Rothbard on Leonard Read and the Origins of “Libertarianism”

Related

• The Origin of “Libertarianism,” Mises Blog (Sept. 10, 2011)
• The new libertarianism: anti-capitalist and socialist; or: I prefer Hazlitt’s “Cooperatism”
• Rothbard on Leonard Read and the Origins of “Libertarianism” (Nov. 17, 2014)
• Wikipedia entry on libertarianism, claiming 1796 usage of “libertarian” in the political sense
• SPRADING, “LIBERTY AND THE GREAT LIBERTARIANS”
• Timo Virkkala, Grand Theft L-Word
• Jeffrey Tucker, “Where Does the Term ‘Libertarian’ Come From Anyway?” FEE, September 15, 2016
• Mark Thornton, “Libertarianism: A Fifty-Year Personal Retrospective,” J. Libertarian Stud. 24, no. 2 (2020): 445–460

In a previous post I observed that modern libertarianism originated with the thought of Rand, Rothbard, Friedman, Hazlitt, and Read in the 1960s and 1970s (and that the term “libertarian” can perhaps be traced back to 1802). ¹ I’ve also argued that the key figure of modern libertarianism, ultimately, was Murray Rothbard, “Mr. Libertarian.” ² I still think this is right, but it’s interesting to note that in Rothbard’s journal Libertarian Forum, this distinction was bestowed upon Leonard Read in his obituary, in Vol. 17.5-6, May-June 1983, Rothbard (presumably it was Rothbard, as the editor), wrote: ³

More than any other single person, Leonard was the founder of the modern libertarian movement. … ⁴

In addition, more than anyone else Read coined the name “libertarian” for the current movement. Before that, we had no single name, awkwardly going back and forth between “individualist” and “true liberals”. The problem with the latter phrase is that the quasi-socialists had already succeeded in appropriating the term “liberal”, and calling ourselves “true” anything was confusing and hardly persuasive. And the term “individualist” tended to confuse political philosophy with possessing a spirit of individual autonomy. Read and a few others launched the term “libertarian” for the freedom philosophy, and it stuck—the only case I know of when we were able to appropriate a word from others. For before that, communist-anarhcists had often referred to themselves as “libertarian.” The first time when we were referred to publicly as “libertarians” was in an odious book, published in the 1950’s, by a certain Ralph Lord Roy, entitled Apostles of Discord. There was a repellent literature in those days of works written by aggressive centrists and “moderates” who pilloried all “extremists” as per se evil. Roy, a Social Gospel Protestant, wrote his book to attack both Communist and ultra-rightist “extremists” in the Protestant church. That was par for the course in those days, but lo and behold! he included a chapter called “God and the ‘Libertarians'”, spotting quasi-anarchistic extremists then centered around a libertarian publication for Protestant ministers called Faith and Freedom.  Libertarianism had arrived on the American ideological scene.

Ironically, as Rothbard goes on to note, “In later years, Leonard Read drew away from the libertarian movement which he had named and founded.”

[Update: used in 1796, apparently: See Wikipedia entry for Libertarianism:

The first recorded use of the term libertarian was in 1789, when William Belsham wrote about libertarianism in the context of metaphysics.^{[12][non-primary source needed]} As early as 1796, libertarian came to mean an advocate or defender of liberty, in the sense of a supporter of republicanism, when the London Packet printed on 12 February the following: “Lately marched out of the Prison at Bristol, 450 of the French Libertarians”.^[13] It was again used in a republican sense in 1802 in a short piece critiquing a poem by “the author of Gebir” and has since been used politically.^[14][15]

The use of the term libertarian to describe a new set of political positions has been traced to the French cognate libertaire, coined in a letter French libertarian communist Joseph Déjacque wrote to mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1857.^[16] Déjacque also used the term for his anarchist publication Le Libertaire, Journal du mouvement social (Libertarian: Journal of Social Movement) which was printed from 9 June 1858 to 4 February 1861 in New York City.^[17] Sébastien Faure, another French libertarian communist, began publishing a new Le Libertaire in the mid-1890s while France’s Third Republic enacted the so-called villainous laws (lois scélérates) which banned anarchist publications in France. Libertarianism has frequently been used to refer to anarchism and libertarian socialism.^[18][19][20]

In the United States, the term libertarian was popularized by the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker around the late 1870s and early 1880s.^{[21][better source needed]} Libertarianism as a synonym for liberalism was popularized in May 1955 by writer Dean Russell,^{[citation needed]} a colleague of Leonard Read and a classical liberal himself. Russell justified the choice of the term as follows:

Many of us call ourselves “liberals.” And it is true that the word “liberal” once described persons who respected the individual and feared the use of mass compulsions. But the leftists have now corrupted that once-proud term to identify themselves and their program of more government ownership of property and more controls over persons. As a result, those of us who believe in freedom must explain that when we call ourselves liberals, we mean liberals in the uncorrupted classical sense. At best, this is awkward and subject to misunderstanding. Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trade-mark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word “libertarian.”^{[22][better source needed]}

Subsequently, many Americans with classical liberal beliefs began to describe themselves as libertarians. One person who popularized the term libertarian in this sense was Murray Rothbard, who began publishing libertarian works in the 1960s.^[23]

In the 1970s, Robert Nozick was responsible for popularizing this usage of the term in academic and philosophical circles outside the United States,^[24][25][26] especially with the publication of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a response to social liberal John Rawls‘s A Theory of Justice (1971).^[27] In the book, Nozick proposed a minimal state on the grounds that it was an inevitable phenomenon which could arise without violating individual rights.^[28]

References

1.  “libertaire – traduction – Dictionnaire Français-Anglais WordReference.com”. www.wordreference.com (in French). Retrieved 6 October 2025.
2.  Wolff, Jonathan (2016). “Libertarianism”. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London. doi:10.4324/9780415249126-S036-1. ISBN 9780415250696.
3.  Vossen, Bas Van Der (2017). “Libertarianism”. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.86. ISBN 978-0-19-022863-7.
4.  Mack, Eric (2011). Klosko, George (ed.). “Libertarianism”. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy: 673–688. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238804.003.0041.
5.  Boaz, David (30 January 2009). “Libertarianism”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on 4 May 2015. Retrieved 21 February 2017. [L]ibertarianism, political philosophy that takes individual liberty to be the primary political value.
6.  “Non-Aggression Principle”. Archived from the original on 14 December 2024. Retrieved 23 November 2024. There are a small group of libertarians who do not accept the non- aggression axiom.
7.  Otero Carlos-Peregrín [gl], ed. (1994). Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments, Volumes 2–3. Taylor & Francis. p. 617 Archived 9 January 2020 at the Wayback Machine. ISBN 978-0415106948.
8.  Woodcock, George (2004) [1962]. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Peterborough: Broadview Press. p. 16. ISBN 978-1551116297. [F]or the very nature of the libertarian attitude—its rejection of dogma, its deliberate avoidance of rigidly systematic theory, and, above all, its stress on extreme freedom of choice and on the primacy of the individual judgement [sic].
9.  Long, Joseph. W (1996). “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class”. Social Philosophy and Policy. 15 (2): 310. “When I speak of ‘libertarianism’ […] I mean all three of these very different movements. It might be protested that LibCap [libertarian capitalism], LibSoc [libertarian socialism] and LibPop [libertarian populism] are too different from one another to be treated as aspects of a single point of view. But they do share a common—or at least an overlapping—intellectual ancestry.”
10.  Carlson, Jennifer D. (2012). “Libertarianism”. In Miller, Wilburn R., ed. The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America. London: SAGE Publications. p. 1006 Archived 30 September 2020 at the Wayback Machine. ISBN 1412988764. “There exist three major camps in libertarian thought: right-libertarianism, socialist libertarianism, and left-libertarianism; the extent to which these represent distinct ideologies as opposed to variations on a theme is contested by scholars.”
11.  Francis, Mark (December 1983). “Human Rights and Libertarians”. Australian Journal of Politics & History. 29 (3): 462–472. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.1983.tb00212.x. ISSN 0004-9522.
12.  William Belsham (1789). Essays. C. Dilly. p. 11. Archived from the original on 11 April 2021. Retrieved 26 October 2020Original from the University of Michigan, digitized 21 May 2007
13.  OED November 2010 edition
14.  Seeley, John Robert (1878). Life and Times of Stein: Or Germany and Prussia in the Napoleonic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3: 355.
15.  Maitland, Frederick William (July 1901). “William Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford”. English Historical Review. 16[.3]: 419.
16.  Marshall, Peter (2009). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. p. 641. “The word ‘libertarian’ has long been associated with anarchism, and has been used repeatedly throughout this work. The term originally denoted a person who upheld the doctrine of the freedom of the will; in this sense, Godwin was not a ‘libertarian’, but a ‘necessitarian’. It came however to be applied to anyone who approved of liberty in general. In anarchist circles, it was first used by Joseph Déjacque as the title of his anarchist journal Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social published in New York in 1858. At the end of the last century, the anarchist Sebastien Faure took up the word, to stress the difference between anarchists and authoritarian socialists”.
17.  Woodcock, George (1962). Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Meridian Books. p. 280. “He called himself a “social poet,” and published two volumes of heavily didactic verse—Lazaréennes and Les Pyrénées Nivelées. In New York, from 1858 to 1861, he edited an anarchist paper entitled Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social, in whose pages he printed as a serial his vision of the anarchist Utopia, entitled L’Humanisphére.”
18.  Nettlau, Max (1996). A Short History of Anarchism. London: Freedom Press. p. 162. ISBN 978-0900384899. OCLC 37529250.
19.  Ward, Colin (2004). Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction Archived 13 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 62. “For a century, anarchists have used the word ‘libertarian’ as a synonym for ‘anarchist’, both as a noun and an adjective. The celebrated anarchist journal Le Libertaire was founded in 1896. However, much more recently the word has been appropriated by various American free-market philosophers […].”
20.  Chomsky, Noam (23 February 2002). “The Week Online Interviews Chomsky”. Z Magazine. Z Communications. Archived from the original on 13 January 2013. Retrieved 21 November 2011. The term libertarian as used in the US means something quite different from what it meant historically and still means in the rest of the world. Historically, the libertarian movement has been the anti-statist wing of the socialist movement. Socialist anarchism was libertarian socialism.
21.  Comegna, Anthony; Gomez, Camillo (3 October 2018). “Libertarianism, Then and Now” Archived 3 August 2020 at the Wayback Machine. Libertarianism. Cato Institute. “[…] Benjamin Tucker was the first American to really start using the term ‘libertarian’ as a self-identifier somewhere in the late 1870s or early 1880s.” Retrieved 3 August 2020.
22.  Russell, Dean (May 1955). “Who Is A Libertarian?”. The Freeman. 5 (5). Foundation for Economic Education. Archived from the original on 26 June 2010. Retrieved 6 March 2010.
23.  Paul Cantor, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty Vs. Authority in American Film and TV, University Press of Kentucky, 2012, p. 353, n. 2.
24.  Carlson, Jennifer D. (2012). “Libertarianism”. In Miller, Wilburn R., ed. The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America. London: SAGE Publications. p. 1006 Archived 21 December 2019 at the Wayback Machine. ISBN 1412988764.
25.  Lester, J. C. (22 October 2017). “New-Paradigm Libertarianism: a Very Brief Explanation” Archived 6 July 2018 at the Wayback Machine. PhilPapers. Retrieved 26 June 2019.
26.  Teles, Steven; Kenney, Daniel A. (2008). “Spreading the Word: The diffusion of American Conservatism in Europe and beyond”. In Steinmo, Sven. Growing Apart?: America and Europe in the 21st Century Archived 13 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine Growing Apart?: America and Europe in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge University Press. pp. 136–169.
27.  “National Book Award: 1975 – Philosophy and Religion” (1975). National Book Foundation. Retrieved 9 September 2011. Archived 9 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine
28.  Schaefer, David Lewis (30 April 2008). “Robert Nozick and the Coast of Utopia” Archived 21 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine. The New York Sun. Retrieved 26 June 2019.

1. See Kinsella, “The Origin of ‘Libertarian’”; also “Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?“, in ,Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023). [↩]
2. Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned? (transcript). [↩]
3. The PDF and HTML versions of the journal are apparently down now, but .mobi and epub versions are available here. [↩]
4. See also on this, See “Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?“. [↩]