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…]
- 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. [↩]
- 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. [↩]
- 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). [↩]
- 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. [↩]
- Areas That Need Development from Libertarian Thinkers. [↩]
- Activism, Achieving a Free Society, and Writing for the Remnant. [↩]
- 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. [↩]
- 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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