The Libertarian Tradition: Recent Episodes
Jeff Riggenbach
Ayn Rand objectivists are more neocon than libertarian.
Podcast episode for 11 August 2011.
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 everything.
The biggest success of his freelance career was this three-volume satirical novel.
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 always limited.
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.
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 achieve a free society, or even to understand why a free society is a desirable goal.
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 mainstream journalists accused of not bothering to read Hayek before they sit down to write about him.
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 and the fable of the broken window in which what is not seen is as important or more than what is seen.
Ludwig von Mises opined in the 1920s that Bastiat's "critique of all protectionist and related tendencies is even today unsurpassed. The protectionists and interventionists have not been able to advance a single word in pertinent and objective rejoinder."
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 different public issues to speak out on, but both displayed an unwavering commitment to human liberty.
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 of society and that economic freedom was needed for all not just for women. She was a rigorous opponent of all government interventionism.
She had loved working with and for Albert Jay Nock. She had learned so much from him.
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. His book The Syndic won the Libertarian Futurist Society's Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1986.
Libertarian science-fiction fans under 40 are probably at least a little unclear on just who or what the Futurians were.
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 to let their own attention be captured by Gary Chartier's book.
As the fastest good writer, Bock was an intellectual libertarian doing the daily heavy lifting required to engage in the war of ideas.
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 wrath of the pro-war group. The Randolph Bourne Institute and the website Antiwar.com are his memorial.
His radically antiwar views on the eve of the US government's intervention in World War I got him fired from the New Republic . He stuck to his principles and produced some of the best antiwar and antistate writings of the 20th century. Bourne speaks to us today.
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 to wage that war anyway.
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 American Cities told essentially the same story as Hayek's The Use of Knowledge in Society. A city is a marketplace that cannot be planned.
In the works of Jacobs, the order present in a well-functioning urban area emerges as the result of human action but not human design. It arises from a myriad of individuals each pursuing their own interest and carrying out their own plans, within a framework of rules.
The basic logic of Jane Jacobs's work must lead an attentive reader inexorably to a libertarian view of human social relations.
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. Minding other people's business is dangerous and wrong. Yet Sumner did think people owed each other compassion and assistance.
There is considerable evidence that the entire concept of "social Darwinism" as we know it today was virtually invented by Richard Hofstadter. It certainly didn't apply to Sumner, who was a great libertarian. The description "social Darwinist" was never made of his views during his lifetime.
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 the 1970s was a heady time for libertarians.
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 Hayek came into Mises's employ, he favored the democratic-socialist politics of Wieser, his mentor at the university.
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 all his brains fall out." However, Andrew did lucidly elaborate on the thought of Josiah Warren.
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 condemnation is just, and no judgment is righteous. All violence and force are cruel, unjust and barbarous, and cannot be sustained by the judgment of men."
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 version of history is not radical enough.
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 of his novels, G. William Domhoff in Who Rules America, and Carroll Quigley in Tragedy & Hope...
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. Kropotkin is one of the half-dozen cases of anarchocommunists that are worth a second look.
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, happiness, will be found only in Individuality ."
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 antagonists.
In Russell's revisionist view of American history, you see, there is "an enduring civil war" between these two factions — the "renegades" and the "moral guardians," whom he also calls the "disciplinarians."
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 notice. The widespread popularity of science fiction is one of the factors that has helped to keep individualism at the center of American culture.
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 many pacifists have not realized it). Gandhi, it appears, did realize it.
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 York magazine's ignorance, is a certain degree of historical illiteracy. But that's commonplace in our society. It is, therefore, one of the chief things we have to focus on.
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 enlightenment along to the students of Objectivism.
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 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, she espoused the political views of Ayn Rand.
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, she espoused the political views of Ayn Rand.
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. Consider the effort as a legacy to your great-grandchildren.
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 question very easily answered: we put our efforts into education.
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 known about her, and that is a damn shame.
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 of government.
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 Perfect Day has been out of print in recent years, so largely unsung is it.
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 with excitement.
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 preferred the phrase "gun-run schools" and used it liberally on the editorial page.
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 had anything to do with the economy or with economics.
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 libertarians in the 21st century. Rather it was his tendency never to throw anything away.
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 is the beginning of historical revisionism where the New Deal is concerned.
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 government interference menaced freedom, but intervention was believed to increase security. A stateless society terrified liberals. A community without rulers was an unknown to them.
Flynn gradually became more libertarian, more individualist. He was considered a member of the old right, while never being on the right.
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 newspapers.
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 most extreme variety."
I suppose you might call it elitist individualism. It's the sort of individualism that is focused on self-realization and self-expression, and Mencken never makes any secret of the fact that he is primarily concerned with the self-realization and self-expression of what he calls "the superior man," that is, the individual of substantially above-average intelligence. "There are minds which start out with a superior equipment, and proceed to high and arduous deeds," he wrote in 1926, in the very book Walter Lippmann was reviewing when he called Mencken "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people."
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 destroyed by higher forms of culture."
It is Republicans, not libertarians, who favor handouts to and special privileges for big corporations. And Republicans are not libertarians.
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 at American public schools rather than at American foreign policy...
"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 any other means."
The sphere of government begins, where the freedom of competition ends, since in no other way can equal liberty be assured. But within this line I have always opposed governmental interference. I have been an active, consistent and absolute free trader and an opponent of all schemes that would limit the freedom of the individual.
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 an ingenious test for their influence on the ordinary individual, Stanley Milgram made an important contribution to the libertarian tradition.
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 be "protected" by the state from the risk of being offended and from the necessity of thinking. Bradbury never makes it perfectly clear whether the utter mindlessness of television in the world of Fahrenheit 451 is a result of government censorship or an outcome of market processes. It unquestionably might be the latter. One of his characters, a retired English professor and secret lover of books named Faber, speaks contemptuously of "the solid unmoving cattle of the majority," and it is, of course, majorities that markets serve best.
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 laws to a bare minimum and leaving people free to make their own choices about their own values. "Politically," he wrote, "individuality is fundamental. If we did not possess individuality we would all have the same tastes in eating, drinking, reading, art, music, religion, and all other pursuits and would willingly submit to regimentation and censorship in all matters."
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 did. All three of them are part of the libertarian tradition.
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 philosopher, John Locke. Many of his theories were taken up and popularized in America by Thomas Jefferson...
This brings us to the question Barnes's account of political developments in 17th-century England poses for us. For it seems clear that the theory Barnes depicts as having been developed to "justify" the economic and political program of the middle class is none other than what we call today by the name "libertarianism." And John Locke is, of course, one of the major heroes of the libertarian intellectual pantheon. But should we regard Locke in this way? Was he one of the pioneers in the effort to discover and work out the implications of libertarian principle? Or was he merely a clever propagandist — a composer of "justifications" for political policies actually designed to benefit the middle class economically?
"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 of the State constitutes the Counter-Economy." The Counter-Economy is, therefore, pretty vast.
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 of that word...Most people who know about this work don't think of it as a single novel. They think of it as three novels — a trilogy — and they call it "the Gormenghast Trilogy."
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 ignore the State."... "Thoreau's condemnation of the state was more thorough, and in many other ways he fits more closely into the anarchist pattern than Emerson could ever do."
"I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least,'" Thoreau wrote,
and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.
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 communism as late as 1919, when, at the age of 50, she wrote that she favored "anarchist-communism — voluntary economic cooperation of all towards the needs of each. A social arrangement based on the principle: To each according to his needs; from each according to his ability."
No other woman in America ever had to suffer such persistent persecution. She was arrested innumerable times, beaten more than once, refused admission to halls where she was to speak. Often the police dispersed her audience. Intimidated owners frequently refused to rent her meeting places or cancelled contracts at the last minute. On various occasions she was met at the train and compelled by sheer force to proceed to the next stopping place.
"What role did authority or government play in human endeavor for betterment, in invention and discovery?" she asked. "None whatever," she answered,
or at least none that was helpful. It has always been the individual that has accomplished every miracle in that sphere, usually in spite of the prohibition, persecution and interference by authority, human and divine. Similarly, in the political sphere, the road of progress lay in getting away more and more from the authority of the tribal chief or of the clan, of prince and king, of government, of the State.
Emma wrote that
the individual is the true reality in life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals. Man, the individual, has always been and, necessarily is the sole source and motive power of evolution and progress.
"In 1982, Vince moved on to building a nonprofit organization to host a series of international libertarian conferences — the Libertarian International."
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 mind when we use that word today...
He was a permanently confused but authentically and radically antiauthoritarian democratic socialist. He was the kind of modern leftist few modern-day libertarians would have any trouble getting along with, making common cause with, collaborating with. George Orwell presents us with yet another case of a writer who was not himself a libertarian as we understand the term today, but whose last two novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, have earned him a place in the libertarian tradition.
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 subject which might come up for discussion." DeLamotte commments that "among the many subjects that came up routinely in late-nineteenth-century freethinking circles were marriage, sexuality, birth control, women's rights, race relations, labor relations … and the relation of the individual to the state."
Little wonder, then, that, as Paul Avrich puts it, "between the anarchist and free thought movements there was a close and longstanding affinity. Both shared a common anti-authoritarian viewpoint and a common tradition of secularist radicalism stretching back to Thomas Paine," who was, of course, well thought of by "atheists and anarchists alike. Nearly all anarchists were freethinkers, and many … first came to anarchism through the free thought movement, in which they constituted a militant left wing within the local clubs as well as the regional and national federations."
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'll make many decisions that they'll later regret. But whose decisions are they to make?...
Liberty does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the liberty of a single human being.
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...
"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 Democrats he opposed, but with window dressing."...
"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 Godwin
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 individualists until they focus on particular government programs that they like, then they like entitlements and government programs. They quickly swallow propaganda. It is far too early to imagine that the political process might be useful in anything other than as an educational effort. The hard core libertarian candidate will be unelectable. The educational job ahead of libertarians is huge. But, the remnant exists and they will find us.
"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 well with other human beings, adults or children, is a subtle art," Holt wrote.
Rules for doing it are not much help. But if I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be very wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued. "Mind your own business" is not a bad minor rule in human affairs.
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 through his publishing as his own writing. He published Liberty for twenty-five years and he opened a unique bookshop in NYC for other like publishers.
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 written by her mother... It was Roger MacBride who put the Little House stories on network TV for most of the 1970s and the early 1980s as well. It was also Roger MacBride who put the fledgling Libertarian Party on the political map in 1972 and represented it as its presidential nominee in the 1976 campaign against Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. In later years, MacBride abandoned the LP and went back to the Republican Party, within which he founded a libertarian organization, the Republican Liberty Caucus.
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 anything but bridge other's rights. Science can only thrive in a liberal environment. And, liberalism needs science for health, wealth and happiness.
Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights posits that rights are self evident. Reason made this realization clear. But all of these ideas had to be learned. Novels allowed much of this learning to occur.
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 only books a child may read on the subject. Most History teachers have not majored in History. Political pressure now makes textbooks promote special interest groups.
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 was consistent and principled. He was a giant.
Galambos was the unknown libertarian, but those who met him and the students in his courses seemed profoundly effected by him and his Free Enterprise Institute. Browne was not permitted to teach ideas that Galambos maintained were his. Students were not allowed to tell you about the mysterious classes.
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. An erudite, brilliant intellectual, Rothbard's strategic vision to make the libertarian movement thrive and grow is credited with the robust growth that has occurred.
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 American Revolution as editor and writer. Common Sense was a huge success.
Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said, "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain."
"These are the times that try men's souls..." Paine wrote in The American Crisis pamphlet series. General Washington had this read to his soldiers. Paine suggested the phrase United States of America. The Rights of Man was popular in France, but not in America. The Age of Reason was about deism, not atheism as was thought. All three books were high sellers, perhaps because Paine wrote to be read aloud.
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 him all this harm.
We was the work of a not-very-well-known Russian writer, Yevgeny Zamyatin. Nineteen Eighty-Four, by contrast, is extremely well known in the West today, particularly in England and the United States, where words and phrases like "Newspeak," "doublethink," "thoughtcrime," and "Big Brother Is Watching You" are familiar to millions who have never read the novel from which they come. And there is no getting around the similarities between 1984 and Zamyatin's We.
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, MLK killed by feds,concludes that some theories create problems for government to solve. Thus, government should target, undermine and silence those (false, not true) conspiracy entrepreneurs with, at least, censorship.
Nock prescribes the study of classical Greece and Rome for disciplining the mind. Thus equipped, current events can be put in perspective. Rothbard's The Anatomy of the State reveals the problem the state has in gaining support from the public. The majority must view their government as good and beneficial. Court historians are groomed to persuade the public to the state's position. Conspiracy theories breed skeptics.
Barnes and Beard wrote revisionist histories, importantly exposing truths and facts - often the reverse of what had been previously accepted. Revisionists have been blocked from documents about WWII and US Foreign Policy since 1933. Revisionists might reveal the US to be morally repugnant.
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 history. Rand rescued the book and promoted it.
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. Lord Acton phrased this concept as Power tends to corrupt and Absolute power corrupts absolutely. This was why the one ring in Lord of the Rings had to be destroyed.
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 out of business by the government. He again lost everything and lived out his years as an urban recluse. His most famous work was The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. No Treason is his most famous political tract (1867). "Although Spooner’s argument on the unconstitutionality of slavery had no legal basis, his concept of natural law contained the germs of anarchistic theory of government".
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 confused. Rand is not a Conservative. Most conservatives stand for mixed economies. They are proponents of big government and statism, not individual liberty and free markets.
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 major novel The Fountainhead (1943) was "masterful". In the fifties, Rand (50) and Nathaniel Branden (25) begin a romantic affair with the consent of their spouses. Rand's husband Frank O'Conner played the role of her supportive wife. Atlas Shrugged (1957) was Rand's magnus opus. When Branden fell in love with a young girl, Rand spurned him and shut down the Nathaniel Branden Institute. The Objectivist movement imploded. Many then drifted into the libertarian circles.