Radicals for Capitalism, by Brian Doherty

Submitted by Staff on Wed, 2007-01-24 12:22.

         An excerpt from the new book

RADICALS FOR CAPITALISM
                 A Freewheeling History of
                 the Modern American Libertarian Movement
by Brian Doherty

Published by Public Affairs, a member of the Perseus Book Group
and reprinted here with permission

                                ISBN: 1586483501
                 List Price: $35.00
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                 Radicals for Capitalism is the winner of the February 2007 Lysander Spooner Award for Advancing                  the Literature of Liberty. For more information about the Lysander                  Spooner Awards, CLICK HERE.

                 To go to our full review, or to go to purchase the book, CLICK HERE.

                 The excerpt, below, is the first chapter of the book, Radicals for Capitalism. Enjoy!

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                 RADICALS FOR CAPITALISM
A Freewheeling History of
                 the Modern American Libertarian Movement

                 by Brian Doherty

                 CHAPTER 1:
                 PATRIOTS, UNTERRIFIED JEFFERSONIANS, AND SUPERFLUOUS MEN

The libertarian vision is all in Jefferson. Read your Declaration of Independence: We are all created equal; no one ought to have any special rights and privileges in social relations with other men. We have, inherently, certain rights—to our life, to our freedom, to do what we please in order to find happiness. Government has one purpose: to help us protect those rights. And if it doesn't do that, then it has to go, by any means necessary.

Hard to imagine a more libertarian document; and there it is, one of the nearly sacred founding documents of the United States of America. Of course, not everything about the American founding meets complete libertarian approval; lingering affection for the antifederalist cause is one of libertarianism's many interpretive peculiarities in the modern American context. The antifederalists saw in the U.S. Constitution a dangerous return to the sort of tyrannical powers on the part of the national government that we had fought the British to free ourselves from. Antifederalists were particularly alarmed by Congress's power under the Constitution to tax almost without limit, to alter the time and manner of elections, and to raise and support armies. And they understood, as does the modern libertarian, that state power is always trying to overwhelm political liberty, and that defending it requires the unwavering diligence of free citizens. But overall, the modern American libertarian, if so inclined, can feel unambiguous stirrings of patriotic fervor when contemplating the covenantal purpose of this nation.

Lessons about the benefits of free markets are embedded in American history, not merely American ideology; the famines and travails of the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies in their beginnings were the result of unfortunate experiments in agricultural communism, providing grim lessons in the necessity of private property and free trade.

Murray Rothbard, who wrote the only explicitly libertarian history of colonial America, leads the reader into a wonderland of libertarian example making. He paints a portrait of people who gleefully tarred and feathered customs inspectors, juries that refused to convict on unjust laws, and a citizenry that refused to buy government-confiscated property; Rothbard identifies swaths of essential and mostly blissful anarchism at certain places and times (Pennsylvania in the 1680s, for example). Some colonial Americans were so uninterested in politics that they didn't bother sending representatives to assemblies; they were so devoted to personal rights and justice over state power that they enjoyed justice that was dedicated to compensating the victim, not merely giving governments the power to punish. In prerevolutionary history Rothbard finds Americans fighting against any encroachment on their liberties, with a strong streak of religious liberty (rare at that time), inspired by radical Whig notions of inalienable and natural rights to life and liberty, as well as the elimination of tyrants. While Rothbard's narrative history has a distinct agenda, it provides a fair amount of convincing evidence for a powerful libertarian streak in the character and behavior of early Americans.

All ideologies try to create a usable past; libertarians have often relied on the philosophical spirit of the American Revolution to support the modern libertarian vision of the proper role of government. To counter this, conservatives rightly point at elements of early American civic life that would strike a modern as the worst sort of tyranny, things most colonials seemed to accept sanguinely enough, from sumptuary laws to state-established religions to vagrancy statutes that made moving into certain towns nearly impossible.The American past is complicated, and libertarianism's apotheosis remained a task for the future—and remains so today.

The idea of human political liberty, of restrictions in the power and reach of government, goes back forever. One can play the game, as libertarians sometimes do, of finding libertarian-sounding rhetoric from such hoary and venerated figures as Confucius's disciple Mencius, who wrote that "in a nation, the people are the most important, the state is next, and the ruler is the least important." That idea about the state's circumscribed role, however, never led to the development of an effective mechanism to create regime change, much less real system change, in Confucian China—nor was there any widespread urge to do so.

In the Western tradition, Judaism contained the idea that the king rules beneath God, is subject to God's rules, and is in no sense divine. The existence of a separate priestly caste meant that the king wasn't necessarily responsible for interpreting what was his business or his mandate. The heart of Judaism was the contract between Jehovah and the Jews. Even God, the highest source of government, owed obligations to man, or at least to the Jews, as long as they kept up their end of the bargain. Christian intellectual history has a natural law and natural rights tradition that recognizes discoverable, rational standards for behavior and human control of behavior that are above and beyond the decisions of earthly governments. This tradition can have strong libertarian implications.

The notion of a higher law that binds government or even God was not a purely Judeo-Christian innovation. Some Greeks believed that, as historian Mario Attilio Levi put it, "the king, even if he were a God, was fallible. They continued to believe that the law was the product of reason, not revelation." Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus (featuring Prometheus steadfastly and heroically defying Zeus in the name of a justice higher than the gods), Antigone by Sophocles, and plays by Euripides attacking slavery and the barbarity of war, indicate a people who understood the distinction between what earthly or even divine authority commanded and what was right and just.

The idea of limits on state power antedate the Western heritage. Levi writes of the concept of ma'at in ancient Egypt: "Ma'at was a limitation imposed on God by himself. Just as, in theological terms, God begat himself in the form of the king, so 'ma'at' became the Law that even the King-god had to respect, and which was therefore separate from him as the son was separate from the father."

The idea that state power is not the last word in justice is ancient; the yearning for liberty against power and attempts to figure out what it means and how it can be actuated are not restricted to a particular religious tradition, though in practice the set of ideas and institutions that arose from certain cultures seemed more amenable to liberty than others did, despite what Mencius said. The notion of a king imposing restrictions on himself would remind a modern libertarian of a constitution whose limits are judged by the same government empowered by that constitution. Modern American history, libertarians argue, shows that government is not apt to work for liberty, considering the enormous expansion of government power since the Progressive Era and New Deal, supported by excuses such as the Constitution's Commerce Clause, which is alleged to mean that even wheat grown on your own farm for your own consumption falls under federal power because you could have sold it in an interstate market.

Libertarian ideas about human politics go back to the creation of the state itself. While a strictly modern libertarian historical anthropology has not been fully developed and a theory of the origins of the state is merely implicit in most libertarians, it is fair to characterize the vision of German anthropologist Franz Oppenheimer in The State (1922) as a dominant libertarian story of how we ended up with the state and what it's all about in origin and essence. Oppenheimer says that the state was born in blood and conquest, as conquerors lived off of the efforts of the conquered through taxation and in return provided "protection." In Oppenheimer's classic distinction, the state reified the practice of the "political" means of survival—predation—as opposed to the "economic" means—production.

The history of Western civilization, however bloody and tyrannical in practice, provides succor for libertarian belief in the power and rightness of liberty and free markets. That relatively free markets and capitalism have produced the wealth and liberty we enjoy today is central to the libertarian story of Western culture. However, no state, guild, church, or bastion of aristocratic privilege has ever allowed those forces to operate totally unrestricted. A common interpretation has it that the urbanization and mechanization created by the relatively free flow of labor and capital known as the Industrial Revolution made millions miserable. The libertarian counterargument is that those millions would not have been alive at all had not free markets, mechanization, and urbanization created surplus wealth above mere agricultural sufficiency.

The twentieth-century movement for limited government—very limited government, extremely limited government, at times totally limited government—began in America, and American libertarians won't let you forget it. Lots of America's sacred iconography is co-opted by libertarians—Liberty Bell, Statue of Liberty—hey, it's right there in the name. Liberty is this country's shibboleth.

Americans were Englishmen first, and, as historian Gordon Wood wrote, "no people in the history of the world had ever made so much of [liberty]. Unlike the poor enslaved French, the English [in colonial American days] had no standing army, no letters de cachet; they had their habeas corpus, their trials by jury, their freedom of speech and conscience, and their right to trade and travel; they were free from arbitrary arrests and punishments; their homes were their castles."

The progress of markets and wealth in the past centuries has eliminated many aspects of day-to-day early American life that strike us today as tyrannical, from the sharp distinctions of rank, the religion-based social control in the towns, and of course the most prominent stain on America's libertarian heritage, the status of blacks and women. (In the form of social pressure as opposed to strict state action, such problems have not entirely disappeared.) As nineteenth-century libertarian hero Henry Maine noted, the history of Western civilization and Western liberty has been the shift from status to contract—from being locked into positions based on who you were at birth, to being able to live, work, do what you wish, deal with others as you please, based on mutually binding contracts—commercial, residential, or marital—chosen by both parties.

More than just Englishmen, Americans were Englishmen who zealously protected their liberties, enflamed by pamphleteers like John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, of the famous Cato's Letters (after which the modern libertarian think tank the Cato Institute is named). Trenchard and Gordon, identified by historian of American revolutionary thought Bernard Bailyn as probably the best-read and most widely regarded pamphleteers of prerevolutionary times, believed in inherent natural human rights that no government may violate. These rights, they maintained, come from God and cannot be alienated; the function of government is solely to defend citizens' persons or property. The capper was, as their hero Whig martyr Algernon Sidney said, free men always have the right to resist tyrannical government.

Thomas Paine, a leading radical of the founding generation, knew that this antimonarchical revolution in the colonies was also something new; that the band playing as British General Cornwallis surrendered was correct: The world had turned upside down.As Paine put it, "we see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts than those we formerly used." As embodied in the Declaration of Independence, American revolutionaries were fighting for the natural rights of all mankind, not just their own particular rights as a people. To the early American revolutionary, "English rights were the legal application of natural rights."

Magna Carta or no, the rights of Americans were not theirs only because of any ancient "contract." As James Wilson put it, using ancient legal terms, "The fee simple of freedom and government is declared to be in the people." Thus the people always had the right of revolution against a repressive government. This too was part of a grand Whig British heritage that the colonists were upholding even if king and Parliament (the latter of whom many colonists thought they owed no fealty to regardless) were ignoring it. The Declaration of Independence was Americans' way of reminding them, and the world, of the rights of a free people.

Using ideas echoed by later French liberals, Americans had a fresh vision of civic virtue; no longer based only in participation in public (i.e., governmental) matters, the new virtue, as historian of the revolutionary era Gordon Wood put it, "flowed from the citizen's participation in society, not in government, which the liberal-minded increasingly saw as the principle source of the evils of the world.... People were wrong to consider society as merely the scaffolding of government; [as James Wilson said,] 'in the just order of things, government is the scaffolding of society: and if society could be built and kept entire without government, the scaffolding might be thrown down, without the least inconvenience or cause of regret.'" An early statement of classic American anarchism, that.

In early America, commerce—that great libertarian emollient of all social ills, that creator of wealth and happiness—was breaking free of the old-fashioned strictures and attitudes that denied it respect. We were to be a great commercial republic and, to the best of our ability, a free republic. In other words, a libertarian republic.

If it had actually worked out that way, the modern American libertarian movement would not exist. There is no room here for a detailed discussion of the long history of the diminution of American liberties, though some libertarian or libertarian fellow-traveler historians of American thought and politics have tried to supply it. Still, even as the contrary impulse toward federalism and nationalism overshadowed these radical founding notions, libertarian ideals surfaced now and again as a counterweight to the impulses toward centralization and statism.

Libertarian historians have detected libertarian strains in the Jacksonian fight against centralizing institutions of federal control such as the national bank, even in aspects of the Confederacy, though that's tricky and controversial ground for libertarians because of human slavery. Many libertarians tend to be sensitive to the quasi-tyrannical means Lincoln used; while not necessarily sympathetic to Confederate values, they sense that the issues involved are more complicated than Lincoln's triumphalism and regret some of the powers of the centralized federal state that arose in the aftermath of, and to a large degree as a result of, the Civil War.

Libertarians find political heroes from the second half of the nineteenth century, though it was hardly the golden age of laissez-faire. Dug up for praise on occasion in libertarian publications is Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field. A former chief justice of the California Supreme Court, Field was named a justice in 1863 and served for thirty-five years in, ironically, what could be seen as a court-packing scheme by Lincoln (ironic because both court packing and Lincoln were things that libertarians in the 1930s and 1940s were not enthusiastic about), a rare tenth justice (the court was reduced back to nine in 1869, but Field stayed).

Field was one of the pioneers of the concept (beloved by many libertarian legal thinkers) of substantive due process—the notion that the due process protected by the Fourteenth Amendment applied not merely to procedures but to the substance of laws as well. Thus the courts could overturn state laws that regulated private property. As slavery was abolished, the Fourteenth Amendment tried to guarantee that no state government could violate the "privileges and immunities" of an American citizen. Field argued, as one libertarian journalist put it, "the phrase 'privileges or immunities,'... describes those 'natural and inalienable rights' that 'belong to the citizens of all free governments.' Furthermore, 'among these must be placed the right to pursue lawful employment in a lawful manner, without other restraints than such as equally affects all persons.'" This idea that the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to overturn state laws that violated rights is a cornerstone of twentieth-century liberal constitutional jurisprudence. However, hardly any judges use it as Field and other late nineteenth-century judges did, to overthrow economic regulation. For example, through substantive due process doctrine a court could declare and protect the right to practice a trade, noting that without this doctrine "there be no protection, either in the principles upon which our republican government is founded, or in the prohibitions of the constitution, against such invasion of private rights, all property and all business in the State are held at the mercy of a majority of its legislators."

Field believed in economic rights unspecified in the Constitution (which he linked with the Fourteenth Amendment, but which could be placed in the libertarians' favorite amendment, the Ninth, which specifically roots the Constitution in a natural rights tradition that says we are born with more rights than any constitution could ever list or specify). His intellectual enemies linked this belief with popular late-nineteenth-century Yale political scientist and sociologist, William Graham Sumner. Sumner opposed imperialism, advocated strict business laissez-faire, and celebrated the right of entrepreneurs to accumulate as much as they can in an honest way. Sumner was a social Darwinist who thought the best should be left to succeed and others left to fail in a free economy. He celebrated the notion that the market order was so brain-bustingly complex that government attempts to manipulate it are apt to lead to unpredictable and likely negative results.

Sumner celebrated "the forgotten man," the independent middle-class man who falls between the cracks of the plutocrats on the one hand and the paupers who receive benefits from government reformers and planners on the other. Yet he has to pay for the schemes that help them. Sumner also rightly predicted that the twentieth century, given the burgeoning combination of socialism and warmongering, would be "a frightful effusion of blood in revolution and war." He eloquently celebrated liberty's intimate connection with peace: "The great reason why all these enterprises which begin by saying to someone else, We know what is good for you better than you know yourself and we are going to make you do it, are false and wrong is that they violate liberty; or, to turn the same statement into other words, the reason why liberty, of which we Americans talk so much, is a good thing is that it means leaving people to live out their lives in their own way, while we do the same. If we believe in liberty, as an American principle, why do we not stand by it" when it comes to foreign affairs? Sumner mordantly noted in his anti-imperialist essay "The Conquest of the United States by Spain" that the United States, despite its apparent victory in the Spanish-American War, allowed Spain's imperial system to conquer it. "We have beaten Spain in a military conflict, but we are submitting to be conquered by her on the field of ideas and policies."

A crude version of American history paints the nineteenth century as an era of the unbridled laissez-faire that libertarians call for—an era that the American people found intolerable and rebelled against with a series of sensible Progressive Era laws that rescued the American dream of opportunity and equality from the villainous plans of the robber barons. Just because the occasional ideologue like Field or Sumner worked on the American mind during the nineteenth century does not mean that era actuated the eternal libertarian dream. Before the Civil War enormous state subsidies went into internal improvements, most of them regrettable as the state interfered with people's business and personal lives. Historian Sidney Fine, who celebrates America's departure from laissez-faire in the twentieth century, writes that "the doctrine of laissez faire... appears to be of relatively slight import in the formulation of state policy before the Civil War... but... those who argued for or against laissez faire between 1865 and 1901 generally spoke little of the earlier, varied activities of government in the United States, and tended to assume that laissez faire had been the determining factor in the formulation of government policy." By the second half of the nineteenth century, as Fine points out, big business wanted and got "a national banking system, a high protective tariff, generous land grants to railway corporation" among other government giveaways and interventions on behalf of the wealthy and powerful. As Arthur Ekirch, a historian of American liberal decline beloved by libertarians, noted, "Instead of the limited state desired by Jeffersonian believers in an agrarian society, the post-Civil War era was characterized by the passage of a stream of tariffs, taxes, and subsidies all unprecedented in their volume and scope."

A libertarian movement functionary debating with Murray Rothbard in the late 1950s opined that libertarians should not allow the left to spread the myth of nineteenth-century laissez-faire. Libertarians must stake their ground as true revolutionaries, a stance that is "rightly and accurately ours!" The nineteenth century was a world of interventionism and mercantilism, with government a useful tool for big business, if not for the less well off. Libertarianism is the ultimate future revolution, the truly liberal, truly free world of tomorrow, for a mankind liberated from all yokes of status and privilege. Rothbard thought, strategically, that libertarians should "praise the American tradition of free enterprise" while maintaining that "we are revolutionaries and not reactionaries because we want to go all the way.... Laissez-Faire was and is revolutionary, and we have come to fulfill the work begun by the martyrs who have gone before; we have come to complete and resuscitate the Revolution."

The general sweep of the American experience is to a large degree disheartening to the modern libertarian because of the horrors of war and statism unleashed by the Civil War, the invention of the Federal Reserve, the income tax, Progressive Era business regulations (arising, as historians and theorists both libertarian and leftist have stressed, more from business desires for rational control over their own industry than from an impulse to empower or help the citizenry), World War I and World War II, the New Deal, and the Great Society. American government has steadily shifted toward less reliance on the free play of commercial republican virtue as it moves toward a traditional pattern of a god-king government, unrestricted by constitutions, dedicated to caring for and managing people in all their activities. This is why a gang of economists, novelists, theorists, pamphleteers, and politicians founded the libertarian movement in the first place.

Libertarianism arose in America from distinctly American roots. Yet in its soul it is a cosmopolitan philosophy, celebrating a world united in spirit, ideas, and trade, while reveling in the wide panorama of freely chosen local peculiarity that only relatively free polities can provide. Modern libertarians sought solace, inspiration, and insight from radical liberals of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and even earlier. Montaigne's good friend Etienne de la BoŽtie, in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1577), tackled the question of how governments keep command over people who command more force than the government ever could. He realized that government's control over us is ultimately ideological—that people believe they ought to obey the state before the state can command obedience. His insight helped drive modern libertarianism's mission to educate the public as to the true nature and effects of the state.

The first major postrevolutionary liberal in France was Benjamin Constant (whose novel Adolphe is better remembered than his political writings), who celebrated what he called "the liberty of the moderns" (actual liberty in day-to-day private affairs) in contrast to the classical "liberty of the ancients" that the French revolutionaries relied on overmuch, which merely meant "equal powerlessness before the state and equal participation in public affairs."

Unlike the free market French economists of the Turgot School (the Physiocrats), Constant was one of the first liberal figures to see the state as always and everywhere the enemy, rather than as a useful instrument for liberal reform against Church, guild, and other power centers. "With Constant, the chief articulator of his generation's liberal ideas, we see the beginnings of classical liberalism's 'state-hatred,' which, after the 18th century's ambiguous attitude, marks its theory to the present day," noted modern libertarian and historian of classical liberalism Ralph Raico. A consistent antistatist, Constant rejected both Jacobinism and conservatism, since "both involved violent interference with the individual's private judgment and action, the seed-bed from which emerge the things that make social life worthwhile."

Early-nineteenth-century French liberal economists created a libertarian class analysis that was later warped by Marx. In the view of this school of French economistes, the relevant class distinction, as Franz Oppenheimer hinted, lay between the productive and the predatory—with the productive being anyone working in the market in any capacity, and the predatory being the state and its agents and dependents who steal from the productive. Here we see the vital libertarian distinction between society and state; between the forces of productive human cooperation and those who prey on it; between, as Comte put it, "farmers, manufacturers, merchants, and scientists, and... courtiers, office holders, monks, permanent armies, pirates, and beggars."

That distinction was the key libertarian insight of these nineteenth-century French radical liberals. As economist Destutt de Tracy, one of the inspirational figures centered around the publication Le censeur europŽen, put it, "Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges... an exchange is a transaction in which the two contracting parties both gain.... It is this unnumberable crowd of small particular advantages, unceasingly arising, which composes the general good, and which produces at length the wonders of perfected society."

Following in this tradition of French liberal economics was the greatest libertarian publicist of the nineteenth century, Frederic Bastiat, a free trader who wrote witty pamphlets against protectionism and tariffs. Bastiat came from a banking family; he followed closely the actions of Richard Cobden and John Bright, the English liberal politicians and publicists who succeeded in overturning Britain's Corn Laws (tariffs and restrictions on imported grain) in the 1840s. Their influence helped shape his writings and agitation on behalf of free trade in France (though he was less successful than Cobden and Bright). Bastiat's writings have been reprinted by libertarian publicists and educational institutions in the twentieth century. In fact the most popular book of libertarian economics in the twentieth century, Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, is a contemporary updating of Bastiat's style and approach to looking at the secondary and tertiary effects of government economic intervention beyond the apparent good they might do.

Bastiat was a great epigrammist for freedom; for example, "The State is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everyone else." He mocked anti-free trade arguments, proving that under protectionist logic, France as a nation is better off if its exports sink at sea before they can be sold, and the profits turned into imports that make the balance of trade worse. He composed the perfectly logical (on protectionist grounds) candle makers' petition against the sun, arguing that for the benefit of French industry and craft the nation must bar this dastardly source of free, imported light. Bastiat's general tone, an important contribution to the spirit of modern libertarianism, was to celebrate the abundance markets create and mock the blinkered small-mindedness of producer-centered economics, which ultimately makes human life less abundant, human beings less rich. Operating in an environment of nineteenth-century socialists, he tried to show how free markets achieved what the socialists hoped to achieve through the state: more abundance and a better life for all.

The most radical of the nineteenth-century European liberal economists (and thus a particular favorite of Murray Rothbard's) was Gustave de Molinari. Molinari was the first, apparently, to explain how the principles and practices of the free competitive market could apply to military defense, thus kicking the props out from under any need for government. He was a young follower of French liberal economists Bastiat and Charles Dunoyer, and gave a speech and published a paper in the Journal des economistes in 1849 that shocked them by reasoning that if free competition works in other fields, we ought not assume beforehand that it could not work with defense.

As Molinari wrote in his 1849 book Les Soirees de la Rue St. Lazare, "Aren't there men whose natural aptitudes render them specially fitted to be judges, policemen and soldiers? On the other side, haven't the property owners a need to protection and justice?... If there are on the one side men fitted to attend to the need of society, and on the other side, men disposed to attend sacrifices upon themselves to obtain the satisfaction of that need, doesn't.... Political economy... say if such a need exists it will be satisfied, and it will be better under a regime of full liberty than under any other?" Molinari hit on the most significant point anyone questioning the "anarchy" of the free market must understand, in the libertarian view: "How will this industry organize itself? What will be the operating techniques? Here is where political economy cannot know the answer. Also I am able to affirm that if the need to feed itself is manifest at the heart of society, this need will be satisfied.... Things will arrange themselves in absolutely the same manner if it is a matter of security rather than food."

The German Wilhelm von Humboldt, much relied on by John Stuart Mill in his more famous writing on liberty, is another European liberal admired by modern libertarians. He argued in The Spheres and Duties of Government (1792) that providing security was government's only proper function, and that social progress required that people be free to conduct cornucopian experiments in living from which we can learn the manifold possibilities and pleasures of human living.

According to modern libertarian and historian of European liberalism Ralph Raico, Humboldt was possibly the first to summon certain arguments for liberty (e.g., the almost metaphysical one, going beyond politics to the nature of what it means to be human). As Raico put it, Humboldt explained it is "only when men are placed in a great variety of circumstances that those experiments can take place which expand the range of values with which the human race is familiar, and it is through expanding this range that increasingly better answers can be found to the question, 'In exactly what ways are men to arrange their lives?'" Only under liberty, Humboldt argued, and Mill would later repeat, can the true manifold glories of human possibility be discovered and expressed.

Herbert Spencer was the most influential of nineteenth-century European philosophical radicals. He based his first major work of political philosophy, Social Statics (1851), on what he saw as innate social laws that make liberty as essential to human life as understanding scientific laws is for mastering nature. This social law of liberty is so unyielding that it led Spencer to anarchism, announcing the "right of people to ignore the state." (He backslid from this radical anarchism, however, and in later editions of the book he excised that chapter.)

Spencer rose from a humble Quaker background and an early career as a railroad draftsman to become one of those energetic Victorian intellectuals who wrote massive books summing up all his thoughts on various sciences, physical and moral. He was an early evolutionary theorist who invented the phrase "survival of the fittest," coined the term "law of equal freedom" to sum up the libertarian message that we have a right to all the freedom we can enjoy that does not infringe on another's freedom, and was largely responsible for whatever laissez-faire feelings dominated elite intellectual thinking in the late nineteenth century. Historian Sidney Fine writes, "It would be difficult to overestimate Spencer's popularity in the United States during the quarter-century after the Civil War" (over 350,000 copies of his works were sold in America between 1860 and 1903). In 1864, the Atlantic declared that "Spencer... represents the scientific spirit of the age" and that his ideas "will become the recognized basis of an improved society." Andrew Carnegie was so impressed and heartened by Spencer's explanation of the advantages of free markets and business that he gifted him with a grand piano. Spencer is perhaps best known in American legal-intellectual circles for Oliver Wendell Holmes's summoning of him darkly, in his dissent in the 1905 Lochner case (which overturned a maximum-working-hours law on principles of economic liberty that Holmes felt the Constitution did not protect), that "the 14th Amendment is not an enactment of Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics." Spencer was the most prominent name to drop when it came to a libertarian vision of unrestricted economic rights. Holmes had elsewhere written that no writer but Darwin had done more to shape the thinking of his age.

Auberon Herbert, a disciple of Spencer's, stayed truer to Spencer's original anarchist vision and was a direct inspiration to a squad of 1950s American libertarian anarchists who adopted his term "voluntaryism." Herbert was that rare anarchist philosopher who was a practicing politician before his ideological maturation. He served as Liberal representative in the House of Commons for Nottingham between 1870 and 1874; in Parliament he fell under Spencer's spell to the point that he began to doubt the propriety of staying in government.

By 1879, deciding that his political values did require representation in Parliament, he tried again, but the Liberal party found his new radical views uncongenial. He had become a leading anti-imperialist by then. Convinced that he was taking a purified Spencerianism further than the increasingly cynical Spencer himself dared in the last decade of the nineteenth century, he started a Party of Individual Liberty and a journal, Free Life, "the organ of voluntary taxation and the voluntary state." Herbert argued passionately against state education and against the notion that the majority had any more right to run a man's life than "either the bayonet-surrounded emperor or the infallible church." He foresaw the explosion of wealth that truly free trade would bring for all in a realm of inviolable private property, recognized that pollution was a rights violation, and, apparently detecting the likes of Murray Rothbard on the horizon, theorized that someday a philosopher of liberty would explain why libel law is an unjust diminution of freedom.

He saw his anarchistic libertarianism as the final apotheosis of everything good in the human moral sense, a world in which force and violence can legitimately be used for nothing other than protecting "self-ownership"—the root of all human rights. An unjustly obscure figure in his style and in the far places he took his libertarianism, Auberon Herbert sounds the most twentieth-century of all the nineteenth-century individualists.

Modern libertarianism has an American tradition to lean on that continued past the era of Paine and Jefferson. This is fortunate for libertarians, as some radicals among them consider the Constitution itself and the Federalist movement from which it arose a betrayal of America's tradition of decentralized liberty.

The prehistory of modern American libertarianism will of necessity be surveyed lightly here, alighting on certain figures of unique influence on the modern movement, particularly those less widely noted in other surveys of American intellectual history. Not every American intellectual or political figure whose beliefs are echoed by modern libertarianism will be discussed here. Given the libertarian roots of American political theory, that would require nothing less than a shadow history of American thought itself. Henry David Thoreau, for just one prominent example, professed impeccably libertarian beliefs when he wrote "that government is best which governs least" and asserted the less famous but explicitly free market "this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way." But more obscure heroes that only modern libertarians are apt to remember, and whose intellectual resources and spirits only the libertarians call on, will be discussed here.

The American individualist anarchists represented a small and by the late 1940s almost forgotten sidestream in nineteenth-century American radicalism. The linchpin of this movement (or tendency) was Benjamin Tucker, a Bostonian (born in South Dartmouth in 1854) from a well-to-do Unitarian family. He blended the beliefs of his various American anarchist forebears and dedicated his life to a plumb-line, no-retreat, and no-sellout defense of them. Tucker's role for his radical intellectual movement presaged Murray Rothbard's in his. After reading Tucker in light of Rothbard, one seems to hear eerie echoes sounding backward in time. They shared a similar tone, a passionate belief in the moral illegitimacy of the state, and a brave (some might think foolhardy) tendency to remorselessly follow the logic of their chosen premises to any end, however bitter it might seem even to those who agreed most of the way.

The modern libertarian movement is the only political tendency that honors these individualist anarchists, keeping their ideas alive and in some cases (like Lysander Spooner) openly embracing them. Despite this, not much contemporary scholarship analyzes the individualist anarchists in the light of how their ideas have been revived and maintained by libertarians.

Tucker saw himself as continuing and expanding a tradition launched by Josiah Warren in America and Jean-Pierre Proudhon in France. Their antistate radicalism arose in a different intellectual environment than did the mid-twentieth-century libertarian movement. Although Warren and Proudhon said many things that would generate enthusiastic nods of assent from a modern libertarian, much in their thinking is alien to its main thrust. Both Warren and Proudhon saw themselves as figures in a worldwide socialist revolution, though Warren's catch-phrase, which Tucker said summed up his mission as well, was "individual sovereignty." The main goal of their movement was to eliminate the causes of exploitation and oppression that keep the laborer from what is properly his. Tucker and the other individualist anarchists thought, contrary to the other socialists of their day, that eliminating the state was the clearest, most just path toward that goal.

Although intellectual history provides few clear-cut examples of innovators with no discernible precursors (making any declaration that anyone was the first when it comes to ideas a mug's game), Josiah Warren is a suitable starting point for the history of a uniquely American anarchism. Historians such as Eunice Minette Schuster and William Reichert trace back American anarchism's roots to Anne Hutchinson's resistance to Puritan authority in Massachusetts in the 1630s, and her brother-in-law Reverend John Wheelwright's belief that spirit always trumps law. Active around the same time as Warren were such American rebels against authority as Thoreau, John Humphrey Noyes and his perfectionism, William Lloyd Garrison, the Non-Resistance League end of the antislavery movement, and Adin Ballou of the utopian colony in Hopedale, Massachusetts, who believed that the Bible advocated anarchism. All of these ideas arose in a subterranean American environment of social ferment over free love, temperance, slavery, women's suffrage, and the liberty to speak and worship freely. Eventually everyone but the anarchists ended up winning their battles.

Garrison's natural rights-based radical assault on slavery—which insisted on immediate abolition, with no "compensation to the slave-holders" (what about compensation to the slaves?)—led to victory for his ideas within a generation, as inspirational an example as we have of a radical libertarian activist whose cause prevailed, even though through the troublesome means of Civil War. (It is hard to be precisely certain to what degree intellectual agitators inspired or caused real-world events that follow their prescriptions.) His journal The Liberator helped turn escaped slave Frederick Douglass into an ideological anti-slavery crusader. Garrison also won that ultimate compliment to the antistate agitator: a bounty on his head in various states. His life shows modern libertarians that uncompromising radicalism in defense of justice, even if most of your culture sees your cause initially as more madness than justice, can enflame souls and effect real change.

Born in 1798, Josiah Warren was a New England man who traveled west to Cincinnati. His first brush with radicalism was joining Robert Owen's experimental community of New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825. Warren moved his family into that community, which collapsed after two years. Owen's approach failed, Warren thought, because individuality and difference were stifled among the residents.

After the collapse of New Harmony, Warren, who loved empiricism in social theorizing, tested his contribution to anarchist economics: the idea that cost should always be the limit of price. One should not sell something for what its value is to the buyer, but rather for the cost of making it (or obtaining it) to the seller. He first tried this out at his Time Store in Cincinnati in 1827. He ostentatiously activated a clock at the beginning of every transaction to measure how much time he dedicated to selling you what you wanted.

In 1833, Warren published the first American journal of anarchism, The Peaceful Revolutionist, wherein he made such pronouncements as, governments "commit more crimes upon persons and property and contribute more to their insecurity than all criminals put together." Warren was an inventor as well as a social theorist. He came up with an innovative lard-burning lamp and a new kind of continuous-printing press (which was destroyed by an angry labor union in Evansville, Ohio, in a fit of Luddite rage in 1840). His influence spread to Europe as well; John Stuart Mill credits Warren with influencing his own conception of individualism.

Warren didn't want to overthrow existing society; he merely wanted to create alternative communities where men could ignore the state. He eventually decided to enter the experimental community business and do it right. Warren's family and five other families settled on four hundred acres in Tuscarawas County, Ohio. Poor drainage drove them out within a year. His next colony, started in 1847 in Ohio, was called, appropriately enough, Utopia, also sometimes known as Trialville. Most of the residents were ex-Fourierites, whose own colony, the Clermont Phalanx, had failed. The community tried to run on Warren's "equitable commerce" principles, using labor notes, and by most accounts succeeded remarkably for a while. Eventually Warren decided that taking someone's labor in exchange was awkward; what if you had no particular use for it? Deciding that corn was better than metal "with respect to ease of determining its cost of production in man hours," labor notes became payable in a certain amount of corn as well as in labor.

Warren's biggest experiment in a new kind of human community commenced in 1851 on a 750-acre patch in the township of Islip in Suffolk County on Long Island, about forty miles outside New York City. The community was called, portentously enough, Modern Times. By now Warren had picked up one of his most prominent disciples: Stephen Pearl Andrews, a man with an already illustrious and notorious libertarian past.

Andrews, born in 1812 in Templeton, Massachusetts, to a roving Baptist minister, became a firebrand lawyer and abolitionist. By 1839, Andrews and his wife were living in Houston, helping translate the Republic of Texas's constitution and laws into Spanish. Andrews had become an ardent abolitionist while living in New Orleans and witnessing the institution's baneful effect on both slave and master. He developed a scheme to keep Texas, then an independent republic, from entering the United States as a slave state: convince Britain to buy it. He set sail in 1843 on his mission, but the Texas government had already warned the British that Andrews represented no one but himself. He failed to seal the deal.

His opportunity to strike a historic blow against slavery a failure, Andrews realized (after being driven from both Texas and New Orleans by angry mobs who didn't cotton to abolitionist agitators) that it was the North for him. He settled in Boston and indulged in another of his lifelong interests: a more compact and convenient language. He invented a new phonographic shorthand and began teaching it. Around this time he discovered Josiah Warren's Equitable Commerce (1846) and became an enthusiastic convert to the cause of individual sovereignty and cost-the-limit-of-price. He wrote a huge work explicating Warren and adding some of his own wrinkles, called The Science of Society (1852). Benjamin Tucker thought this book "the most important political and economical work ever printed in the English language." Andrews's socialism was by no means antimarket or anticompetition; he had a fairly sophisticated, Austrian-sounding theory of how truly free competition will automatically lead every worker to find the place where he can be most productive and earn the most he is capable of.

Modern Times attracted more than those into cost-the-limit-of-price and living in communal but individualistic liberty; it was catnip as well to the full range of mid-nineteenth-century experimenters in living. Although Warren and Andrews allowed people in by invitation only at first, with future residents needing the approval of at least one of the first ten settlers, Modern Times became famous not as a land of the free but as a land of the peculiar. Warren, more bourgeois in outlook when it came to that kind of experimental living, wrote despairingly of the dietary crank in Modern Times who would eat nothing but beans. "She tottered about a living skeleton for about a year, "Warren recalled, "and then sank down and died (if we can say that there was enough left to die)." Nudists and polyamorists flocked to the Pine Barrens of Long Island. The Spiritual Affinity movement found a home there. The town's reputation as a hotbed of radical kookery spread. Henry Edgar, a disciple of Comte's socialist positivism, tried to make Modern Times a Comtean redoubt. After the Civil War Modern Times was no longer a functioning experimental community; it had ceased using Warrenite labor notes for currency and existed as the town of Brentwood, New York.

After Modern Times, Andrews went on to a colorful career as a full-service nineteenth-century American kook. He invented his own language, Alwato, which he taught to his acolytes; he became a fervent advocate of free love and invented his own gaseous all-encompassing "science" called Universology and declared himself "pantarch." Despite embracing the idea of individual sovereignty and spreading it to later generations, in his waning days Andrews became convinced that he should be ruler of the world and that he was in all likelihood the reincarnation of Christ. Famed suffragette, presidential candidate, and free love advocate Victoria Woodhull became an acolyte of Universology and invited Andrews to contribute regularly to her early-1870s journal the Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly. (When Andrews and Woodhull joined the socialist First International, they were promptly booted for "bourgeois" tendencies.)

Both Andrews and Warren became personally acquainted with the man most responsible for their ideas surviving their century: Benjamin Tucker, an enthusiast from the first after attending an 1872 meeting of the New England Labor Reform League (NELRL), a group largely dedicated to Warrenite principles. Reading Warren's True Civilization was a conversion experience for Tucker. He was led from there to Proudhon. Tucker had freshly translated and published some of the French socialist-anarchist's work. Anarchist theory was then mostly dedicated to the problems of the working man. Whether individualist or communist, anarchists of the nineteenth century thought their beliefs were a social tool they could use to rob the plutocrats of their dominion over the mind—and surplus labor—of men.

Tucker was certain who the primary enemy was: "The State is said by some to be a 'necessary evil;' it must be made unnecessary," he declared." This century's battle, then, is with the State: the State, that debases man; the State, that prostitutes women; the State, that corrupts children; the State, that trammels love; the State, that stifles thought; the State, that monopolizes land; the State, that limits credit; the State, that restricts exchange; the State, that gives idle capital the power of increase and, through interest, rent, profits, and taxes, robs industrious labor of its products."

Tucker the individualist anarchist, no less than Johann Most the communist anarchist, embraced the Marxian concept of the surplus value of the laborer stolen by the bosses. But Tucker identified four monopolies, all of which he thought would die when the state died: currency monopoly, tariff monopoly, land monopoly, and the patent and copyright monopoly. In the pages of his short-lived publication Radical Review (1877-1878) and later in Liberty (1881-1908), Tucker and his coterie of fellow individualist anarchists quarreled, fussed, speculated, and explored the policies and implications of a world with no states and the four-legged monopoly beast slain. (Despite his opposition to monopoly, the anarchist Tucker didn't believe in antitrust law.)

Ezra Heywood, one of Tucker's first mentors and an energetic NELRL member, sometimes reached 100,000 people through his pamphlets. Tucker became an associate editor of Heywood's publication The Word in 1875, but quit in frustration at the end of 1876 when he concluded that Heywood was more concerned with freedom of speech and sexual relations than with more important labor and economic reform matters.

Still, when Heywood was arrested in 1877 by famous bluenose Anthony Comstock for printing his essay "Cupid's Yoke" (which questioned the necessity of marriage and suggested that women should be free to have sex under any circumstances they wished), the estranged Tucker stepped forward to keep the magazine coming while Heywood languished in durance vile. (President Rutherford B. Hayes later pardoned Heywood.)

Free love advocates and unionists swirled through Tucker's world, though he was not necessarily one with them. (He lost his virginity to an aggressive Victoria Woodhull.) Tucker put his money where his mouth was regarding opposition to censorship, publishing an edition of the banned Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. (He was never prosecuted.) The world of American radicalism was small; the utopian socialists and the free lovers and the new languagers and the labor syndicalists and the Marxist rabble-rousers all minded each other and argued with each other as the outside world persecuted and laughed. As the various revolutions—Soviet, sexual, and other—of the twentieth century would show, the kooks were indeed visionaries, even if not always right. A feminist individualist anarchist in his wide circles, Voltairine de Cleyre, is heralded and anthologized these days by modern libertarian feminist thinker Sharon Presley (who ran the Association of Libertarian Feminists) for her bold combination of politico-economic anarchism and radical feminism and sexual liberation for women.A sign of the different ways history has treated the individualist anarchists versus the communist anarchists is how little known de Cleyre is compared to her occasional sparring partner Emma Goldman.

Tucker played the role of movement leader and enforcer, dictating what he called the "plumb line" of individualist anarchism. In the Tucker line, Proudhon and Warren were heroes and wise forefathers; Marx tried to be a friend of labor but was ultimately an authoritarian rather than a lover of liberty, though Tucker did accept much in Marx's economics.

Tucker tried to clear a more consistent path to liberation than did either state socialists or bourgeois liberals. As Liberty anthologist Frank H. Brooks put it, "In Liberty... liberals and anarchists could argue together as fellow libertarians, while state socialists and anarchists could argue together as fellow socialists." The pages of Liberty were frequently filled with Tucker and others distinguishing their libertarian anarchism from the communist variety. "A Communist sailing under the flag of Anarchism is as false a figure as could be invented," Tucker insisted.

Like socialists, Tucker and Liberty fulminated against concentrations of wealth and the rise of monopolies; like libertarians, they admired private property and competition. But Tucker held no truck with the violence of the stereotypical bomb-throwing anarchists, though all anarchists were stained by that association after the Haymarket incident of 1886, in which an anarchist labor gathering in Chicago was disrupted by explosions that killed seven and wounded dozens more. (It quickly turned into a riot of police violence after that.) Whether set off by anarchists or police provocateurs is still uncertain, though almost all now agree that the men who were hung for the crime—anarchist activists Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer—were in no way responsible. Tucker was no pacifist, but he considered bomb throwing to be a less productive strategy than education.

In his strategic focus on how an anarchist could achieve social change, Tucker presaged Rothbard and through him modern populist libertarianism; much of his rhetoric reads exactly like Rothbard's (or vice versa). From Tucker, Rothbard (and through him the libertarian movement) got arguments about how most of the ills of society, rather than requiring a state solution, are caused by the state itself. Consequently there is no practical reason to tolerate government. But the individualist anarchists disagreed with the modern anarcho-capitalists in economics. While a Rothbardian thinks a landlord can be as productive as anyone else in a free society, Tuckerites thought that only occupancy grants a right to land ownership. All absentee landlords should—and would, with the death of the state that acted as their praetorian guard—lose any right to extract rent.

Similarly, Tuckerites embraced notions about banking and currency—largely from the influence of William B. Greene—that seem sheer crankery to the Mises-marinated anarcho-capitalists of today. They agreed on eliminating state monopoly control over currency. Unlike most anarcho-capitalists, who believe that nothing less than a hard metal can serve as an appropriate currency in a free market, Tuckerites under Greene's influence believed in bringing monetized debt to the people, creating mutual banks where all personal property could back currency. This would ensure, they argued, that no one would ever lack for purchasing power.

Though Tucker moved in the radical socialist circles of his day and thought of himself as a socialist, he was aware that the quest for enforced equality leads to tyranny. Summing up his movement's self-image within the American tradition, he declared himself and his associates "unterrified Jeffersonians"—people unfrightened by the radical implications of the American idea of freedom. As individualist anarchist historian Eunice Minette Schuster wrote, "The Individualist Anarchist... crystallized the traditional individualism and lawlessness of America into a universally applicable, systematic philosophy. And they were conscious of their heritage. Almost without exception they were the descendents of old New England families, particularly of Massachusetts, and in some cases of Revolutionary War heroes... American tradition was their inheritance and European philosophies reinforced their convictions, particularly those of John Locke, Adam Smith, William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, Proudhon, John Stuart Mill, Max Stirner and Herbert Spencer."

The Liberty crowd prefigured the concerns of modern libertarians. Victor Yarros was already defending anarcho-libertarians from the accusation that in opposing government, they opposed society and civilization. Yarros posited the anarcho-capitalist idea of competing defense agencies in a market replacing a government monopoly on defense. "Society would cease to exist if life and liberty were not protected against invasion, external or internal," Yarros admitted. "But it would not cease to exist if the governmental method were abandoned."

Tucker's Liberty was not strictly dedicated to American anarchism; it also discussed the work of such British fellow travelers as Auberon Herbert and Herbert Spencer. In the early days of Liberty Spencer and his law of equal freedom were highly praised. But Tucker ended up criticizing both Spencer and Auberon Herbert for what he saw as an obsession on their part with only the liberties that benefited the bourgeoisie, and not matters of equity to labor.

By the early 1890s,Tucker had discovered a new foundation for his anarchism. He abandoned his initial belief in natural rights and embraced the egoism of German writer Max Stirner (real name Johann Kasper Schmidt), as explained in The Ego and Its Own, translated into English by Liberty contributor Stephen Byington. "There is no real liberty save that one takes for oneself," Stirner declared. Stirner rejected morality entirely; arguments based on "rights" struck him as superstitious hoodoo. To be truly free, the individual must be free of any mental "spooks," as Stirner called them, that would become more important to him than him, full stop. Tucker came to insist, after Stirner, that contract alone creates obligations; morality or rights has nothing to do with it. Liberty contributor John Kelly countered that contracts themselves posit a moral system, else whence came the obligation to obey them?

Tucker believed in education, not political action or mass demonstrations; in the quiet conversion of minds, one at a time, to anarchistic thought. Eliminating the state through revolution without first convincing people that they don't need one merely guarantees that another state will quickly arise in its place. Tucker wanted anarchy in a wholly modern, urban context; not for him the Warren idea of experimental anarchist communities separated from the rest of the world.

In reading through old Liberty articles, a modern libertarian will find many familiar arguments and issues. Like libertarian periodicals from the 1960s to 1990s, they contain discussions of whether libertarians are, or ought to be, harder on slightly deviationist fellow libertarians than they are on statists; arguments over whether a certain libertarian conclusion rubs so violently against most people's beliefs that it is better not to emphasize it; debates about whether libertarians must first start living libertarian principles, proving that voluntary individual effort can meet needs most people think only the state can handle; controversy over whether Christianity is inimical to or essential to libertarianism; a hue and cry over whether a libertarian ought to vote; all these internal movement dialogues essentially began in Liberty and went underground for over fifty years, resurfacing in the libertarian periodicals of the postwar era.

After a while, his circle's failure to significantly turn America in an anarchist direction began to wear on Tucker. His brand of individualist anarchism suffered from having no clear constituency that directly benefited from it, unlike labor agitators' attraction to socialism or big business's attraction to progressive centralization.

Schuster summed up the difficulties of the Tuckerite program within its historical context well: "[Individualist anarchism's] demands to secure the just distribution of wealth did not please the capitalists. Its pacific, un-class conscious program left the proletariat cold. The capitalists wanted nothing of absolutely unrestricted unprotected competition and individualism. What it wanted was class solidarity, cooperation and the distribution of the goods of this world irrespective of the accident of birth and inherited capacity. Its complete anti-governmentalism made them all tremble. But the lack of a definite means of destroying the present forms of inequalities made it impractical."

Tucker never promised a utopia, something the social agitators of his time seemed to crave. "There are some troubles from which mankind can never escape," he admitted. "[The anarchists] have never claimed that liberty will bring perfection; they simply say that its results are vastly preferable to those that follow from authority.... As a choice of blessings, liberty is the greater; as a choice of evils, liberty is the smaller. Then liberty always says the Anarchist. No use of force except against the invader."

Tucker gave up on Liberty after a 1908 fire claimed his print shop and most of his papers. Taking his wife and young daughter, he moved to France, a country he grew to adore. This love for France led him to support the allied forces in World War I, a move many of his old fans and friends saw as a sellout of his principles. He despaired of his anarchistic values ever finding a congenial place to take root and grow in the modern world. The communist anarchists surrounding Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were victims of a powerful state backlash in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Being an anarchist and an immigrant became a crime, and hundreds were arrested and dozens deported—the final act in the post-Haymarket drama of fear and distrust of anarchists.

In 1925, Tucker wrote to a friend who asked him what he, Tucker, had achieved of lasting value: "To that question 'Nothing' is the only truthful answer," Tucker glumly replied. "I aimed to contribute a stone to a social edifice, a cathedral if one may call it so, which I expected to be carried to completion, slowly but surely, through the ages. I have contributed that stone.... But I see now that the cathedral will never be finished, and that the portion already built is destined soon to tumble into ruins."

Tucker's greatest contribution to the individualist anarchist tradition was publishing in Liberty and befriending the nineteenth-century individualist anarchist most revered by modern libertarians: Lysander Spooner.

Spooner was born in 1808 on a farm outside Athol, Massachusetts. He became an enemy of the state early on and succeeded in repealing a state statute that prevented him from practicing law without college training. Before beginning his copious writings on the criminal nature of the state, he practiced some competitive anarchism: running a private post office. Spooner's American Letter Mail Company, launched in 1844, was cheaper and more efficient than its government competition, and was driven out of business by Congress. For those who want to explain Spooner's relentless assaults on every ethical excuse for the government as arising from personal pique, one could look to that, and to the fact that the state of Ohio drained a river and damaged land that Spooner owned on the shore.

Spooner developed a vision of the inherently criminal nature of government that strikes many with a powerful and liberating force (as it struck me when I came across Spooner's pamphlet No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1870) in high school). His arguments are firmly based in the standard Western moral order, and yet his relentlessly logical conclusion proves that the state by its very nature always and everywhere destroys justice, even though nearly everyone in the West believes in the state as much as they believe in justice. This sense of the utter criminality of all government action can be traced through Rothbard's polemical writings on government: a furious indignation that government, nothing more than a band of brigands and killers, should command so much obedience and carry so much moral weight. While Spooner was not a violent revolutionary, he believed in the natural right to use force, up to and including deadly force, against those who would deny you your rights.

Spooner grew into his mature opinion that there was no legitimate authority behind the U.S. government, or any government not based on complete consent. He was especially caustic on the pretended consent in which the U.S. government cloaked itself, especially after the Civil War. "The North exults beyond measure," he wrote, "in the proof she has given, that a government, professedly resting on consent, will expend more life and treasure in crushing dissent, than any government, openly founded on force, has ever done."

He began his polemical career as a standard abolitionist who argued for America against the fervent opinion of abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison: Since the U.S. Constitution countenanced slavery, it was a compact with Satan and not to be respected. Garrison inflamed crowds by setting fire to copies of the Constitution. Spooner used his lawyerly constitutional analysis to prove Garrison wrong—to show that the U.S. Constitution properly interpreted could not permit slavery. History was more on Garrison's side, as it took the destruction of aspects of the U.S. Constitution—particularly the idea that it was a voluntary joining together of independent and sovereign states—and its official amendment to finally end slavery. Despite his abolitionism, Spooner thought the Civil War was a worse crime than slavery, since it cemented the principle "that men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals."

Spooner agitated for the basic individualist anarchist line on mutual banking and free currency. In one of his unique contributions, he was the patron saint of the lively movement for jury nullification. His longest work of legal/historical scholarship was Trial by Jury. In it, he demonstrated that historically in Anglo-Saxon society juries were not merely meant to decide who was or wasn't telling the truth on the witness stand, but to be the people's final council and bulwark against the possible tyranny of king and parliament. Spooner insisted that juries always had (and must always have, to protect citizens' liberties) the power to judge both the law and the facts. Even if a defendant did in fact perform the alleged act, the jury must have the power to decide to refuse to convict anyway—in modern language, to "nullify" the conviction.

Spooner later went a step further, in effect saying, screw the jury; none of the laws enforced by U.S. courts have any validity whatsoever. In a series of essays called No Treason, he argued that only consent can give moral validity to the government's use of force. The alleged consent of our forefathers when they ratified the Constitution can by no acceptable legal logic bind anyone living in the present to allegiance unless they personally vow such allegiance. Thus "no treason," since treason is betraying that to which one rightfully owes allegiance—and no one owes the U.S. government such allegiance.

At best, Spooner says, the Constitution could only bind those men who ratified it, which was never even all the people living then. For Spooner, elections were merely the illegitimate deputizing of politicians to act as thieves and marauders.

In a quote beloved by libertarians, Spooner tried to prove that the state is in fact of lower moral standing than a common brigand.

The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life.... [But] the highwayman... does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your benefit.... He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a "protector." ...Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you.... He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful "sovereign" on account of the "protection" he affords you. He does not keep "protecting" you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest and pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and... shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villainies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.

Spooner demolishes the arguments that paying taxes or voting—or not leaving the country—imply agreement to the "social contract" that legitimizes the U.S. government. He provides the most furious yet lawyerly argument yet seen for a bourgeois anarchism, one that takes bourgeois reasoning and propriety to their ultimate limit and shows that, properly interpreted, they allow no room for a state. More than any of his nineteenth-century individualist anarchist brethren, Spooner is still an active influence on the libertarian movement—reprinted, quoted, honored, and relied on.

Whether there is any direct ideological lineage from Josiah Warren through Stephen Pearl Andrews and then to Benjamin Tucker and on to modern libertarianism is a controversial question. To the extent that such an influence exists, Rothbard is its major conduit.

The Tuckerites' opposition to absentee land owning and their belief in monetizing everything are absent from modern libertarianism. Stirnerism is far less popular than arguments that are either moralistic, such as Rand's and Rothbard's, or don't make a point of antagonizing moralists, such as Friedman, Mises, and the "government doesn't work" pragmatic mentality that frequently undergirds the arguments of libertarian organizations such as the Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party.

Still, one can detect the spirit—certainly the thoroughgoing opposition to any and all government action—of Tucker and especially Spooner in the libertarian movement today. As William Gary Kline said in his book about the individualist anarchists, "They took the ideals of the liberal tradition more seriously than most Americans." That is also true of modern libertarians.

Even before a recognizable movement of institutions, funders, and writers dedicated to libertarianism in its modern sense coalesced in the 1940s, scattered public intellectuals in America in the first half of the twentieth century were already advocating ideas similar in many respects to the radically antistate individualism that defined the post-war American libertarian movement. Journalist, biographer, and belle lettrist Albert Jay Nock is frequently cited in attempts to establish a prewar pedigree for modern libertarian thought, and he is a hero to many of the modern movement's founders. His book-length essay on political philosophy and American political history, Our Enemy, The State (1935), was brought back into print by libertarian-themed presses in both the 1970s (Free Life Editions) and 1990s (Fox & Wilkes).

Nock's final book, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, was a bestseller in 1943, and he contributed regularly to such popular-intellectual American magazines as the Atlantic and Mencken's American Mercury. He was widely praised for his fine style. Post-Mencken American Mercury editor Paul Palmer called him "the greatest stylist among American writers... no American ever wrote a purer prose." But Nock is mostly forgotten outside libertarian circles today, although conservative kingpin William F. Buckley also considers him a personal hero. Michael Wreszin (who specializes in hard-to-pigeonhole American public intellectuals with biographies of Oswald Garrison Villard and Dwight MacDonald) wrote in his 1971 Nock biography that Nock's memory was kept alive by "a small body of eccentric libertarians who championed his cause in obscure subterranean journals." Nock's public profile hasn't risen since.

Nock was an anarchist, though he carefully distinguished the state, to which he was bloodily opposed, from government—the necessary functions for an orderly civilization historically usurped by the state. His anarchism was, as Wreszin put it, an "extrapolitical poetic vision" more than a considered political program or theory. Nock considered the stuff of humane culture—art, literature, good living—more important than political ideology.

Nock was honest enough to admit the curious fact that "I have to recognize, with searchings of heart, that the sense of whatever in human society is enviable, graceful and becoming has been bred by a regime so monstrously unjust and flagitious that it had no right ever to exist on earth." This, he wrote, made him "a little circumspect about the imposition of one's theories.... I am an individualist, anarchist, single-taxer and free-trader.... I think also that the general course of things is in those directions. But whenever I feel inclined to hurry up the course of things, I ask myself how much at home I should feel in a society of my own creating."

Nock was born in 1870 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of Joseph Albert Nock, a clergyman. Nock himself was an ordained Episcopal minister, active from 1897 until 1909. He kept his religious career secret in later life and didn't even mention it in his memoirs. Nock was notorious for extreme reticence about his personal life. Libertarian journalist and Nock protŽgŽ Frank Chodorov wrote, "It was only after I was appointed administrator of his estate that I learned of the existence of two full-grown and well-educated sons." After leaving the priesthood, Nock drifted into journalism. He became a staff writer at the American magazine, edited by John S. Phillips and staffed largely by refugees from the original home of American muckraking journalism, McClure's. The American, as Nock biographer Robert Crunden put it, attempted to "improve and educate, not to shock or irritate."

Nock was already devoted to Henry George, a political and economic philosopher, author of Progress and Poverty (1879), who came into vogue in the late nineteenth century. George combined a basic libertarianism with a belief that government should be funded by a "single tax" on the unimproved value of land. Nock wrote a long series of articles for the American on the inequities of America's existing, non-Georgist system of property taxation. He left the American in 1914 after claiming he wrote a deliberately bad article about Edison that was accepted and published.

In 1915, on a supposed mission (mysterious to all his biographers) in Europe on behalf of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, Nock met and befriended Francis Neilson, a British member of Parliament who had written an early work of World War I revisionism called How Diplomats Make War. The book was a pioneer in arguing against the Allies' notion that the full load of war guilt rested properly on Germany. Nock wrote an introduction to the first American edition and helped find a publisher for it. Nock's association with Neilson was his entrŽe into the world of twentieth-century war revisionism, discussed below. Nock wrote his own book on German war guilt, The Myth of a Guilty Nation (1922).

Neilson and his wife, Helen Swift, an heiress to the Swift meatpacking fortune, were major funders of The Nation during Oswald Garrison Villard's editorship. The Neilsons bought a staff position for Nock on the magazine. Nock wrote a story criticizing labor leader Samuel Gompers that got the September 13, 1918, issue temporarily banned from the U.S. mail. (Gompers was a favorite of the Wilson administration for helping keep the labor movement supportive of World War I.)

The Neilsons also financed the Freeman, a publication Nock edited for its entire run (1920-1924). Its circulation never exceeded 7,000. The Freeman, in Nock's vision, opposed the mealy-mouthed equivocations of the standard liberal press as represented by Villard's Nation and Herbert Croly's New Republic. When Villard wrote a piece welcoming Nock's Freeman to the community of liberal magazines, Nock responded that "we loathes liberalism and loathes it hard," insisting that his magazine was radical. The magazine maintained and retained a high reputation as a home for serious writing on culture and politics, with Nock's Georgist-reformist slant showing through. Freeman contributors included Charles A. Beard, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, Bertrand Russell, Lincoln Steffans, and John Dos Passos.

Nock's overall political/intellectual slant was unique, although parts of it were strongly influenced by earlier writers. Nock biographer Robert Crunden astutely characterized the Nock intellectual mix as "spirit and object from Matthew Arnold, philosophy and politics from Herbert Spencer, economics from Henry George, and history and sociology from Franz Oppenheimer." Libertarian historian Charles Hamilton noticed that Nock's uniqueness left observers of the Freeman "struggl[ing] to fit the journal into a political procrustean bed. They couldn't decide if it was liberal, conservative, Bolshevik, revolutionary, anarchist, or Georgist. Lillian Symes and Travers Clement were probably closest when they placed The Freeman within 'the main tradition of American individualism... individualist radicalism.'"

In 1924, with Nock's relationship with the Neilsons strained, The Freeman went under. One of his assistants, Suzanne LaFollette, revived the publication under her control as the New Freeman in 1930. Nock wrote a regular column for it, but it folded within a year.

Nock biographer Wreszin makes much of the two Nocks—the early muckraking radical journalist with his innocent belief in the perfectibility of man and society, and the later Nock who, under the influence of largely forgotten architect (and pop anthropologist) Ralph Adams Cram, came to believe that the majority of people aren't human in any meaningful sense, and are beyond reform.

This Cram thesis colored Nock's writings from the mid-1930s on. Nock wrote extensively during that period about education, contending that most of what passed for education in the United States was training. This was perfectly appropriate, because, as per Cram, most people weren't capable of being educated in the true sense, which involves the inculcation of a refined wisdom pursued for its own sake, not mere utility. Nock thought universal literacy a useless goal, as most people can't do anything valuable with it anyway.

Nock's belief in the uneducability of most men led to one of his strongest influences on the modern libertarian movement. He introduced to movement thinking the concept of the Remnant—an idea of vital influence to the sense of mission of the Foundation for Economic Education, the first libertarian think tank and a great conduit for Nockian ideas and attitudes into the modern movement. The Remnant belief is that the ideas of human liberty might not become dominant at any given historical moment, but that the movement's task is to keep the ideas alive, a flame of truth flickering in dark ages. It is, as Nock styled it in a famous essay, akin to "Isaiah's job," preaching to those few with ears to hear. And the Remnant will find the true-hearted prophet. "They will find him without his doing anything about it; in fact, if he tries to do anything about it, he is pretty sure to put them off."

Nock's most extended political thoughts are found in Our Enemy, The State, derived from a series of lectures he gave in the early 1930s at Columbia University. This is one of the few libertarian classics shot through with the thinking of Henry George. This is sometimes sold as a great introductory work to the libertarian tendency; it was introduced to me as such when I was a college student. But the book's focus, which attacks landlords and the evils of rent (as per George) almost as much as the state, would strike most modern libertarians as somewhat strange.

Georgists and libertarians have been uneasy fellow travelers and sometime allies for over a century; significant libertarian figures such as Nock and later Frank Chodorov arose from the Georgist movement, and many Georgists to this day insist that libertarians should just make peace with the idea that has come to define Georgism, the so-called single tax—that all government functions can and should be funded through a tax on the basic value of land (not on improvements on it). Theoretically such a tax would have the virtue (among others) of having no negative incentives on wealth creation, since humans can't make new land (though they can, of course, make new usable land). Georgism would lead, then, to a very libertarian society indeed, with government taxing little and doing little. (Georgism remains an obscure strain in libertarianism today, though in its day it was a significant Progressive Era reform movement.)

Our Enemy is also rooted in Oppenheimer's theories of the state as a parasitic excrescence on social power, and his important distinction between the economic means of satisfying human desires (production) and the political one (theft and depredation). Nock analyzes American history through Charles Beard's lens, excoriating the merchant state that held no truck for natural rights or popular sovereignty. His analysis provided little hope for short-term change in American circumstances. As Nock noted, he was "oppressed with a great sense of futility in publishing it.Any good critic would say that the main object of the book is to show that there was no use in writing it."

Though Nock was patrician in manner and attitude, he was not a rich man. He survived for his last couple of decades off the patronage of wealthy fans of the Freeman. Nock's goal, his attorney Abraham Ellis said, was to die with no money, "and he succeeded in his goal." He would only work when he needed the cash.

While Nock is usually slotted as a member of the pre-Cold War right, many of his stances and attitudes would make modern conservatives condemn him as the worst sort of pink—continual na*vetŽ about the good intentions and prospects of Soviet Russia; a belief that youngsters during his dotage were not rebellious enough, complaining that they "seem to cherish none of the resentment wherewith their Creator endowed them as an inalienable right;" and a fussy bachelorhood that extended to believing that standard domestic family relationships were the enemy of the human race.

Nock was firmly opposed to social pressure that might limit the freedom of alternative lifestyles. It wasn't enough, he insisted, for a judge to refuse to convict girls for walking naked down the street; true freedom would mean no one even noticed. He argued not merely for legal freedom but for the necessity of an overarching spirit of liberal tolerance. He hit on the idea, later also touched on by Hayek, that a busybody state doing things both for and to its citizens damages a people's character. "The best argument for free speech," Nock wrote, "is what the suppression of it does to the character of a people."

But Nock did possess one of the most important constitutive elements of the old right/protolibertarian temperament: a contempt for Franklin Roosevelt bordering on bloody hatred. Like many cranky individualist writers of the time, he recognized no substantive difference between the various governments clashing during World War II. "Rooseveltism, Hitlerism, Stalinism, are all only local variants of the common doctrine that man has no natural rights but only such as are created for him by the state... [this is] State absolutism, formulated by the German idealist philosophers."

In his last years, his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man became a surprise best-seller. In one of his more Menckenian moments (H. L. Mencken was a longtime friend and fan of Nock's), Nock wrote that he best approached the mentality of the average American when horribly ill—then he achieved the "enervated mind, debilitated nerves, no power of concentration and an intense desire to be rid of the burden of my circumstances" that characterizes his countrymen.

The Memoirs were useless for the facts of Nock's life, but a great introduction to his detached, cultured, patrician persona, his stoic self-reliant strength that rose above the problems of merely political life. Meeting this mind—coolly adjusted to the reality that his attitudes and beliefs rendered him superfluous in FDR's welfare/warfare state—was a delightful and often formative experience for many readers.

After Pearl Harbor, Nock's anarchism and opposition to war could find no home in standard American journalism. The outbreak of World War II killed or neutered a generation of individualist writers who could not gin up the enthusiasm for FDR and the New Deal that the war suddenly made a social necessity—some of them will be discussed further on. Nock's friendship with anti-New Dealer and anti-World War II journalist Lawrence Dennis earned him a visit from the FBI.

Nock had never stopped thinking of himself as a radical. He found it bitterly ironic that in the post-New Deal era, conservative businessmen became his primary audience. He had never imagined them his natural constituency. He was disconcerted by the notion that he was now being feted by "Wall Streeters, oil magnates, and... steel baron[s]."

"The simple truth," he wrote, "is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone. They want a government that they can use. Offer them one based on [Herbert] Spencer's model and they would see the country blow up before they would accept it." He lamented, as Roosevelt's New Deal solidified, that it was doubtful "how many people in this country would read a treatise on liberty, written by a disinterested hand; I would put it at perhaps a thousand... anyone who mentions liberty for the next two years will be supposed to be somehow beholden to the Republican Party, just as anyone who mentioned it since 1917 was supposed to be a mouthpiece of the distillers and brewers."

Nock died on August 19, 1945. He represented a strain of old right thinking that wins sentimental praise from modern libertarians—for the ragged glory of his fully imagined fight against the modern megastate—but which is no longer clearly recognizable in the active movement or intellectual tendency.

For example, a celebratory love for modernity, for the material benefits of a cornucopian market society, permeates the modern libertarian movement. The patrician Nock had no use for such an attitude. He had powerfully expressed prejudices that few libertarians in the early twenty-first century would share. Nock saw commerce as vulgar and uncivilized; he was adamantly opposed to the automobile and even the electric light; his Remnant philosophy, though of vital importance to the Foundation for Economic Education's sense of mission, is no longer widely embraced in the libertarian movement, which strives to be more ecumenical and reach out to a wider mass audience.

Nock represented an apolitical, cultural, and intellectual approach to anarchism. He eschewed attempts to change policy or strenuously push his views. One of the "most offensive things" about FDR's America, Nock wrote, "was its monstrous itch for changing people." Nock's attitude toward affecting political change could be seen in something he once told Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, regarding his Georgism. He was not an advocate of the single tax, Nock said—merely a believer in it.

Nock was in no sense an activist—political or intellectual. As libertarian historian Walter Grinder summed it up in an introduction to the 1973 reprint of Our Enemy,The State, Nock's "plan of action" was "a plan of no action at all. To Nock there was clearly only one path to follow, and that was to learn, to think, to write, to informally teach, and then, simply wait."

The decades from the 1920s to the 1940s saw a gang of individual thinkers who have been adopted by a certain segment of modern libertarians as ancestors; from H. L. Mencken at the most famous to Garet Garrett at the most obscure. The term of art for them has become "the Old Right" though they didn't think of themselves as or call themselves that. One could argue there was no "they" at all—they were a squad of journalists, novelists, politicians, and publicists who can be seen in retrospect as standing for many of the same values, pushing in the same direction. Aspects of their stance and style fed into the words of Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson, and Rose Wilder Lane (see Chapter 3), though none of these old right figures were across-the-board libertarian in the modern sense.

Their institutional homes included the Saturday Evening Post under George Horace Lorimer and the Chicago Tribune under Colonel Robert McCormick. Their political heroes—mostly for their opposition to Roosevelt on various matters, from the National Recovery Administration to court packing to entry into World War II—included Senators Robert Taft, William Borah, and Burton Wheeler—not all conservatives in a modern sense, certainly not all libertarians, but the only opposition to important aspects of the major shifts toward statism in the 1930s and 1940s.The one quality that united them was opposition to some, most, or all of Roosevelt's New Deal, disdain for its quasi-fascist centralization, and disgust for his maneuverings of America into yet another European war.

Some modern libertarians love to laud them, but major differences exist between them and the radical, principled, philosophically and economically rooted antistatism that constitutes modern libertarians. Yet in books such as Justin Raimondo's Reclaiming the American Right and monographs such as Sheldon Richman's "New Deal Nemesis: The 'Old Right' Jeffersonians," modern libertarians make a convincing case that the old right was a real movement, not made up entirely of libertarians in the modern sense but containing strong strains of similarity. It was an important (though ultimately failed) force in American politics during the New Deal era.

What links the old right to modern libertarian ideas was a call for "a return to first principles: the U.S. Constitution, separation of powers, checks and balances, decentralization, limited popular rule, individual autonomy; in a word, republicanism." They were in some ways a new antifederalist movement, as are modern libertarians. These movements are as American as whatever pie Americans gave up in order to choose the apple pie. Old right and modern libertarians continue a tradition of endless opposition, the perpetual "other party," the anima haunting America since the founding. In a sense, they have been the American establishment's most loyal enemy, waging war over American hearts and minds in distinctly American language; all the while knowing that they are fighting an uphill battle.

An important institutional arm of the old right was the controversial Liberty League. It was formed by businessmen, including J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil and Alfred Sloan of General Motors, who would be prominent supporters of libertarian causes in the 1940s and 1950s.The league agitated strenuously to defeat FDR in 1936, through pamphleteering and sponsoring a professional lawyers association which argued that certain aspects of the New Deal were so clearly unconstitutional that no one need obey those laws. The organization fizzled out after its 1936 failure to unseat Roosevelt. Its reputation was on the ropes already, first because of its powerfully plutocratic makeup during times of mass privation and second because General Butler Smedley fingered it as a group of conspirators secretly plotting a fascist military coup against the president.

World War II was another reason some old right characters have been subsumed into a protolibertarian coalition by later libertarian thinkers. Since antimilitarism is a constitutive element distinguishing modern libertarians from supposedly "free market" conservatives (though even antimilitarism has become controversial within the libertarian big tent post 9/11), any antiwar force exudes some libertarian flavor. Most of the antiwar forces ended up opposing Roosevelt fully, not limiting themselves to his foreign policy.

Thus the America First Committee movement, though a single-issue group not dedicated to larger libertarian principles, is considered proof of a popular antiwar tradition in American culture surviving into the twentieth century, an actual mass movement standing up for a principled noninterventionism and preservation of classic American republican virtues. We are a nation out to preserve our own political virtue, not expend citizens' lives and treasure trying to remold the world. Despite the fact that we have waged war after war in our history mostly with popular approval, and in this century all of them away from the homeland, the America First movement indicated that our national character retains some link to classic Washingtonian virtues of peaceful isolation from the rest of the world's wars. Peace is a constitutive libertarian principle; the vision of the state's role in libertarianism remains, for the most part, the nineteenth-century classical liberal one, of a world linked by cosmopolitan principles of free trade, not international warfare or welfare. That vision leaves no room for acting as a world superhero, regardless of motive. Although peace may be a libertarian principle, not all peace forces are thorough libertarian forces. Still, some of the arguments America Firsters proffered for their opposition—such as the centralization and aggrandizement of government power inherent in waging huge wars—recognize the libertarian roots of peace.

John Flynn, chair of the New York branch of the America First Committee and one of its most tenacious defenders against the encroachment of pro-Nazi forces into its antiwar ranks, though often feted and praised by modern libertarians, never really grew out of his roots as a New Republic columnist on finance matters into a detailed and sophisticated understanding of the importance of free markets. Flynn won a permanent place in the hearts of anti-New Dealers with his detailed shredding of FDR's political career, The Roosevelt Myth (1948), and his account of the similarities between New Dealism and European fascism, As We Go Marching (1944), though Flynn later turned into a severe Cold Warrior.

Other old right hands had direct connections with modern libertarians. Garet Garrett, one of the Saturday Evening Post's leading anti-New Deal writers in the 1930s, was an early mentor to Richard Cornuelle, later of the Volker Fund, the major funder of libertarian causes during the 1950s. Garrett contributed a (not very useful) sense of Jacobite tragedy to libertarianism with his stirring paean to the fact that American liberties are beyond protection and were lost after the New Deal. Garrett came from a classic Americanism, not a purist libertarianism. He had a soft spot for national autarchy (the idea that America ought to be as independent as possible of international trade) and an anti-immigrant streak. He thought that importing foreign ideas—even from Europe—damaged the American character and polity.

Libertarians have had to fight for their past. H. L. Mencken, a spiritual forefather to these old right figures in his love of traditional American liberty and hatred for Roosevelt, was as popular an intellectual as America knew in the 1920s, forger of a distinctive sense of good-humored, whooping liberality and keen eye for the comedy of cant, political, literary, or social. Yet he is rarely thought of as libertarian. His outrageous sense of humor, his contempt for religious obscurantism, censorship, and any variety of Puritanism made many identify him as a protoprogressive lefty. As libertarian journalist John Chamberlain noted, Mencken's guffaw, as even many of his devoted young fans failed to notice, "had Voltairean undertones. It stemmed in good part from an outraged appreciation of true libertarian political principles, not from mere love of watching the clowns behave idiotically in the anterooms of Capitol Hill. Mencken had read his Jefferson, his John Stuart Mill, and we had not." Murray Rothbard was correct in noting that Mencken was first of all a radical individualist libertarian, who believed, in Mencken's own credo, that "all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty; and that the democratic form is at least at bad as any of the other forms."

Albert Jay Nock represented the beginning of libertarian linkage with a cause that some early libertarians adopted as part and parcel of their antimilitarism: twentieth-century war revisionism. That connection was honored and extended by such libertarian institutions as the Institute for Humane Studies and the Cato Institute; movement magazines like Reason would devote respectful issues to it in the mid-1970s. These days, war revisionism is ignored by most mainstream libertarian institutions. Arguing against the Leviathan state seems far enough beyond the pale to trouble yourself further by linking yourself with such lost causes as arguing that America should not have entered World War II or even the milder version, that Roosevelt's means for getting us into it were underhanded, antidemocratic, and antirepublican in the real, not partisan, sense.

Nowadays, only some writers associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the libertarian-run website Antiwar.com are apt to link libertarianism and revisionism. But especially in the old right days, and in a line continuing through Rothbard and those he directly influenced, libertarians cheered and embraced war revisionism, even if the war revisionists were not libertarians. (In many cases they were disillusioned left progressives, such as Charles Beard.) The term "revisionist" refers to attempts to "revise" the standard, triumphalist understanding of our century's wars and their causes spread by the victors. Leading revisionist writer and cheerleader Harry Elmer Barnes says the term arose from the fact that their initial second looks at World War I and its aftermath had the polemical purpose of seeking revisions in the terms of the treaty of Versailles and its overly punitive measures that (as even John Maynard Keynes agreed) helped create the resentments and conditions that led to World War II.

World War I revisionism was successful, and its viewpoints—in broadest terms, that war guilt did not belong to Germany and its allies alone in World War I, and that the war's aftermath was unnecessarily punitive—became standard liberal-progressive opinion by the end of the 1930s.

But when a squad of historians and polemicists—including some of the same men, like Barnes, who had been a well-known and widely relied on sociologist and historian prior to his war revisionist work—tried to do the same with World War II, they made no headway with acceptable opinion. While many Americans opposed American entry into World War II, that opposition mostly sank to the bottom of the sea along with American ships at Pearl Harbor. (Raising questions about how much FDR knew in advance about, or even welcomed, the Pearl Harbor attack became a popular pastime for war revisionists.) In Barnes's mind, men such as him, Charles Tansill (author of Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933-1941, 1952) and Charles Beard (author of President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1948) were victims of what he called a "historical blackout"—ignored, mocked, reviled, in some cases, Barnes accused, blocked from access to government historical papers. Barnes became the revisionists' main spokesman and propagandist. Historian of American anarchism James Martin also became an enthusiastic Barnesian, writing many self-published books on war revisionist themes in the 1950s and 1960s. Their major polemical point could be summed up as follows: World War I, theoretically fought to make the world safe for democracy, resulted in fascism and communism overtaking much of Europe; World War II, fought to stop aggressive totalitarianism, extended the scope and control of one of the worst totalitarianisms known to man, communism, in both Europe and Asia.

World War II revisionism fit snugly with the anti-New Deal, anti-regimentation attitudes that defined the old right and shaded over into postwar libertarianism. Roosevelt's sneaking us into war was all of a piece with his creation of unconstitutional agencies to institute his plan for overall regimentation of the U.S. economy and his court-packing scheme to make sure no other branch of government would stop it. To classic American republicans, wishing to preserve the power of Congress—the institution closest to the people—over foreign affairs and holding tight to the power of the people over their own economic affairs, Roosevelt seemed to be setting up the equivalent of the most ancient forms of tyranny, the god-king—combining magic and religion, as anthropologist Gordon Childe put it, with magic being "a way of making people believe they are going to get what they want" and religion "a system for persuading them that they ought to want what they get." The combination of alphabet agencies, Social Security, and relentless barrages of war whooping and propaganda, plus a reign that seemed to be growing as long as any pharonic family with term after unprecedented term—what did this all add up to? All hail God-King Roosevelt!

The old right's end was inherently, sadly, crepuscular. They saw themselves lose and lose and lose and lacked the optimism of some of the next generation who looked up to them. The waning of their personal fortunes as their ideological fortunes dissipated must have added to their crankiness; John Flynn, who started his career as a favorite in high standing of standard American liberalism as a financial columnist for the New Republic, ended it accused of fascist sympathies and driven from most standard sources of American opinion, his work lauded and distributed only by disreputable right-wing groups. Garet Garrett no longer wrote for one of America's most widely read publications, the Saturday Evening Post, but edited American Affairs, the journal of the National Industrial Conference Board, a businessmen's pressure and education group. Mencken lost his voice in the contemporary American conversation over politics and more long before he lost it in reality through a stroke in 1948. Roosevelt and his forces won the war, and they won World War II. Those who opposed it were losers, and inevitably seen as sore ones at that.

Roosevelt's successful revolution formed the constitutive elements of American politics and government, creating a veritable one-party state. Even such supposed Republican reactionaries as Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich admired FDR and paid him fealty. The forces arrayed against Rooseveltism, including the protolibertarian elements of the old right, lost; but their ideas—in most cases, purified and intensified versions of their ideas—formed the soil from which modern libertarianism grew.

As modern libertarians recognize, America never really had an era of true laissez-faire—at least not since the antifederalists lost their fight over ratifying the Constitution. Modern libertarianism is a vision of a radical and just future—but one whose contours are inherent in the meaning of the American Revolution, arising from European traditions of natural law, natural rights, a relationship between man and the state that ought to be contractual and reciprocal; and a vision of man that is rooted in the best of the Western Christian tradition. That vision sees the individual soul as so worth saving that God-made-man would sacrifice himself to do so. And that individual soul is responsible for the choices that can guarantee its own salvation.

America in the twentieth century developed an alternate version of individualism. This new version argued that the full flowering of the individual came in material security and a technocratically managed culture that gave man, through the government, control over what had heretofore been seen as beyond human control. Politicians would do for us what we would do for ourselves, if only we were able. What could be more liberating to the individual than that? This new vision sold itself as modern and scientific, the apotheosis of reason. It held out the promise of managing our way to a benevolent and equal wealth.

The twentieth century had no room for an apparently outmoded political philosophy. This was now a world of crises, big machines, war, and economics. Carping about the propriety of the methods used to muddle through these crises seemed antiquated, in the midst of interlocking national wars of communism, fascism, New Dealism. The state's ability, the state's need, to manage the big machinery of the modern economy went largely unquestioned.

Thus it was appropriate—and probably necessary—that the first pair of major intellectual leaders for a recognizably modern libertarianism made their reputation as economists, with a scientific vision rooted in the nineteenth century. Their mission was to show that technocratic management and manipulation of the economy is not a path toward a just equality and unprecedented wealth but to instability, chaos, and serfdom.

                 _____________________________________________

                 To go to our full review, or to go to purchase the book, CLICK HERE.

                 __________________________________________________

                 From Radicals for Capitalism by Brian Doherty. Copyright © 2007 by the author and reprinted here by permission of the publisher.

                 CLICK HERE TO GO NOW TO PURCHASE BOOK

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Radicals for Capitalism, by Brian Doherty

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