken different roads, and different levels of radicalism, and ask who has had the greater influence: Ludwig von Mises or Milton Friedman? Murray Rothbard or Alan Greenspan? Durk Pearson or Dana Rohrabacher? And then you realize how pointless it is to argue the point. The one was not going to be the other. Imagine Rothbard working for the Fed — or Durk in Congress. Liberty is an idea for people who want to go their own way; it is oxymoronic to condemn them for inattention to the herd. Individualists do what they do because it pleases them.

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Brian Doherty's "Radicals for Capitalism" provides an opportunity to explore the idea that there are at least two kinds of libertarianism. We may call them, at least for the sake of argumentative distinction, conservative or Right libertarianism and liberal or Left libertarianism ("conservative" by the sharing of some ideas with modern conservatives, and "liberal" by the sharing of some ideas with modern liberals).

At this time, Left libertarians appear to constitute the majority of the movement. Doherty, who works with the Reason Foundation, is a Left libertarian, as are the Cato Institute, Reason, the Independent Institute, and, to a lesser extent, the American Enterprise Institute. There is, however, another version of libertarianism, a version that offers a different approach on many issues. The conservative variety of libertarianism emphasizes, in particular, the idea that associational rights should be ranked among the central libertarian concerns. As John Stuart Mill said in "On Liberty" (1859), the possession of a social or political right includes the ability to associate with others of similar views. Too many liberal libertarians, it seems to me, underemphasize the importance of freedom of association and the importance of the secondary, nongovernmental institutions — churches, clubs, professional associations, and the like — that form so much of a free society's framework. And there are other important differences between the Left and Right of the libertarian movement.

Doherty well states the Left libertarian view. He says that the "eventual goals" of libertarianism "include the abolition of all drug laws, . . . the abolition of the income tax, the abolition of all regulations of private sexual relations (from marriage to prostitution and everything in between), an end to public ownership and regulation of the airwaves, an end to overseas military bases and all warmaking not in direct defense of the homeland, an end to the welfare state, and an end to any legal restrictions whatsoever on speech and expression." ¹

Yet it is possible to dissent from most of these goals, and still consider oneself a libertarian. With respect to the abolition of all drug laws, Left libertarians often talk as though their vision of utopia with respect to drug policy would be to use the military to impose on every community a policy of the legal use and exchange of crack, heroin, and methamphetamines. If this is not the meaning of "the abolition of all drug laws," what do these words mean? Left libertarians underemphasize or ignore the right of different communities to set different standards and laws.

With respect to abolition of the income tax, libertarians both of the Left and of the Right favor lower taxes, usually substantially lower taxes. But why must this general preference necessarily take the form of abolition of the income tax? Why not property or sales taxes? Why not capital gains taxes?

With respect to the abolition of all regulations regarding private sexual relations, many of the same objections that would hold with respect to unitary drug laws across the United States are also applicable in this area. What if different communities and states wish to enact different laws? What if different communities and states wish to have different standards about pornography or to allow covenant marriage as an alternative to traditional marriage?

With regard to the issue of marriage, Left libertarians' views seem particularly inconsistent. Do they really believe that there should be no regulation of marriage? What of age restrictions? What of polygamy? But if liberal libertarians would allow regulation of marriage in such cases, why can't they concede that states can properly pass laws to define marriage as a bond between one man and one woman? If there can be some regulations with respect to marriage, why cannot there be others?

With respect to ending the welfare state, most libertarians, whether liberal or conservative, support a society in which government plays a considerably smaller role in providing welfare and in which private charities and nonprofits play a larger role. But to define a libertarian as someone who supports the complete abolition of the welfare state, particularly as a proximate goal of public policy, strikes many who have considered themselves to be libertarians, including Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, as unrealistic and even undesirable when taken to an extreme.

Respecting the contentious and controversial issue of the war in Iraq, military policy, and foreign intervention by the United States, there is no unanimity of views among those who consider themselves libertarians. Left libertarians tend to favor an isolationist foreign policy. Right libertarians tend to support an interventionist one. All libertarians acknowledge the right of self-defense, and this is often taken to include preemptive self-defense. To be sure, there is always a strong presumption against military intervention, which can be justified only in the most serious circumstances. But on the practical versus the philosophical question of when it is appropriate to engage in military intervention, and whether an isolationist United States would lead to a more peaceful world, Left and Right libertarians often differ.

Hayek was reasonably interventionist. He remarked in 1983, "I am convinced Reagan is right not to reduce arms expenditures. World peace depends upon America staying strong. The real problem is whether we have got ourselves into a situation in which the Soviets can intimidate us to such an extent that we knuckle under completely. The West must stay at least as strong as the Soviet Union." ² He wrote the following letter to the editor in 1983 in Britain during the Falklands crisis: "Argentina ought perhaps to be reminded that no rule of international law would forbid to retort to another attack on what for 150 years had been under the jurisdiction of Britain by some counter-attack on the geographical sources of such bellicose action." ³

A few years earlier, Hayek wrote the London Times, during the Iranian hostage crisis, that he was "genuinely puzzled by the restraint shown by the United States in the recent emergency. It seems to me that the future of peaceful international relations and the safety of persons in foreign countries would have been much better served if the United States government had at once sent an ultimatum saying that, unless every single member of the embassy staff were within forty-eight hours handed over unharmed to representatives of the United States Government, bombs would be falling at an increasing rate at the seat of the Iranian Government." ⁴ These are not typically the sorts of sentiments issued by Left libertarians, nor were they the particular policy recommendation favored by Left libertarians at the time.

Doherty's study focuses on the explicitly libertarian movement in the United States in the 20th century, and he does not much consider in this place the British philosophers and economists who laid the rhetorical groundwork for libertarianism. Particularly in the area of international relations as practiced by the United States, the thought of the great British political and pure philosopher John Locke should be considered. Locke was clear that the existence of law requires its enforcement. If there is no enforcement of law, then law does not exist. Law includes its physical execution. From the perspective of many conservative libertarians, the United States is the primary physical executor of law in the world today. If the United States were to withdraw from the world militarily, chaos, from the perspective of many Right libertarians, would ensue.

Generally, the principle of libertarians is to minimize the use of force. Whether this would be the outcome of a policy of military disengagement from the world is an open question. Withdrawal from the world might result in the use of less force in the short run, at the expense of much greater force in the intermediate and long run, as increasingly perilous conditions required reintroduction of a military presence in diverse places around the world.

Doherty gets Hayek and Friedman spot on in some of their central political and philosophical views. He writes of Hayek that "[r]ules, defined by Hayek as 'simply a propensity or disposition to act or not to act in a certain manner, which will manifest itself in what we call a practice or custom,' are the sine qua non of both civilization and government; we could not possibly achieve what we have achieved without following them. It is only when rules are followed that what Hayek calls the 'spontaneous order' can develop." ⁵

For Hayek, liberty was the supremacy of legitimate law, a view shared by Right conservatives, often in opposition to Left libertarians, who tend to veer more toward anarchism, or lawlessness or normlessness. With respect to the central Hayekian topic of the rule of law, Hayek was fond of quoting Locke, including the words that follow, which Hayek used to preface his chapter on "The Origins of the Rule of Law" in "The Constitution of Liberty": "The end of law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others; which cannot be where there is no law: and is not . . . a liberty for every man to do what he lists [wishes]. (For who could be free when every other man's humour might domineer over him?) But a liberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be the subject of the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own." ⁶ Hayek also approvingly quoted Locke in "The Road to Serfdom": "There can be no liberty without law." ⁷

So from the Right libertarian point of view, libertarian order cannot be an order without law. There can be no freedom (in the sense of maximum material development) without political liberty (in the sense of a lawful social order that minimizes coercion). Right libertarianism recognizes that law is necessary to the optimal society. Left libertarianism often sees this differently. The jacket covers of books are the products of the publishers; authors do not always write them; nevertheless, I do not think that Doherty would disagree with the first paragraph of the jacket cover of his book, which says: "It is a simple but radical idea: The sole purpose of government, if it has a purpose, is to protect the lives and property of its citizens. A free people in an unregulated marketplace will maximize both human potential and economic growth."

This is, again, not exactly the situation that conservative libertarians perceive. To take Hayek, again, as an example: he recognized, and indeed affirmed, that the idea of an "unregulated" market is misleading; markets will always need to be enabled and protected by law. Left libertarians, on the other hand, often talk as though "property" were something that existed ineluctably in nature, irrespective of the absence of commonly held rules defining it. Hayek wisely rejected this view. He wrote early, in "The Road to Serfdom," that the functioning of a competitive order "depends, above all, on the existence of an appropriate legal system, a legal system designed both to preserve competition and to make it operate as beneficially as possible. It is by no means sufficient that the law should recognize the principle of private property and freedom of contract; much depends on the precise definition of the right of property as applied to different things. The systemic study of the forms of legal institutions which will make the competitive system work efficiently has been sadly neglected." ⁸ In "The Road to Serfdom" and in "The Constitution of Liberty," he saw a "wide and unquestioned field for state activity. In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing." ⁹ The idea of an unregulated market is chimerical.

When compared to Left libertarians, Right libertarians are more tolerant, less exclusive, less extreme, and more evolutionary in approach. They are less likely to put forward a list of positions and say that individuals who do not support these positions are not libertarians. Coinciding with greater toleration is less exclusiveness. Conservative libertarians' conception of the holders of their creed embraces many individuals not considered libertarians by Left libertarians. Doherty himself notes that many libertarians have been famous for factionalism and for excluding people they don't consider sufficiently pure.

William F. Buckley exemplified the more judicious approach of conservative libertarianism: "We must not, if we are to pass for sane in this tormented world, equate as problems of equal urgency, the repeal of the social security law, and the containment of the Soviet threat." ¹⁰

Left libertarians often appear to equate the welfare state or government regulation with the conditions that prevailed in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. Right libertarians are more likely to recognize that there are degrees of evil, that to equate all disagreeable aspects of government policy is not productive. Coincident with the less extreme nature of conservative libertarianism is its greater emphasis on gradualism and working within the system. Utopias may, as both Friedman and Hayek held, offer guiding ideals toward which to aim. But utopia is difficult to achieve on earth — that is why it is called utopia, "no place." As technological knowledge grows, our conception of utopia will continually change. If individuals wish to involve themselves in the public policy process, their proposals must generally be for incremental changes from the status quo, at least if they wish these proposals to be successful.

Conservative libertarians are less ideological and more practical than liberal libertarians. They also have different heroes. For Doherty, the key libertarian figures are Hayek and Friedman, but also Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises. For conservative libertarians, such figures as Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater would also enter the pantheon; and from the more intellectual side, Buckley and even Russell Kirk, for his emphasis on the value of social customs and values beyond the state. Nor is this a dry historical issue. Our heroes, our inspirations, our models of human attainment tell a great deal about our concepts of normative fact and ethical belief.

Left and Right libertarianism are as one on the issue of free speech. Both kinds of libertarianism recognize that there is no higher value than truth, and that the only way to achieve it is to create an environment in which freedom of discussion and debate is encouraged.

Right libertarians and Left libertarians also agree, of course, that government should become smaller. Conservative libertarians generally believe that if, over the next quarter of a century or so, the size and scope of government could be reduced from that reflected by the current 30 to 35% of GDP in the United States to 20 to 25%, this would be great progress. Liberal libertarians, on the other hand, sometimes talk as if even a society in which government controlled 10 to 15% of GDP would be a slave regime tantamount to that of pharaonic Egypt.

But to return to the book that prompted this discussion: "Radicals for Capitalism" sets a standard for new works in the history of libertarianism, particularly of a liberal variety. Its extensive research, which included many interviews, will make it a reference work for decades, if not longer. Doherty's presentations of the views of libertarian authors are particularly useful. He is correct, for instance, in his interpretation of Friedman's methodology. He emphasizes that, for Friedman, the most crucial aspect of a theory is its capacity to predict, and what it predicts. Theories that do not predict are usually of little worth.

Doherty should be commended for his substantial contribution to the history of a diverse and exciting field. He should also be commended for inspiring the kind of debate that reaches beyond his book — the kind of debate that naturally arises when libertarians define and discuss their beliefs, methods, and models.

Notes

1. Brian Doherty, "Radicals for Capitalism" (2007), 3.
2. In Alan Ebenstein, "Friedrich Hayek: A Biography" (Palgrave, 2001), 301.
3. Ibid., 300.
4. Ibid.
5. Doherty 220–21.
6. Ebenstein, 196–97.
7. Ibid., 197.
8. F.A. Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom" (University of Chicago Press, 1994 [1944]), 43.
9. Ibid., 45.
10. Doherty, 305.

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I want to thank Liberty for giving me a chance to respond to comments on "Radicals for Capitalism." An author could not hope for better equipped reviewers.

Lanny Ebenstein is author of the definitive biography of one of my book's central characters, F.A. Hayek, and is freshly out with the first major biography of another one, Milton Friedman, a book I look forward eagerly to reading — and one that I wish I'd had access to when writing my book. Bruce Ramsey, long one of Liberty's most dynamic contributors, has recently edited and introduced wonderful volumes of writing by the old-Right hero Garet Garrett. I thank them for their general appreciation of my book.

However, neither reviews nor comments on them would be optimally interesting to readers without some scrapping, or without branching out into a larger discussion.

Lanny Ebenstein frames his review with thoughts on a distinction within libertarianism that is not explicitly drawn in my book, at least not by name — the distinction between "Left" and "Right" libertarians (or, as he also says, "conservative" and "liberal" libertarians).

I can't say I don't know what he means, roughly, when he makes this distinction. Without any specific examples, or any obvious necessary philosophical connection between thinking, for instance, that local communities should be able to ban gay marriage and drugs and thinking that the U.S. military should legitimately be used for preemptive strikes, it's hard to know exactly what one can say overall about the phenomenon of the "Right libertarian," or if there are any clearly defined principles underlying his beliefs.

I hope I am not completely mistaken in imagining, absent the naming of many specific thinkers and institutions, that Ebenstein considers himself, as well as William Buckley and "even" Russell Kirk, an exemplar of "Right libertarianism." For "Left" libertarianism, however, Ebenstein does give many specific examples, including the magazine for which I now work, Reason, and a thinktank where I used to work, the Cato Institute.

I don't think it's true that the institutions he lists as "Left libertarian" lack a solidly libertarian version of associational rights. Certainly, both Cato and Reason have published works that attack affirmative action and any other restrictions on people's right to choose with whom they associate, and I don't think they have ever denied, though perhaps in Ebenstein's mind they don't sufficiently emphasize, the importance of social-not-governmental institutions in meeting human needs. I think this particular accusation needs more citation, although I believe that Ebenstein is echoing (I'm sure not intentionally) Murray Rothbard in his final "paleolibertarian" phase. Rothbard believed, without, I think, much good evidence, that many so-called libertarian institutions had sold out to Martin Luther King-esque principles of diversity and egalitarianism and had set them above true liberty.

As for Ebenstein's examples about community control of drugs and marriage, it has been mostly definitive of libertarians to believe that government — federal, state, or local — should be restricted in its functions, generally to the protection of citizens' lives against force or fraud and the provision of a small set of so-called public goods that could not be provided by free markets. Indeed, I can't imagine much that is libertarian about thinking it's all right to arrest or fine people merely because of something they chose to eat, whether that restriction comes from a local cop or a federal bureaucrat. Almost everyone involved in the movement whose history I tell would agree.

As for the "Right" or "conservative" libertarian, as Ebenstein describes him, the average politically savvy American would identify a person with such views as a "conservative," full stop. A streak of libertarianism has always run through the conservative coalition. But libertarianism has been only part of the larger conservative identity, and it has often been buried by other considerations: by traditionalism and nationalism; by militaristic anticommunism, in the early days; and in these latter days, often by militaristic anti-Islamicism.

So I'm not sure that someone with the views Ebenstein identifies as those of the "Right" or "conservative" libertarian ought properly to be considered a libertarian at all, rather than just a conservative. I know that saying this raises what might be called the "Hayek perplex": surely, if anyone was a libertarian, Hayek was! I'll return to this point later.

While I don't think I said this explicitly in "Radicals for Capitalism," I was obviously using the term "libertarian" in a descriptivist, not prescriptivist sense. I was chronicling the adventures of the thinkers and institutions that people who identify themselves as libertarian have tended to identify as part of "their team." I wasn't trying to enforce a deductive definition, casting out all those who fail to meet it.

Nevertheless, as Ebenstein notes that I note, this desire to cast out heretics is a central character trait of many modern libertarians. The list of libertarian stances that Ebenstein quotes from the introduction to my book was meant to give a reader I had to presume was ignorant of the topic a general sense of what most libertarian thinkers and institutions have believed, especially those beliefs that have made libertarianism distinct from conservatism and the Right in general. Rescuing libertarianism from the impression that it is merely the right wing's wacky, overenthusiastic little cousin was one of my book's historical and rhetorical missions. At the same time, I warned the reader of "Radicals for Capitalism" that the libertarian world is a feisty and contentious one. As Liberty contributing editor Fred Smith wisely put it, "When two libertarians find themselves agreeing on something, each knows the other has sold out." Libertarianism is a fighting faith — even if only with other libertarians!

But Ebenstein's distinctions do get at an important issue. Clearly, there is something philosophically questionable about calling thinkers as diverse as Hayek and Rothbard the same thing — libertarian. It is equally true, however, that most people who self-identify as modern American libertarians do consider both Hayek and Rothbard as part of their intellectual heritage, arsenal, or team — even while remaining critical enough to suggest that a Hayek gives too much credence to the state's role, or a Rothbard too little, to be "properly considered a libertarian." (This also is detailed in my book.) Each side at least recognizes that it needs to grapple with the other — whereas too much of the rest of the intellectual world is happy to ignore both the more classically liberal and the more anarchistic arenas of the modern American libertarian Big Tent.

Ebenstein draws another important distinction among libertarians, that between the roughly Hayekian notion of rule-under-law, with law seen as requiring a monopoly of force to work properly, and the Rothbardian notion of anarcho-capitalism, which was in broad strokes also accepted by such libertarian teachers and influences as F.A. Harper, founder of the Institute for Humane Studies; R.C. Hoiles, founder of the Freedom newspaper chain; and Robert LeFevre of the Freedom School (Rampart College). I found the near-dominance of anarchism (though not under that name) in the libertarian movement in the 1950s one of the more interesting things that needed to be explained in my book.

It is important to realize, though, that anarcho-libertarians do not deny the need for law. They merely deny that anyone needs to possess a monopoly of force to establish and enforce it. This is a complicated subject, and admittedly sounds on its face absurd to most people, but the idea is certainly familiar to most within the libertarian movement, even if they ultimately reject it. For some explanations of how the idea might work and why it might be appropriate, see Murray Rothbard's "Power and Market," David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom," and Randy Barnett's "The Structure of Liberty." (All three books are discussed in "Radicals for Capitalism," the first two at greater length.)

I applaud Ebenstein's ecumenism in declaring that his sort of libertarian is more tolerant than the other — though isn't he trying to explain how Left libertarians are mistaken? Still, the fact that he hews to the word "libertarian" shows a willingness to be grouped with a bunch of people whose views he clearly does not accept. I earlier suggested that I'm not sure that people with his "Right libertarian" viewpoint deserve the name of libertarian, so I suppose he wins a point on tolerance here!

The thinker who causes the most trouble for unified definitions of "libertarian" is Ebenstein's own F.A. Hayek. Reason's editor, Nick Gillespie, has called Hayek the "capo di tutti capo" of libertarianism. The Cato Institute has named its auditorium after him. The Institute for Humane Studies has used his image on postcards. His combination of the Nobel Prize and complicated, wide-ranging social theory makes him one of libertarianism's classiest cards to play. But a lot about Hayek rubs against a lot of the conclusions of other libertarians — a point my book makes clear. Indeed, I quote a lot (pages 553–54), mostly from the later Hayek, that makes him sound conservative indeed. Ebenstein does the same in his review, especially in regard to hawkish foreign policy.

I'm no longer as sharp at the game of "What Would Hayek Do?" as I once was — but certainly many libertarians have felt frustration, as I put it in my book, at how often opponents of more radical libertarianism can use Hayek as a weapon against them. As a joke has it, Hayek's real first name was "Even": "Even Hayek agrees we need a government-supplied income floor . . . " I note in one of my book's notes (a side note to libertarian readers: don't skip the notes! — lots of nuggets considered too recondite for the general audience are there as special treats for the very interested) that Murray Rothbard considered Hayek's classic "Constitution of Liberty" so full of concessions to the state that he told the Volker Fund, the great libertarian funding group of the 1950s, for whom he vetted manuscripts and thinkers, that it was "an extremely bad, and . . . even . . . evil book."

Hayek is a complicated case. I think the kind of libertarianism (not quite so hard on the state, willing to countenance overseas interventionism) that Ebenstein seems to support could also, in some ways, be called "Hayekian libertarianism." At least Ebenstein seems to think so. Hayek wrote a famous essay on why he was not a conservative — yet, as Ebenstein notes, a Hayekian libertarianism could rightly be called "conservative" in its reliance on tradition, and its allowance of a wider scope for government action than (say) a Rothbardian would.

But I question whether the attitude toward control of drugs and gay marriage, even on the local level, that Ebenstein discusses can be supported on Hayekian principles. To quote from "Why I Am Not a Conservative": "Liberalism [Hayek's term for his own position] is not averse to evolution and change; and where spontaneous change has been smothered by government control, it wants a great deal of change of policy . . . [T]here is in the present world very little reason for the liberal to wish to preserve things as they are. It would seem to the liberal . . . that what is more urgently needed . . . is a thorough sweeping-away of the obstacles to free growth." For very solid reasons, most libertarians think that quick change in laws related to drugs, sex, and marriage is perfectly Hayekian and perfectly libertarian.

While Ebenstein uses Hayek as an example of a wise, gradualist libertarianism, Hayek himself argued for a liberal radicalism that "is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible." That has been the dominant spirit of modern libertarianism — which has mostly been what Ebenstein segregates as "Left libertarianism."

Let us say that libertarians are in many cases children of Hayek who mutated the antistate gene for stronger expression. But if Dr. Ebenstein is willing to let both sides of the divide he limns be named "libertarian," then so be it. (Certainly, there is more to the intellectual game of figuring out the implications of Hayek's thought than merely quoting Hayek, particularly the Hayek of the 1980s, whose active, sharp intellectual life was largely over.) As to the unquestionable tensions that remain between Hayek and the larger libertarian tendency, I am grateful for Ebenstein's efforts in clarifying our thinking on what we are talking about when we talk about libertarianism.

* * *

Bruce Ramsey's review provides less for me to argue with. I especially appreciated the skilled and knowing way in which he brought out the flavor of the book and its characters. This is sadly rare in professional reviewing, where all too often a book is assigned, believe it or not, to people with no demonstrated knowledge or even interest in the topic. An author always wants reviews of his books to stand alone as interesting essays, hoping that the reader will imagine that the book which launched the review is similarly interesting. And Ramsey's review stands alone as a great summoning of the spirit of the libertarian movement, circa the early 1970s.

It's a glorious thing to grapple with a reader who is deeply learned in your topic, and fascinated by it. Of course, with the glory may come the painful experience of the disagreements and second thoughts of the learned and thoughtful reader.

I'll take on a few disagreements.

The "three furies" phrase is a chapter title, and is by no means the only clue I give to the personalities of Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand. Their stories are told over the course of dozens of pages of the book. If Ramsey thinks it inaccurate to call Lane a "fury," well, no one phrase comprehensively defines these complicated women's characters. But the Rose Lane who stars in the anecdote on page 132 of my book, in which she thunders to a young cop sent to investigate her for potential sedition because she wrote on a postcard her objections to Social Security (both she and Paterson refused money from the program): "Then I'm subversive as all hell! . . . I say this, and I write this, and I broadcast it on the radio, and I'm going to keep right on doing it 'til you put me in jail. Write that down and report it to your superiors!" — this Rose Lane had some of the fury about her. At any rate, people who read the whole book, not just the chapter titles, will get a pretty thorough sense of what type of writers and thinkers these women were.

On one of Ramsey's other points: perhaps I do sometimes assume too much background knowledge of people whom I found it necessary to refer to, without thoroughly explaining — people such as Wilhelm Reich, the post-Freudian radical psychiatrist, whom libertarian science fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson doted on. It is difficult to balance too much information against too little, and certainly for specific readers one will always find oneself erring one way or the other. (But "techno-optimism" is explained, I think, at sufficient length in the epilogue.)

I disagree that I should have left out my survey of pre-20th-century precursors of libertarianism. I wish I'd had space to discuss more of them, and in more depth. Libertarianism did not arise Athena-like from the brow of my book's five central 20th-century characters, Mises, Hayek, Rand, Rothbard, and Friedman, and I think it important for the reader to have at least some sense of that.

Ramsey's last paragraph offers a particularly wise, kind, and ecumenical take on the topic of libertarian internal warfare, one that I know I'll be thinking about, and quoting, in the future. It provides a fitting capstone both to Ebenstein's parsing of libertarian differences and to my own issue-taking with Ebenstein.

Warriors for liberty inevitably have different personalities, different intentions, different goals, different time horizons. This is as it should be, because the audience for the message of liberty — the educational mission that has been at the heart of the active libertarian movement since Leonard Read launched the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946 — is similarly varied. When contemplating the libertarian movement's past and future, it is wise to accept and even to celebrate the division and the variety of labor.

While I have this forum in Liberty, I want to honor both the magazine — in whose pages I learned much of the general shape and tenor of the movement's history and its great figures — and the memory of the man who gave me my first gig as a "professional libertarian," as an intern at Liberty in 1990. He was the first person thoroughly educated in movement history whom I had the pleasure of spending a lot of time with: this magazine's founder, R.W. (Bill) Bradford. Bill would undoubtedly have written a very detailed and thoughtful and certainly very critical review of my book. I wish to hell that I — and the rest of the world — were able to read, and learn from, and pleasurably argue about, everything he'd tell me was wrong with it.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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