Podcasts by The Libertarian Tradition

Robert Bidinotto's Hunter from 2011-08-11T00:00

Ayn Rand objectivists are more neocon than libertarian.

Podcast episode for 11 August 2011.

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) from 2011-08-04T00:00

Wilson's best known work was Illuminatus - an arcane conspiracy-based cult classic that won libertarian futurist awards. Wilson referred to his own beliefs as generalized agnosticism about e...

Conjectural History from 2011-07-28T00:00

Historians must use Rand's sense of life to make their best guess of how things happened when the past facts are lost.

All history is partly conjectural, because our knowledge is alway...

Eight Ways to Run the Country from 2011-07-20T00:00

Riggenbach's review of Mitchell's book is mixed because he does not find a fit with the political perspectives described as individualist or paleolibertarian.

Libertarianism and Psychology II from 2011-07-14T00:00

Nathaniel Brandon and Sharon Presley saw the importance of psychology and the self-esteem movement for libertarians. People who lack self-confidence aren't likely to support efforts to achie...

Libertarian Journalism in the '60s, '70s, and '80s from 2011-07-07T00:00

Ronald Hamowy and Ralph Raico were the best libertarian journalists. Their efforts included the quality publications New Individualist Review and Inquiry.

It is not uncommon to see mainstr...

Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) from 2011-06-30T00:00

Forerunner of the Austrian School, Bastiat contributed high quality popularization of such legal and economic ideas as legalized plunder, everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else a...

Libertarianism and Psychology from 2011-06-22T00:00

Psychologist Timothy Leary held LSD to be therapy. Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz held that mental illness was a myth. Both libertarians opposed the war on drugs. Szasz and Leary often chose somewhat...

Suzanne La Follette (1893 –1983) from 2011-06-15T00:00

As the protege of Albert Jay Nock, La Follette's thinking reflected much of his own. Her valuable book Concerning Women stressed that the interests of the state are opposed to the interests ...

C. M. Kornbluth (1923–1958) from 2011-06-09T00:00

Although as a young man Kornbluth held leftist political views, he grew to share Rothbardian-style sentiments about the state. To Kornbluth the state was obviously just another criminal gang. Hi...

Gary Chartier: The Conscience of an Anarchist from 2011-06-03T00:00

Chartier credits Rothbard more than Rand in shifting him from a statist to an anarchist. He deliberately does not use the L-word. Libertarians in their teens and twenties could do far worse than...

Alan Bock: Persuasion for Liberty from 2011-05-25T00:00

As the fastest good writer, Bock was an intellectual libertarian doing the daily heavy lifting required to engage in the war of ideas.

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) from 2011-05-17T00:00

The State manuscript and Bourne's famous phrase within it - War is the health of the state -was only discovered after his death. Bourne's radical anti-war views earned him the focused wr...

America Aflame from 2011-04-27T00:00

Goldfield's book fails at revisionism. The author does not grapple with the truth that the Civil War was not about slavery, that war does not boost an economy, and that Lincoln did not need ...

Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) from 2011-04-22T00:00

Jacobs was a libertarian whether she knew it or not. The conclusions she drew were Misesian, just in a different way. Jacobs has also been compared to Hayek. Her The Death & Life of Great Am...

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) from 2011-04-15T00:00

Neither Sumner nor Herbert Spencer were social Darwinists - a moniker hung upon them both. What Social Classes Owe to Each Other answers that question with to take care of his or her own self. M...

The Ambiguous Utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany from 2011-04-07T00:00

LeGuin, in The Dispossessed, and Delany, in Triton, explore various social arrangements in the search for happiness through the genre of utopian science fiction novels.

The first half of t...

Friedrich Hayek and American Science Fiction from 2011-03-30T00:00

Seeing a Hayekian angle in William Gibson's science fiction novel, Pattern Recognition, may lead more thinkers to Hayek's The Use of Knowledge in Society and his other work.

When H...

Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812–1886) from 2011-03-25T00:00

Andrew's contribution to anarchist thought was fleeting. He was a zealot in perpetual search of a movement. "Andrews seems to have been one of those people whose mind is so open that al...

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) from 2011-03-17T00:00

The Clarence Darrow of 1902 was on pretty much the same wavelength as the Murray Rothbard of 80 years later. They both rejected the statist means. A criminal lawyer, Darrow held that "No co...

The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History from 2011-03-11T00:00

Author Jill Lepore's view is that it would be better if the Tea Partiers got their facts right. They seem to be just disaffected Republicans. The problem with the tea partiers is that their ...

Libertarian Science Fiction II from 2011-03-02T00:00

Riggenbach finds individualism and anti-state themes in the works of four authors who would not call themselves libertarians: Anthony Burgess of A Clockwork Orange fame, Philip K. Dick in four o...

Mutual Aid: The Anarchism of Peter Kropotkin from 2011-02-23T00:00

Kropotkin, the founder of anarchist communism, defended the key ideas of libertarianism - social cooperation and rejection of coercion - and was the chief influencer of Murray Bookchin. Kropotki...

The First American Anarchist: Josiah Warren from 2011-02-17T00:00

Warren rejected Owen's communist colonies like New Harmony, Indiana, because he saw that the individual would be stifled by the common property scheme. "Peace, harmony, ease, security, ...

A Renegade History of the United States from 2011-02-09T00:00

Thaddeus Russell's Renegade History is highly recommended for showing, among many other things, that both individualism and Puritanism thrived in America even while they were political antag...

Libertarian Science Fiction from 2011-02-01T00:00

Sci-fi novels are an important means of spreading the libertarian anti-state word.The Great Explosion by Eric Frank Russell and the Weapon Shops of Isher by A.E.van Vogt are two that deserve not...

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) from 2011-01-26T00:00

If you abjure all violence, you must abjure the state. Thus, while not all libertarians are pacifists, all pacifists are libertarians, whether they realize it or not (and, admittedly, a great ma...

The Ignorance of 'New York Magazine' from 2011-01-19T00:00

Christopher Beam did his homework in authoring The Trouble With Liberty, but he needs a firmer grasp of history. Bombs are not libertarian. Beam's chief problem, and the basic nature of New ...

Joan Kennedy Taylor and the Rediscovery of Libertarian Feminism from 2011-01-12T00:00

Reclaiming the Mainstream was Joan's book that placed the origins of the American feminist movement in the abolitionist movement of the 19th century. Joan Kennedy Taylor first became involve...

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (1949–1992) from 2011-01-12T00:00

Childs was mightily impressed by what he read inside the covers of Rothbard's books and by what he heard from Rothbard himself in that famous living room. And he was determined to pass his e...

Joan Kennedy Taylor (1926—2005) from 2010-12-28T00:00

Joan Kennedy Taylor first became involved in the libertarian movement in the early 1960s, when she was a student at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in New York City. As a student of Objectivism,...

Frank Chodorov, Educator from 2010-12-22T00:00

You have only a few years to live and cannot hope to remake society in so short a time. Nobody now living will see a free society in America. But, in fighting for it, one can have a lot of fun. ...

Frank Chodorov, Non-Voter from 2010-12-15T00:00

If we don't seek to use the vote to steer American society away from the direction in which it has been moving for all these many decades, what do we do instead? For Chodorov, that was a que...

The Auctioneer from 2010-12-07T00:00

Joan Samson was a Depression baby, born in 1937. In 1975, the year before her death, she published her only novel, The Auctioneer . This seems to be just about the sum total of what is publicly ...

James C. Scott: The Art of Not Being Governed from 2010-11-30T00:00

If Scott can excoriate most of his fellow historians for confounding "civilization" with "state-making," he himself can be excoriated for confounding statelessness with lack ...

Ira Levin (1929–2007) from 2010-11-24T00:00

Ira Levin died just over three years ago, on November 12, 2007, at the age of 78, the largely unsung author of one of the top half-dozen libertarian novels ever published in our language. This P...

Robert Nozick (1938–2002) from 2010-11-17T00:00

When he was in his 20s, having newly discovered libertarian ideas, having read Rand, Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, and others, having met Rothbard and conversed with him at length, Nozick was fired up...

R.C. Hoiles (1878–1970) from 2010-11-09T00:00

R.C. wouldn't tolerate news stories that referred to the "public schools," for example. His reporters were required to refer to them as "government schools." R.C. himself...

Henry Hazlitt and the Rising Libertarian Generation from 2010-11-02T00:00

Part of the experience of reading Newsweek in the early 1960s was a weekly column called "Business Tides." It offered wide-ranging and insightful commentary on just about anything that...

Joseph A. Labadie (1850-1933) from 2010-10-26T00:00

Though he devoted much of his life to writing, editing, publishing, and political activism, it isn't really for any of these activities that Jo Labadie should be remembered fondly by liberta...

John T. Flynn: Revisionist Journalist from 2010-10-19T00:00

John T. Flynn was, if not the very first, then one of the very first few, of the revisionist journalists to write about the New Deal, focusing on both its domestic and its foreign policies. He i...

John T. Flynn: Liberal from 2010-10-12T00:00

Flynn was a liberal - a classical liberal. He held to the delusion that the state can be reformed. Wide differences existed on just what state coercion was permissible. Liberals did see that any...

Anarchism and Terrorism in the '90s from 2010-10-05T00:00

The wave of bombings and assassinations perpetrated by anarchists during the 1890s was largely a fiction. To some extent, it was frankly invented by sensation-mongering writers who hoped to sell...

The Elitist Individualism of H.L. Mencken from 2010-09-28T00:00

Mencken saw the implications of where his thinking was leading him and he acknowledged those implications frankly. "I am," he wrote in The Smart Set in 1922, "a libertarian of the...

Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958) from 2010-09-23T00:00

Rocker was awful on economics, but his focus was not on that. He wrote about nationalism and culture, and here Rocker is fantastic. "States create no culture; indeed, they are often destroy...

The Ignorance of the New Yorker from 2010-09-15T00:00

It is Republicans, not libertarians, who favor handouts to and special privileges for big corporations. And Republicans are not libertarians.

Edgar Z. Friedenberg: Deference to Authority from 2010-09-08T00:00

Friedenberg was among those who regarded US participation in the Vietnam War as an abomination. He had begun expressing his outrage in print in the mid-'60s, though most of it was directed a...

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) from 2010-08-31T00:00

"As long as the easy, attractive, superficial philosophy of Statism remains in control of the citizen's mind, no beneficent social change can be effected, whether by revolution or by an...

The Milgram Experiment from 2010-08-24T00:00

Nonetheless, by reflecting further on Etienne de La Boetie's key insight about the politics of authority, the will to bondage, and the eager embrace of voluntary servitude, and by devising a...

Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' from 2010-08-17T00:00

Fahrenheit 451 acknowledges that powerful impulses toward mindless conformity and suppression of deviation exist in the population itself — that, on a deep level, many, many people want to...

Roger J. Williams and the Science of Individuality from 2010-08-11T00:00

But the most effective mechanism ever devised for making effective pooling of our faculties as easy as it can be — the free market — is also the natural result of reducing general la...

The English Civil War and the First Libertarian Movement from 2010-08-05T00:00

Whatever their motives may have been, whatever at any given moment they thought of themselves as doing, Anthony Ashley Cooper and John Locke advanced the libertarian idea, just as John Lilburne ...

Was Classical Liberalism a "Strife of Interests Masquerading as a Contest of Principles"? from 2010-07-27T00:00

As Barnes noted, there were a number of "middle-class writers" who took more or less this line, but "by far the most influential" of them "was the 17th-century English p...

Samuel Edward Konkin, III: The New Libertarian from 2010-07-20T00:00

"The more controls and taxation a State imposes on its people," Sam wrote, "the more they will evade and defy them...

All (non-coercive) human action committed in defiance o...

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) from 2010-07-15T00:00

American libertarians would be particularly interested in Peake's great novel, since the perspective on the individual and society that pervades it is very libertarian in the broadest sense ...

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) from 2010-07-08T00:00

What Thoreau was defending here, in 1849, was essentially the same concept the English philosopher Herbert Spencer defended two years later, in his book Social Statics , as "the right to ig...

Emma Goldman (1869–1940) from 2010-06-29T00:00

When Emma switched her intellectual allegiance from Johann Most to Peter Kropotkin, she lost her commitment to violence but kept her commitment to communism. She still had that commitment to com...

Vince Miller and the International Libertarian Movement from 2010-06-23T00:00

"In 1982, Vince moved on to building a nonprofit organization to host a series of international libertarian conferences — the Libertarian International."

Eric Arthur Blair aka George Orwell (1903–1950) from 2010-06-16T00:00

One doesn't have to read far into the works of George Orwell to discover that he had no understanding of economics whatsoever and was not personally a libertarian in the sense we have in min...

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) from 2010-06-08T00:00

Freethought, she wrote, was "the right to believe as the evidence, coming in contact with the mind, forces it to believe. This implies the admission of any and all evidence bearing upon any...

The New Libertarian Generation from 2010-06-03T00:00

The fact is that, exactly as Mark Lilla fears, when people distrust authority in a generalized way and start thinking for themselves, often without much relevant information to guide them, they&...

Leonard Read and the Love of Liberty from 2010-05-27T00:00

Liberty does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the liberty of a single human being.

Robert Anson Heinlein (1907–1988) from 2010-05-18T00:00

But because of his interaction with Robert LeFevre in Colorado in the '50s and '60s, libertarian ideas were among those he toyed with and dramatized in certain of his stories...

Karl Hess and the Death of Politics from 2010-05-06T00:00

"Some may wonder why it took Hess 20 years to notice all this, why it took a man this obviously intelligent so long to grasp that the Republicans were pretty much the same as the New Deal D...

William Godwin (1756–1836) from 2010-04-28T00:00

"I ought to exercise my talents for the benefit of others; but that exercise must be the fruit of my own conviction; no man must attempt to press me into the service." —William G...

More Free or Less Free? from 2010-04-20T00:00

Do we have perennial libertarian problems, like losing our freedoms year after year? The long view of liberty shows that overall Americans are more free.... Americans broadly speaking are indivi...

John Holt: Libertarian Outsider from 2010-04-14T00:00

"Holt, in effect, reasoned his way to libertarianism from his relentless, dogged analysis of what worked and didn't work in education, in the schoolroom."...

"To live we...

Benjamin Tucker: American Individualist Anarchist from 2010-04-07T00:00

Tucker was a proponent, in the 19th century, of American individualist anarchism. He opposed war because it destroyed liberty, but he favored the allies. Tucker's contribution was as much th...

Roger MacBride and Rose Wilder Lane: A Libertarian Legacy from 2010-03-30T00:00

Ultimately, when Rose died — it was in 1968, she was 81 — Roger MacBride inherited everything she owned, including the fabulously valuable rights to the Little House books ostensibly...

Timothy Ferris and Lynn Hunt: The Cause of Liberty from 2010-03-23T00:00

Ferris' book The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature is about the symbiotic relationship between science and liberalism. His liberalism was Lockean. One can do anyt...

Standards and Textbooks from 2010-03-16T00:00

Textbook commissions, especially from Texas, decide what ideas will be within any book. Biases are evident. Thomas Jefferson was dropped. Yet, these American History texts have constituted the o...

Harry Browne and Andrew J. Galambos from 2010-03-09T00:00

Browne is known as the libertarian investment guru who wrote books like How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. Browne represented the Libertarian Party in two presidential elections. His voice ...

Mr. Libertarian, Murray N. Rothbard from 2010-03-02T00:00

Five figures starred in Radicals for Capitalism by Brian Doherty: Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard. But, by the 1970s the irrepressible Rothbard became the indisputable Mr. Libertarian...

Thomas Paine: From Pirate to Revolutionary from 2010-02-23T00:00

Paine became a privateer in 1753 to locate and rob enemy ships in order to escape his family business - corset making. The blunt but brilliant Paine was helped by Benjamin Franklin to join the A...

Yevgeny Zamyatin: Libertarian Novelist from 2010-02-16T00:00

Ultimately, he and the woman are caught, imprisoned, and tortured. In the end, he is sincerely repentant of his crimes and is completely devoted to the all-encompassing government that has done ...

Conspiracy Theories, History, and The State from 2010-02-09T00:00

Obama's White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is run by Cass Sunstein. Sunstein and Vermeule's paper on conspiracies theories, e.g. JFK, TWA 800, global warming fraud,...

Isabel Paterson: Early Libertarian from 2010-02-02T00:00

Autodidactic influential libertarian, Isabel Paterson is best known for The God of the Machine (1943). Ayn Rand contributed ideas to it but continued to learn from Paterson both politics and his...

J.R.R. Tolkien as Libertarian from 2010-01-26T00:00

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is thought to be the greatest work of the 20th century with 150 million readers. The book's thesis - Evil power cannot be defeated by power - is libertarian. ...

A Toast to Lysander Spooner from 2010-01-19T00:00

Spooner was an American individualist anarchist with radical opinions on everything. His true calling was writing pamphlets and books on issues of the day. His private postal service was forced ...

Ayn Rand and the Early Libertarian Movement from 2010-01-12T00:00

In Ayn Rand and the World She Made Heller goes to bat for Rand as a fiction writer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns is a poorer book because it is confus...

A History of Ayn Rand from 2010-01-06T00:00

Ayn Rand's books sell between eight hundred thousand and a million copies a year.

Her first novel We the Living was admired by Mencken. Night of January 16th opened on Broadway. Her ma...