{"id":615,"date":"2018-09-02T18:01:56","date_gmt":"2018-09-03T01:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=615"},"modified":"2018-09-14T17:10:11","modified_gmt":"2018-09-15T00:10:11","slug":"those-freewheeling-libertarians-2007","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/those-freewheeling-libertarians-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"Those Freewheeling Libertarians (2007)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Photo by Luke Stackpoole<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Finally someone wrote a history of libertarians: Brian Doherty\u2019s Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (Public Affairs, 2007). The books brought back all sort of memories. And I got to review it in the pages of Liberty, June 2007.<\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0At least this book was written by a libertarian. If the author were one of these snotty liberals, he could have called it\u00a0Zanies for Capitalism<\/i>. 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 \u201cFreewheeling History.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There was Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), bringing his businessmen high rollers into the orbit of a spiritualist guru \u2014 and maybe (though Leonard denied it) some experiments with lysergic acid; Ayn Rand\u2019s Nietzschean adultery with Nathaniel Branden; Andrew Galambos\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I 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.\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I 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.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0At 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, \u201cIf you\u2019re worried about being misinformed, stay away from the polling place; take the market place.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Others were more fringy, to use a word from those times. A few had strange names, such Skye d\u2019Aureous (now Durk Pearson and a contributing editor of\u00a0Liberty<\/i>), speaking on \u201cAlternatives to the State,\u201d and Filthy Pierre, speaking on, \u201cProposals for living on the sea.\u201d (Imagine having a first name of Filthy.) Two men presented on about \u201cgay liberation,\u201d a concept I had not heard, or expected to hear, discussed at a public forum.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There 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, \u201cRight on!\u201d \u2014 a phrase new to me \u2014 whenever Hess would say something profound, like, \u201cNo 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 \u2014 the hired mercenary of the State.\u201d (This from my notes.)<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There was Philip Abbott Luce, who had been a communist, and Dana Rohrabacher, who would become a Republican congressman.\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0This conference is not in Doherty\u2019s 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.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The book doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cFreewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement\u201d should begin with the New Deal and World War II, against which the arguments of Rand, Paterson, Lane, Hayek and Mises \u2014 the modern founders \u2014 were an antithesis.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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But the book is\u00a0freewheeling<\/i>. That is its attraction and its affliction. It drops a hundred names \u2014 picks them up and drops them. Writing about fantasist Robert Anton Wilson, Doherty says, \u201cOne can become a Wilson Head without reaching his libertarianism. Through Wilson\u2019s influence one might become an Aleister Crowleyan, A Wilhelm Reichian, and old-fashioned Tuckerite, a techno-future-optimist in the manner of Buckminister Fuller or Timothy Leary.\u201d The head spins.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Some of the characterizations are sloppy: to call Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson and Rose Wilder Lane \u201cthe three furies\u201d is not really accurate. Maybe Rand was a \u201cfury,\u201d and Paterson some of the time, but Lane was not. She was the most radical of the three, and the sweetest.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Much is fascinating: Friedrich Hayek and his Mont Pelerin Society; Leonard Read, the radical who believed in persuasion one mind at a time; Robert LeFevre, who built some log houses in the Colorado Rockies and proclaimed it Rampart College, and Murray Rothbard and his Circle Bastiat, and so on. There are the money men: Harold Luhnow and the Volker Fund, which financed a university spot for Ludwig von Mises and paid travel expenses to Mont Pelerin; also the Kochs, the oilies who provided the seed money for the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute. Money matters in a movement which, as Doherty points out, is trying to sell something the world is not clamoring to buy.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Doherty\u2019s story includes careerists and amateurs. This is always an issue for anyone with a cause. Do you make your living at it, or do it on the side? Milton Friedman did it on the side (in a big way), and was enormously influential. His day job was as a college professor \u2014 and was also a position from which he could not be fired for his opinions. He could be radical but not nutty. Some of the early libertarians, like Galambos, were niche-market entrepreneurs who could be radical and, by conventional standards, nutty. Their flavor was different. Doherty is an employee of\u00a0Reason\u00a0<\/i>magazine, which is avowedly libertarian but aimed at an audience outside of libertarians.\u00a0Liberty\u00a0<\/i>is written\u00a0for\u00a0<\/i>libertarians. Each of these has different institutional constraints, and tends to attract a different kind of mind.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One of the virtues of Doherty\u2019s book is that he often tells how these people were first turned on. You can see the libertarian idea replicating itself, a kind of virus of the mind. What spread it was an individual who could express it colorfully and forcefully, which also meant radically. Hayek, who considered himself pretty radical, was about as moderate as was allowed. Mises was more hard-core, Rand more, Rothbard, in a political sense, more still. In inspiring people to become libertarians, radicalism works. But it works mainly on those never inoculated by prior commitment.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Radicalism also comes much of the time with the edgy\u00a0machismo\u00a0<\/i>of \u201cI\u2019m more radical than you.\u201d Doherty treats this posturing\u00a0<\/i>with some humor, at one point quoting professional rightist Grover Norquist on libertarians who insist on staking out a position that alienates everyone. Their attitude, he says, seems to be, \u201cThen I win!\u201d He asks: \u201cWin\u00a0what?\u00a0<\/i>\u2018Most Pure Person in Room\u2019 award? A cookie?\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Reading this book, one naturally wants to compare the figures who have taken different roads, and different levels of radicalism, and ask who has had greater influence: Mises or Friedman? Rothbard or Greenspan? Durk Pearson or Dana Rohrabacher? And then you realize how pointless it is to argue it. The one was not going to be the other. Imagine Rothbard working for the Fed \u2014 or Durk and Sandy in Congress. Liberty is an idea for people who want to go their own way, and it is oxymoronic to condemn them for inattention to the herd. Individualists do what they do because it pleases them.<\/p>

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\u00a9 2007 Bruce Ramsey<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo by Luke Stackpoole \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Finally someone wrote a history of libertarians: Brian Doherty\u2019s Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (Public Affairs, 2007). The books brought back all sort of memories. And I got to review it in the pages of Liberty, June 2007. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-615","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":791,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/615\/revisions\/791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}