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Rothbard on Leonard Read and the Origins of “Libertarianism”

by on November 17, 2014

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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?“. [↩]
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Balancing Intellectual Property Rights and Civil Liberties: A Libertarian Perspective [Transcript]

by on November 8, 2014

Below is an unedited (raw) transcript of my Yale speech “Balancing Intellectual Property Rights and Civil Liberties: A Libertarian Perspective,” available at KOL151. [continue reading…]

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Argumentation Ethics, Estoppel, and Libertarian Rights: Transcript

by on November 7, 2014

Below is an edited transcript of my presentation “Argumentation Ethics, Estoppel, and Libertarian Rights” delivered (by remote video) at the 6th Adam Smith Forum, Moscow, Russia (Nov. 2, 2014).

Video and audio for the speech, plus further information and related resources, are available at Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 161.

 

Argumentation Ethics, Estoppel, and Libertarian Rights 

Stephan Kinsella
6th Adam Smith Forum, Moscow, Russia
Nov. 2, 2014
(Edited transcript)

Hello. This is Stephan Kinsella. I am speaking today from Houston, Texas in the United States. I am happy to be able to present to the Adam Smith Forum and I appreciate the invitation to speak. I did speak here in 2011, 1 remotely that time as well. I was unable to attend in person. And I hope to remedy that someday and to visit Moscow and Russia. But I appreciate the invitation.

Today’s topic will be on “Argumentation Ethics, Estoppel, and Libertarian Rights”. I have spoken and written on these topics before. More detail can be found in the notes to the podcast I will do of this lecture after the event. But if you want to follow up you can go to my website which is stephankinsella.com and I will have resources available there, primarily a previous Mises Academy course called “Libertarian Legal Theory” and also a course on the social theory of Hans-Herman Hoppe. 2

So a brief introduction. I am an attorney in Houston, Texas. I am a long-time libertarian and follower of the Austrian School of Economics, primarily the thought of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Hans-Herman Hoppe, and also have been an anarchist libertarian for quite some time. I have developed my own set of views about libertarian rights and related matters and that’s what the topic of today’s conversation will be. [continue reading…]

  1. KOL108 | “Why ‘Intellectual Property’ is not Genuine Property,” Adam Smith Forum, Moscow (2011). [↩]
  2. See:

    [↩]

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Rothbard on the “Original Sin” in Land Titles: 1969 vs. 1974

by on November 5, 2014

Related:

In the June 15, 1969 issue of The Libertarian Forum, in an article “Massacre at People’s Park,” Murray Rothbard writes:

The cry has gone up that all this was necessary to defend the “private property” of the University of California. In the first place, even if this little lot was private property, the bayoneting, gassing, torturing, and shooting of these unarmed park-developers would have been “overkill” so excessive and grotesque as to be mass murder and torture and therefore far more criminal than the original trespass on the lot. You do not machine-run [sic] someone for stealing an apple; this is punishment so far beyond the proportion that “fits the crime” as to be itself far more criminal than the original infraction. So that even if this property were legitimately private the massacre is still to be condemned.

Secondly, it is surely grotesquerie to call the muddy lot “private property”. The University of California is a governmental institution which acquires its funds and its property from mulcting the taxpayers. It is not in any sense private property then, but stolen property, and as such is morally unowned, and subject to the libertarian homesteading principle which we discuss below. The people of Berkeley were homesteaders in the best American—and libertarian—tradition, taking an unused, morally unowned, muddy lot, and transforming it by their homesteading labor into a pleasant and useful people’s park. For this they were massacred.

This has hints of the leftist and left-libertarian view of property rights—that if there is “taint” or “original sin” in the origin of title to current possessed resources, then the title is not legitimate, and the resource may be regarded as “unowned” and is legitimately subject to homesteading. Why something that is stolen is to be regarded as unowned, as opposed to owned by some dispossessed claimants and original owners, is not clear, and seems to contradict later writing by Rothbard. 1

[Update: see also , discussing Rothbard’s “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” from Libertarian Forum, vol. 1.6, June 15, 1969, making similar left-libertarian arguments. And see also Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe on the “Original Sin” in the Distribution of Property Rights as well as Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts… ]

But in any case, later writing by Rothbard, as of 1974 at the latest, seems to reject any such implications. As I noted in my post Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts…, Rothbard published his article “Justice and Property Rights,” 1974, and in two forms: first, in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, which is available online here; and also, a second version, in Property in a Humane Economy, Samuel L. Blumenfeld, ed. (the second version is also included as a chapter in The Logic Action One, which is not online, and in Economic Controversies, which is available online). The two pieces seem identical but the latter version, from the Blumenthal collection, appends an important concluding paragraph that is not present in the earlier version:

It might be charged that our theory of justice in property titles is deficient because in the real world most landed (and even other) property has a past history so tangled that it becomes impossible to identify who or what has committed coercion and therefore who the current just owner may be. But the point of the “homestead principle” is that if we don’t know what crimes have been committed in acquiring the property in the past, or if we don’t know the victims or their heirs, then the current owner becomes the legitimate and just owner on homestead grounds. In short, if Jones owns a piece of land at the present time, and we don’t know what crimes were committed to arrive at the current title, then Jones, as the current owner, becomes as fully legitimate a property owner of this land as he does over his own person. Overthrow of existing property title only becomes legitimate if the victims or their heirs can present an authenticated, demonstrable, and specific claim to the property. Failing such conditions, existing landowners possess a fully moral right to their property.

It appears that language was added by Rothbard to combat the arguments of some, such as some left-libertarians, who want to argue that existing property titles are illegitimate because of their non-immaculate origins and, presumably, ought to be wrested from current nominal owners, especially the wealthy, and I suppose redistributed to the proles.

Or, as Rothbard wrote in ch. 9 of The Ethics of Liberty (1982):

To sum up, for any property currently claimed and used: (a) if we know clearly that there was no criminal origin to its current title, then obviously the current title is legitimate, just and valid; (b) if we don’t know whether the current title had any criminal origins, but can’t find out either way, then the hypothetically “unowned” property reverts instantaneously and justly to its current possessor; (c) if we do know that the title is originally criminal, but can’t find the victim or his heirs, then (c1) if the current title-holder was not the criminal aggressor against the property, then it reverts to him justly as the first owner of a hypothetically unowned property. But (c2) if the current titleholder is himself the criminal or one of the criminals who stole the property, then clearly he is properly to be deprived of it, and it then reverts to the first man who takes it out of its unowned state and appropriates it for his use. And finally, (d) if the current title is the result of crime, and the victim or his heirs can be found, then the title properly reverts immediately to the latter, without compensation to the criminal or to the other holders of the unjust title. 2

I do not see a closely corresponding passage in For A New Liberty (1973) (I stand to be corrected on this), so it appears to me that sometime between 1969 and 1973, Rothbard’s thought on this matter developed.

See also the related thoughts of thinkers like Mises and Hoppe on this issue, as discussed in Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe on the “Original Sin” in the Distribution of Property Rights.

  1. I’ll have to find this language; I forget where it is. [↩]
  2.  But cf. some arguably inconsistent comments elsewhere in ch. 9, and also in ch. 10. [↩]
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Do Business Without Intellectual Property (Liberty.me, 2014)

by on October 24, 2014

Do Business Without Intellectual Property coverMy monograph Do Business Without Intellectual Property was released by Liberty.me earlier this year. The PDF file is here.

I release this material, insofar as legally possible (see Copyright is very sticky!), with a CC0 “no rights reserved” license.

The Table of Contents is listed below. A Liberty.met seminar discussion of these topics  is available at “KOL159 | Seminar: “Practical Solutions to the IP Trap”

[Update: Liberty.me discussion forum about this topic.

In addition, I could have added more detail about defensive patent publishing and defensive patent pools:

Table of Contents

  • INTRODUCTION 3
  • WHAT IS IP? 5
  • WHY DO BUSINESSES NEED TO CARE ABOUT IP? 5
  • SHOULD WE ABOLISH IP? 6
  • IP VERSUS PROPERTY RIGHTS 7
  • HISTORY OF PATENT AND COPYRIGHT LAW 9
  • INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS CONTRARY TO FREE
  • MARKETS AND HUMAN FREEDOM 10
  • WHY DOES IP PERSIST? 12
  • IP, INNOVATION, AND FREEDOM 13
  • WHAT SHOULD YOU DO? 14
    • First, Do No Harm 14
    • But While IP Exists … 15
    • To IP or Not to IP 16
    • Steps You Can Take Now 17
  • EXAMPLES OF IP CONTRARIANISM 18
  • PUBLISHING AND COPYRIGHT 19
    • Music without Intellectual Property 21
    • Inventing without Intellectual Property 21
    • Dying without Intellectual Property 21
    • Patents 22
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Answer to Libertarian Questions from High School Class in Norway

by on October 22, 2014

My exchange with a high school teacher from Norway, whose class had some questions about the libertarian approach to certain issues.

I am teacher at a high school in Norway. During my classes I have spent some time trying to explain libertarianism to my students, and I have used some of your articles, and of course Murray Rothbard has been central.

Some of the students have really dug into the material, to my surprise really. Regarding the extent anyway.

I am writing to you because I simply have trouble answering their questions up to a point, and I would sincerely appreciate it if you would help me with some questions here:

1) What happens on a territory – in a stateless society – where a person or a group of persons are starving to death because nobody will employ them, do business with them, help them etc. What are they supposed to do? Starve to death because, after all, those who wont help them have gained their properties just and should thereby not be attacked? What if survival for them triumphs “justice”? Will this not be an unstable society? Is it not easy to understand that these people will choose war rather than death?

2) Mobility: How can a stateless society avoid that a rich misantrophe uses his rights to block important trade routes and roads?

3) Is it reasonable to accept that private persons can own nuclear weapons or high-tech modern war weapons?

4) The ethics of Liberty by Rothbard; do you hold this as the primary work in freedom ethics, and do you find any flaws in it? Or is it as you see it flawless, and thereby a document which should be basis for a “common law”?

5) There has been some talk about Rothbards work on children here in Norway; is it correct that he meant that not feeding ones child should not be a punishable offense by common law? Do you support this and his reasoning behind it?

Best regards,

[X]

[continue reading…]

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Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?

by on October 21, 2014

Note: An updated and revised version of this transcript is included as chap. 25 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023).

Note: on the origins of modern libertarianism, see also Murray N. Rothbard, “Towards a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change” (April, 1977):

“The contemporary libertarian movement in the United States may be precisely dated as beginning just after World War II. … Into this wasteland there stepped Leonard E. Read, late of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the National Industrial Conference Board, who, in 1946, founded the Foundation for Economic Education. The creation of FEE marked the beginning of the modern libertarian movement in America.”

See also Rothbard, “Listen, YAF” Libertarian Forum (Aug. 15, 1969).

And Rothbard, quoted in Rothbard on Leonard Read and the Origins of “Libertarianism”: “More than any other single person, Leonard was the founder of the modern libertarian movement. … ” 1

See also many, many references to “modern libertarianism” or “the modern libertarian movement” in The Complete Libertarian Forum (1969–1984). See also Roderick Long’s Foreword to the Laissez Faire Books edition of Jerome Tuccille’s classic It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (2012): “It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand is a jazz improvisation on the early history of the modern libertarian movement …”

See also Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism (2023), p. 7:

After introducing libertarianism in chapter 1, we turn to introducing the three major periods or waves of libertarian thought. The first, “primordial” era covers the latter half of the nineteenth century, with special focus on Britain, France, and the United States. The second “Cold War” era runs from the 1930s through the 1980s and mainly centers in the United States. Finally, and more tentatively, we discuss the emerging “Third Wave” of libertarianism.

I agree that there are precursors to modern libertarian thought in the nineteenth century and before, but would not count the “primordial era” as modern libertarianism proper; in my estimation, and that of Rothbard, as noted above, modern libertarianism finds its beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s, with FEE and Ayn Rand’s works, especially Atlas Shrugged (1957), Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962), and many other works by Bastiat, Mises, and so on.

See also Timeline of libertarianism in the United States.

As for my comment in the chapter that “the modern libertarian movement is only about five or six decades old,” this of course means there is still work to be done. As Ayn Rand herself wrote of Objectivism in 1978, just 4 years before she died (as quoted by Barbara Branden in the Foreword to Nathaniel Branden’s The Vision of Ayn Rand:

Much work remains to be done, as Rand was quick to acknowledge. In an interview with Garth Ancier of Focus on Youth in 1978, Rand was asked: “Miss Rand, is there anything more to say about your philosophy that you haven’t said already?” I’m glad you are not that acquainted with my philosophy, because if you were, you would know that I haven’t nearly said everything yet. I do have a complete philosophical system, but the elaboration of a system is a job that no philosopher can finish in his lifetime. There is an awful lot of work yet to be done. 2

We have made progress since the early days of Rand and Rothbard and their earlier progenitors and contemporary colleagues. Libertarianism has become more radical and more integrated with insights from Misesian-Austrian economics. Its numbers have grown, as have the numbers of scholars and books written.

As we do not have a fully libertarian world in which detailed libertarian law can organically develop, we have no body of concrete libertarian law developing. This will eventually be essential to have in a free society, since there are limits to what theory alone can do. Deduction, reasoning, and armchair theorizing can only get you so far. 3 The legal system of a free society will need to have concrete rules or legal precepts that are operational and that develop organically in decentralized legal systems, but based on more general and abstract libertarian principles of justice. 4 Such a libertarian legal order cannot develop until it starts being used.

In the meantime the activists can try to bring about more freedom more quickly and the theorists can keep trying to advance our understanding of liberty and libertarian principles. Again, there is much work left to be done in libertarian theory. Theorists since the days of Rand and Rothbard have continued to contribute to the edifice of libertarian thought, and there is much more that calls out for attention. 5

It is not for everyone. Some are not libertarian at all. Others are more or less libertarian in their lives but otherwise not interested in thinking about it or doing anything about it. That is fine. It’s enough to just be a productive, peaceful person. Still others are passionate about understanding the ideas, both to enrich their own lives and understanding and to help understand what can be done to make things better. Some are activists, both political and intellectual; others more cerebral and focused on understanding, teaching, correcting, writing (even if the activists, in their impatience and often with an anti-intellectual kind of snobbery, often disdain or even scorn or mock theory and the theorists).

Why work on understanding the ideas of liberty, on repeating them, preserving them, teaching them, correcting and developing and extending them, in an unfree world which largely sees this as unserious, pointless, a parlor game? In a sense, it is for the remnant, biding its time until it can be called into action. 6 We want to advance libertarian theory so that it can be used by jurists when a freer world emerges. 7

***

Below is an edited transcript of my speech “Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?” delivered at the NYC LibertyFest (Brooklyn, NY, October 11, 2014; available at Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 152). The original title was “Libertarianism After Fifty Years: A Reassessment and Reappraisal” but I was allotted only about 15-20 minutes so condensed the scope and could only touch briefly on many of the matters discussed.

Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?

Stephan Kinsella
NYC LibertyFest, Brooklyn, NY
October 11, 2014

Introduction

Hello. I’m glad to be here. Thank you to Ian and Mike for the invitation. I do have my eleven year old son with me. It’s the second or third time he’s seen me speak. He’s been to Auburn with me. I went to NYC Comic Con with him on Thursday. So turnabout’s fair play although it was fun. Comic Con was great.

I have fifteen minutes. My topic is “Libertarianism After Fifty Years – What Have We Learned”? If I get cut off I will continue this in a private podcast, if I run out of time. You can find more information, if I run out of time, because this is a big topic for fifteen minutes.

This is my own view of libertarianism. It might not be shared by everyone here. But what I would like to talk about is—what is the libertarian movement? How old is it? Where did we come from?

In my view, the libertarian movement is about fifty years old—the modern libertarian movement. I think we can date it, you know, the glimmers of the movement started with Ayn Rand and Isabel Patterson and Rose Wilder Lane with their books in 1943. Of course, there are precursors to the libertarianism in the Enlightenment and classical liberal thought. There are other writers, Leonard Read, Milton Friedman. But I think we can really date the dawn of the modern libertarian movement to 1957 with the publication of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. And then the works of Rothbard, more importantly, with Man, Economy and State in 1962. 8

So the movement is about 55, 45 years old. It’s a relatively young movement as far as ideologies go and political philosophies go. We still have our disagreements over certain controversies like abortion and other issues. But a lot of progress has been made in the last fifty years. We’ve had a lot of development, partly because of incessant libertarian internal debate, criticism by outsiders, criticism by minarchists, criticism by insiders. But at the fifty year stage, I do think it is a good time to step back and reflect and think what have we learned over the last fifty years. How we could use this going forward to further refine and develop our ideas. [continue reading…]

  1. See Rothbard’s obituary of Leonard Read in his journal Libertarian Forum, Vol. 17.5-6, May-June 1983; the PDF and HTML versions of the journal are apparently down now, but .mobi and epub versions are available here. [↩]
  2.  Barbara Branden, “Foreword: The Dawn of Objectivism,” in Nathaniel Branden, The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism (2011), quoting Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed, edited by Marlene Podriske and Peter Schwartz, p. 239. [↩]
  3. The Limits of Armchair Theorizing: The case of Threats; also Libertarian Answer Man: Corporations, Trusts, HOAs, and Private Law Codes in a Private Law Society; KOL359 | State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PFS 2021); KOL345 | Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution” or: State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PorcFest 2021). [↩]
  4. On the distinction between abstract legal rights and more concrete rules that serve as guides to action, see “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society” and Kinsella, “Knowledge, Calculation, Conflict, and Law,” in LFFS, the subsection “Abstract Rights and Legal Precepts” and the section “The Third-Order Problem of Knowledge and the Common Law,” text at n. 24 et seq. [↩]
  5. Areas That Need Development from Libertarian Thinkers. [↩]
  6.  Activism, Achieving a Free Society, and Writing for the Remnant. [↩]
  7. See Stephan Kinsella, “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society [LFFS] (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), Part V.B; also Roman Law and Hypothetical Cases. For an example of a concise statement of the basic principles of libertarian justice, see Aggression and Property Rights Plank in the Libertarian Party Platform. [↩]
  8. The following is an excerpt I wrote to a Foreword for a forthcoming libertarian book:

    Modern libertarian theory is only about five decades old. The ideas that have influenced our greatest thinkers can be traced back centuries, of course,[1] to luminaries such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill, and to more recent and largely even more radical thinkers such as Gustave de Molinari, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Bertrand de Jouvenal, Franz Oppenheimer, and Albert Jay Nock.[2]

    The beginnings of the modern movement can be detected in the works of the “three furies of libertarianism,” as Brian Doherty calls them: Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Patterson, whose respective books The Discovery of Freedom, The Fountainhead, and The God of the Machine were all published, rather remarkably, in the same year: 1943.[3] But in its more modern form, libertarianism originated in the 1960s and 1970s from thinkers based primarily in the United States, notably Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. Other significant influences on the nascent libertarian movement include Ludwig von Mises, author of Liberalism (1927) and Human Action (1949, with a predecessor version published in German in 1940); Nobel laureate F.A. von Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom (1944); Leonard Read, head of the Foundation for Economic Education (founded 1946); and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, author of the influential Capitalism and Freedom (1962).

    The most prominent and influential of modern libertarian figures, however, were the aforementioned novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, the founder of “Objectivism” and a “radical for capitalism,” and Murray Rothbard, the Mises-influenced libertarian anarcho-capitalist economist and political theorist. Rothbard’s seminal role is widely recognized, even by non-Rothbardians. Objectivist John McCaskey, for example, has observed, that out of the debates in the mid-1900s about what rights citizens ought to have,

    “grew the main sort of libertarianism of the last fifty years. It was based on a principle articulated by Murray Rothbard in the 1970s this way: No one may initiate the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. The idea had roots in John Locke, America’s founders, and more immediately Ayn Rand, but it was Rothbard’s formulation that became standard. It became known as the non-aggression principle or—since Rothbard took it as the starting point of political theory and not the conclusion of philosophical justification—the non-aggression axiom. In the late twentieth century, anyone who accepted this principle could call himself, or could find himself called, a libertarian, even if he disagreed with Rothbard’s own insistence that rights are best protected when there is no government at all.”[4]

    We can date the dawn of today’s libertarianism to the works of Rand and Rothbard: to Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957); and, especially, to Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State (1962), Power and Market (1970), and For A New Liberty (1973), plus his journal The Libertarian Forum (1969–1984). For A New Liberty stands today as a brilliant, and early, bold statement of the radical libertarian vision. By the mid-60s, the modern libertarian movement was coalescing, primarily behind the non-initiation of force principle and the “radical capitalism” of Ayn Rand, and Rothbard’s systematic libertarian corpus based upon the non-aggression principle or axiom. It is no surprise that the Libertarian Party was founded in 1971, as these ideas, and the liberty movement, were gaining steam.

    In the ensuing decades many other influential works appeared expounding on the libertarian idea, such as Linda and Morris Tannehill, The Market for Liberty (1970), John Hospers, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow (1971), David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (1973), Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Henri Lepage, Tomorrow, Capitalism (1978), Samuel Edward Konkin III, New Libertarian Manifesto (1980), Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (1988), Anthony De Jasay, Choice, Contract, Consent: A Restatement of Liberalism (1991), Richard Epstein, Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), Charles Murray, What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation (1996), David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer (1998), Randy E. Barnett, The Structure of Liberty (1998), and, more recently, Jeffrey A. Miron’s Libertarianism, From A to Z (2010), Jacob Huebert’s Libertarianism Today (2010), Gary Chartier’s The Conscience of an Anarchist (2011), and Gerard Casey’s Libertarian Anarchism (2012).

    [1] For more on this, see Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (2008), and David Boaz, The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao Tzu to Milton Friedman (1998).

    [2] See Boaz, The Libertarian Reader, id.

    [3] See Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, id.

    [4] John P. McCaskey, “New Libertarians: New Promoters of a Welfare State” (April 14, 2014), See also Wendy McElroy, “Murray N. Rothbard: Mr. Libertarian,” LewRockwell.com (July 6, 2000). [↩]

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Answers to Questions About Libertarian Punishment and Estoppel

by on October 21, 2014

An interchange with someone with questions about one of my articles, which sets out my “estoppel” theory of libertarian rights. For more background on these issues, see the links interspersed below, and those in the following endnote: 1

From Mr. S:

I just read your article “A Libertarian Theory of Punishment and Rights”, which was very interesting, thank you.  It raised a number of questions in my mind which I wanted to raise with you in case you’ve dealt with them elsewhere and can point me to these sources.

(Note that I am ignoring for now that both aggressor and victim may have protection insurance policies and so the punishment scale might already have been agreed to; I’m more focused on what a libertarian judge should decide in the absence of preset penalties.)

  1. I raised with [a certain libertarian philosopher] the problem of failed attempts.  You deal with this a little in the area of assault (p.640), but not sufficiently to answer my question.  If A shoots at B but misses, what is the punishment B can levy on A?   Is it just that B can shoot at A and miss, which seems pointless?   But if that wouldn’t instill in A the same amount of fear that B suffered, per your assault example, is B justified in actually hitting A with the bullet and potentially killing him, with A being estopped from complaining about this?  Should failed attempts be punishable at all?  According to Rothbard, neither deterrence nor rehabilitation are valid bases for punishment; rather, only restitution and retribution are appropriate.  But in my example, there is nothing to be restituted and retribution would imply shooting and missing.  Then, to make things more interesting, what if A shot at B and missed, and B didn’t even know A had shot at him, so never suffered any fear (but witnesses saw it and reported A)?   Again, what is the basis on which failed attempts should be punishable?  In a failed attempt there has been no physical invasion of body or property, and mental distress cannot be the basis for action since one cannot have property in one’s feelings (that would raise a host of conflict-creating problems).
  2. It seems to me that the estoppel principle should be more narrowly stated.  In your examples, you say that if A murders B then  A is estopped from complaining about being murdered as punishment.  Yet shouldn’t this be restated to say that A is estopped from complaining about being murdered as punishment by B or his representative?  In other words, I don’t think you mean to imply that A is estopped against the whole world from complaining about being murdered; D (a complete stranger) cannot murder A and then claim that by A’s action in murdering B, A is estopped against anyone from complaining.  Yet that would be one reading of the estoppel principle as stated, since A has by his actions apparently indicated that he sees nothing wrong in murder, so it could be open season on A.
  3. If, as stated on p.635, the goal of punishment is to equalize damage suffered, not just the actions that caused the damage, then that could work against the victim.  If nice person A beats up gang member B, since B is used to getting beaten in his daily life the damage suffered is probably not that great.  Thus he would have to reduce the punishment beating he exacts on A.  Perhaps the theory should be that the victim can exact the greater of (x) equalizing action and (y) equalizing damage.  However, saying “should” is somewhat normative, and I wonder what the positive theory behind such a “greater of” concept would be.
  4. That raises a broader point: what is actually being estopped and therefore what forms the basis for outlining the bounds of punishment: (A) the actions of the aggressor [e.g., punching the victim], (B) the result caused [e.g., burst spleen] or (C) the damage suffered by the victim [e.g., inability to continue working as a laborer]?  Can an aggressor be estopped from any one of these that was not obvious at to him at the time?  If so, then does estoppel not really rest on what the aggressor has actually acknowledged by his actions, but rather what a “reasonable aggressor” should have realized what he was doing?
  5. Moreover, why can the victim choose to exact a dollar remedy for a physical aggression (leaving aside the situation where the aggressor bargains for this with the victim to avoid physical retaliation)?  Under estoppel the aggressor has only acknowledged he does not believe hitting is wrong, but it doesn’t mean he has acknowledged that taking someone’s money is wrong.  It seems that the broader the range of remedies the victim is entitled to exact, the looser the connection to the aggressor’s actions which give rise to the estoppel.  We could end up effectively concluding that the aggressor indicated by his actions that he does not believe in the sanctity of private property at all, and thus any punishment is warranted.  Surely that’s not where we should end up?
  6. What is the theory underlying why heirs can take action on behalf of a murder victim (assuming there is nothing in the victim’s will saying so, and there is no protection policy for which the heirs are the beneficiaries)?  If each person’s body is his own property, how can an heir claim to have been damaged when only the victim’s body was invaded?

[continue reading…]

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Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe on the “Original Sin” in the Distribution of Property Rights

by on October 7, 2014

Related:

Modern libertarianism began in the 1960s, about 50 years ago, with the writing of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, primarily, and others like Leonard Read, Milton Friedman, Hayek, Mises, etc. Over the years, certain canards or confusions keep appearing, some from insiders, some from our statist critics. There’s a continual need to debunk and counter some of these. As the theory of liberty continues to mature and advance, the mistakes that need to be addressed become more obvious, at the same time that we are more able to address them.

I’d like to discuss here a couple of paired confusions relating to property rights. One relates to the “Lockean” argument for homesteading, or original appropriation of property; the other concerns rectification for past injustices. Both are interrelated. You’ve probably heard both of these in various forms. For example, the opponent of libertarianism just assumes that our theory is based on the Lockean idea of original appropriation—then makes the “original sin” argument that all property rights are tainted by various acts of theft or statism, and therefore, since you can never trace your property title back to the original pristine owner, no current property title is really valid.

My instant reaction to such comments is always: they are (if they are statists) trying to justify taking my property. If they are libertarians, they are trying to justify not being anarchist. Basically, when I hear people talk like this, I brace myself for the inevitable theft that they are about to endorse or condone or advocate. Two favorite quotes of mine come to mind here:

“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.” —Ayn Rand, Francisco’s Money Speech

“Is there a need to reform taxes? Most certainly. Always and everywhere. You can always make a strong case against all forms of taxation and all tax codes and all mechanisms by which a privileged elite attempts to extract wealth from the population. And this is always the first step in any tax reform: get the public seething about the tax code, and do it by way of preparation for step two, which is the proposed replacement system.

“Of course, this is the stage at which you need to hold onto your wallet.” —Lew Rockwell

When I hear people saying the libertarian theory of property is flawed because it relies on theft, etc., I know this is just a precursor to some kind of advocated aggression. I hold onto my wallet. I keep an eye on these people.

These issues are related but somewhat different. Let me take them one at a time. [continue reading…]

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Daily Bell Interview: on Libertarian Legal Theory, Self-Ownership and Drug Laws

by on July 21, 2014

My second interview with The Daily Bell just came out. It’s fairly informal but lengthy and complements the earlier one, and has a bit fewer links and adopts a more colloquial tone. It seems to be getting very positive feedback on Facebook etc. FYI. The recent and older one are linked below. The interview shows how heavily influenced I am and how permeated my thought has been by what I consider to be by far the greatest libertarian/liberal thinkers, Mises, Rothard, and Hoppe.

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On Libertarian Legal Theory, Self-Ownership and Drug Laws

by on July 20, 2014

Note: An updated and revised version of this article is included as chap. 23 of Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston: Papinian Press, 2023). Text below.

***

“Stephan Kinsella on Libertarian Legal Theory, Self-Ownership and Drug Laws,” interview with Anthony Wile, The Daily Bell (July 20, 2014). Revised version in published as “On Libertarian Legal Theory, Self-Ownership and Drug Laws,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (forthcoming 2023). [continue reading…]

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Second Thoughts on Leoni, Hayek, Legislation, and Economic Calculation

by on May 9, 2014

From The Libertarian Standard, May 9, 2014:

Second Thoughts on Leoni, Hayek, Legislation, and Economic Calculation

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Kinsella 2009Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and retired patent attorney in Houston, Texas. He has published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His publications include Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Papinian Press, 2023), Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008), International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution: A Practitioner’s Guide (Oxford, 2020), and The Universal Principles of Liberty (2025).

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