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

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

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

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

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

         Others were more fringy, to use a word from those times. A few had strange names, such Skye d’Aureous (now Durk Pearson and a contributing editor of Liberty), speaking on “Alternatives to the State,” and Filthy Pierre, speaking on, “Proposals for living on the sea.” (Imagine having a first name of Filthy.) Two men presented on about “gay liberation,” a concept I had not heard, or expected to hear, discussed at a public forum.

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

         There was Philip Abbott Luce, who had been a communist, and Dana Rohrabacher, who would become a Republican congressman. 

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

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