Libertarianism: An Emergent Field

Libertarians have long been accorded a key but subordinate role in the history of American conservatism. Since Alan Brinkley's field-defining essay in 1994, the explosion of histories tracing conservative activism and ideas in the United States has focused on the work of conservative activists, businessmen, and intellectuals, while often highlighting libertarians as key allies in the pursuit of free-market policies, wealthy funders of Republican networks, or kooky eccentrics who add color to the bizarre world of the Right.¹ Recently, scholars of conservatism have turned their attention to the centrality of racism and hostility to the civil rights movement to the rise of the Right, as well as to religious conservatives and the pro-life movement.² Where scholars have examined the rise of free-market ideas, they have typically focused on neoliberal émigré intellectuals at mid-century, who built global networks of scholarship and funding to push for policies that would unleash the powers of the market and contain the reach of democratic politics.³ Libertarian activists who drew on neoliberal ideas to form an American libertarian movement in the pursuit of individual and market liberty have received far less attention.⁴

In the last few years, this has begun to change. An inchoate yet emergent field has begun to chart the intellectual history of libertarianism, focusing on how libertarian philosophy is distinct from conservative or far-right ideas. This scholarship has emerged precisely at a moment when libertarian ideas are increasingly at odds with the current Republican Party. Intellectuals and policymakers surrounding former President Donald Trump seemingly reject Reagan-era economics and the primacy of the free market, while also calling for closed borders, socially conservative policies, support for authoritarian leaders worldwide, and economic protectionism. These positions could not be farther from libertarians' historic support for the free flow of capital and people, and minimizing, if not privatizing, the government. An ever-growing rift between right-wing activists and libertarians can perhaps be no better summarized than by Trump's attempt to court libertarians while speaking at the Libertarian Party's National Convention in May 2024, where he was roundly booed by his libertarian audience.⁵

Yet in defining libertarianism against Trump's white nationalism, some scholars have overcorrected in supposing that they can exhume an "uncorrupted" libertarian tradition that has been untouched by the Right. In The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi identify a family of libertarian ideas, while holding up a left-libertarian tradition from nineteenth-century abolitionists to present-day Bleeding-Heart Libertarians who attempt to reconcile free markets with social justice. Andrew Koppelman, in Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, contrasts what he sees as the emancipatory ideas of Austrian economist F. A. Hayek at mid-century with the egocentric and rapacious theories of the Russian émigré and novelist Ayn Rand, anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard, and Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. And Jennifer Burns' biography, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, depicts Chicago School economist Milton Friedman as representative of a respectable intellectual synthesis within conservative politics that "cracked apart" in the Republican Party's right-turn in the 1990s (p. 15).

All three of these books contend that there is a pure American libertarian tradition defined by its radicalism, its concern with coercion, and its use of market mechanisms to expand wealth and economic opportunity to benefit everyone, especially the poor. This kind of libertarianism, they insist, can still be put to use in structuring the state and the economy. But in their desire to isolate, redefine, and hone a libertarian intellectual tradition for new uses, they overlook libertarianism's historical entanglement with the Right. Even if Trump and libertarian ideas might be at odds today, libertarianism has long been a channel to far-right ideas, whether for the paleolibertarians in the 1990s, the Alt-Right, or, in more recent times, for figures like the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.⁶ And more importantly, libertarian ideas are not yet out of the mix on the Right, nor are libertarian institutions. In focusing too much on our present moment and in seeking a usable past, these books overlook much of libertarianism's rich and variegated history.

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Despite the relatively thin literature, there is nonetheless a standard narrative of libertarianism. Historians of the subject have largely understood American libertarianism to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, arising in opposition to the expanding welfare state and in order to protect economic interests. An early generation of libertarians, most notably Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, and H. L. Mencken, were outspoken critics of the New Deal, but held little hope for the ascendance of their ideas outside of their isolated "Remnant."⁷ Civil libertarians in the 1930s developed arguments for a "free market of ideas" as a cover for economic interests, and though their arguments were not initially successful in the courts, they laid the foundation for an antiregulatory vision of the First Amendment pursued later in the century.⁸ American libertarianism, however, gained steam with the 1944 publication of F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom to popular acclaim and the emigration of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who would train a generation of intellectuals from his post at NYU, including Murray Rothbard. A wave of libertarian women—including Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand—also made popular defenses of individualism at mid-century, which proved influential to the rising Right.⁹

By the mid-1950s, some libertarians like Frank Chodorov and Murray Rothbard began to work with William F. Buckley, Jr. to pull together a "fusionist" New Right coalition of conservatives, libertarians, and anti-Communists.¹⁰ Other prominent libertarians, specifically Ayn Rand, refused to engage in political coalition-building and instead cultivated their own insular and often cult-like libertarian circles.¹¹ Libertarian students found a home both in emerging conservative student organizations like the Young Americans for Freedom, and Rand's Objectivist movement, where Objectivists met in small clubs to listen to the lectures of Rand and her acolyte, Nathaniel Branden.

It was not until the 1960s that the possibility of building a libertarian mass movement finally arrived when libertarians joined anti-Vietnam War protests to oppose the state as a war-making apparatus. During this period, libertarians started to diverge with conservatives over their support for socially conservative family values, the draft, the criminalization of marijuana, and harsh policing, while finding possibilities for linkages with the New Left through their anti-war activism and countercultural commitments.¹² Disagreements with conservatives came to a head at the national convention of the Young Americans for Freedom in 1969 in St. Louis, Missouri, when libertarian student activists broke with conservatives to forge their own path.¹³

What the literature has yet to capture fully is how, after this split with conservatives, libertarians developed a freewheeling movement with a new antistatist, individualist politics that attempted to upend the left-right binary and appeal to Americans across the political spectrum. At the dawn of the 1970s, libertarians forged an ecumenical coalition of Objectivists, anarcho-capitalists, limited government libertarians, libertarian feminists, hard-money advocates, science fiction fans, survivalists, and defectors from the New Left and New Right. Libertarians also established their own intellectual counter-establishment of libertarian magazines, think tanks, institutes, and the Libertarian Party. Within this institutional orbit, libertarians cultivated an internal movement culture with its own texts, in-group references, and shared sensibility. But they also continually made cross-partisan appeals to a broader American public dissatisfied with state action amid the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the 1970s inflation crisis. As the Christian Right expanded, libertarians continued to define themselves as distinct from religious conservatives and the increasingly conservative Republican party. And in 1980, when the Reagan Revolution swept national politics, libertarians ran Ed Clark for the presidency on the Libertarian Party ticket with David Koch as his VP, earning almost one million votes and spreading libertarian ideas to millions of Americans.

Ronald Reagan's triumph in 1980 deeply unsettled the libertarian coalition, as some libertarians began to reconsider collaborating with conservatives over free-market economics. Milton Friedman became an influential advisor to Reagan, both during his presidential campaign and over his two terms as president. Limited-government libertarians, including the wealthy funders Charles and David Koch, also sought new alliances with Reagan conservatives to pursue free-market policies, often dropping their countercultural commitments.¹⁴ But not all libertarians could abide by the Reagan administration's socially conservative policies or hawkish defense posture. Scholars have yet to examine left-libertarians such as libertarian feminists who remained committed to protecting civil liberties and bodily autonomy, and allied with pro-choice advocates in abortion rights activism. More has been written on the right-wing libertarians like Murray Rothbard who veered off to develop a theory of "paleolibertarianism" and built their own intellectual centers to espouse economic protectionist, anti-interventionist, and often anti-Semitic and xenophobic beliefs.¹⁵ Techno-libertarians in Silicon Valley, in turn, crafted new arguments against government regulation of the Internet in the late 1980s and early 1990s.¹⁶ These rifts in the early 1980s have had lasting impacts on libertarianism, scattering activists, who nonetheless continued to draw on a common understanding of "libertarianism" and a shared libertarian sensibility forged during the movement's most cohesive period in the 1970s.

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New scholarship on libertarianism calls the standard chronology into question. In The Individualists, self-described libertarians Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi seek to draw out "a longer, wider, and more diverse history" of libertarianism (p. 2). They define libertarianism as a "family" whose members combine the following "six ideas at once": private property, skepticism of authority, free markets, spontaneous order, individualism, and negative liberty (p. 32). Based on this wider definition of libertarianism, they contend that libertarianism has existed in various forms in three historical eras: a "primordial" era in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Britain, France, and the United States; a Cold War period that past histories of libertarianism have mostly covered; and a contemporary era since the 1990s characterized by three divergent strands of libertarianism: paleolibertarianism, left-libertarianism, and Bleeding-Heart libertarianism.

By elongating the history of libertarianism, Tomasi and Zwolinski offer important new candidates for the family of libertarianism. In nineteenth-century Britain and France, they show how Gustave de Molinari, Frédéric Bastiat, and Herbert Spencer were some of the first to craft a radicalized form of classical liberalism based on natural rights, largely in reaction to the perceived threat of socialism. Libertarianism in the American context is harder to pin down given that there was less opposition to socialism. Instead, Tomasi and Zwolinski claim that nineteenth-century American libertarianism defined itself against the institution of slavery, outlining two libertarian intellectual lineages: abolitionists and individualist anarchists. Benjamin Tucker, the most widely known individualist anarchist in the United States, drew on the work of nineteenth-century anarchists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Josiah Warren, and Max Stirner, who prized individual sovereignty, voluntary cooperation, and equitable exchange. Through his writings on free economic competition and "the abolition, not only of all existing States, but of the State itself," Tucker deepened the individualist anarchist tradition in his periodical Liberty, which later proved an important source for anarchist-leaning twentieth-century libertarians.¹⁷

Abolitionists find strange company in the libertarian family, however. In their struggle against slavery, William Lloyd Garrison and Henry Wright both developed anarchist tendencies that led them to question all forms of political authority. But, like Martin Luther, they believed that human, temporal government was sinful because of their deep faith in God's divine, eternal government.¹⁸ Earthly government could never, by definition, reach the perfection of the divine. Anti-slavery advocates' religious opposition to political authority made them unlikely forebears of secular twentieth-century libertarians, who opposed government for its inefficiencies and wastefulness, its coerciveness, and given their preference for free-market mechanisms.

Tomasi and Zwolinski emphasize this "primordial era" to downplay the historical significance of twentieth-century libertarians, whose defenses of greed, selfishness, and free-market capitalism have been strongly criticized by both the Left and the Right. They draw linkages between nineteenth-century abolitionists and contemporary Bleeding-Heart libertarians who try to reconcile free markets with social justice so as to improve libertarians' image as defenders of the poor who are not opposed to all redistributive policies. Both authors actively support Bleeding-Heart libertarianism: Zwolinski founded the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog in 2011, while Tomasi has attempted to bridge the work of Hayek and Rawls in his previous book, Free Market Fairness.¹⁹ But in trying to shake off the bad reputation of the twentieth-century libertarians and focus on the parts of the tradition they prefer, they dramatically understate the historical significance of twentieth-century libertarians. Unlike the libertarians of the "primordial" era, the libertarian intellectuals of the Cold War era strongly identified as "libertarians," crafted an identifiable intellectual tradition that fueled a political movement, and founded movement institutions without which we would not have such a strong libertarian presence on the American landscape today.

Where The Individualists breaks new ground is in charting out the dispersal of libertarians at the end of the Cold War. "The collapse of international socialism in the late twentieth century," they write, "was like the lifting of a sea anchor that had held libertarian boats together" (p. 295). Libertarian "boats" were cast adrift in three directions: paleolibertarianism, left-libertarianism, and Bleeding-Heart libertarianism. Of the three, scholars have mostly paid attention to paleolibertarianism as the creed that Pat Buchanan embraced in the early 1990s, and have opened up new debates over whether paleolibertarianism was a forerunner for Trumpism.²⁰ Left-libertarianism, by contrast, has received little scholarly attention for its assertions that capitalism has never met libertarian standards and truly free markets would achieve many left-wing goals of worker autonomy, decentralized power, and equality. By laying out these varied trajectories of libertarianism, The Individualists present us with rich new possibilities for scholarship on libertarianism, if not the Right, from the Cold War era to the present.

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In Burning Down the House, Andrew Koppelman similarly contends that libertarianism appears in multiple forms—though he is more assertive in saying which forms he thinks should be embraced in contemporary politics. Koppelman pinpoints the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek as the founder of modern libertarianism through his publication of The Road to Serfdom in 1944, after which libertarianism "bifurcated into crude and sophisticated versions" (p. 31). Koppelman captures the quixotic nature of The Road to Serfdom, which combined dire warnings about the slippery slope to totalitarianism with the concession that some form of a social safety net might be necessary—leading readers to interpret his ideas in multiple ways. Conservative businessmen and activists looking for support for free-market ideas often ignored Hayek's caveats about the welfare state. Others, for instance economist John Maynard Keynes, recognized that Hayek had expressed support for public investment and wrote that he was "in agreement with virtually the whole" book.²¹ In this fashion, many interpretations of Hayek lived on in the postwar period.

The Hayek that Koppelman hopes the reader will take away, however, is one who had deeply humanitarian impulses, and posed a "forgotten middle way" between central planning and laissez-faire that can now serve as bridge for America's deeply polarized politics (p. 8). Koppelman avers that today's Democratic Party has already embraced Hayek's vision of markets, as well as his support for government programs like Social Security and Medicare. He also insists that Hayek understood that markets do not necessarily reward merit and often reinforce economic inequalities, arguing instead that inequalities need to be tolerated for the sake of economic growth that benefits everyone. Koppelman himself asserts that "if you want more for the poor, you shouldn't try to equalize" but rather that "you should make the economy grow" (p. 15). As a self-defined "pro-capitalism leftist," Koppelman argues that Hayek's ideas can be a corrective for those on the Left who do not grasp the virtues of capitalism.

Koppelman contrasts this version of Hayekian libertarianism with later "corrupted" variants of libertarianism espoused by Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Nozick. These intellectuals of "post-Hayekian libertarianism" broadened Hayek's focus on economics to questions of personal liberty, while also making stricter cases for property rights and a minimal, if non-existent state. All three put market outcomes in starkly moral terms, arguing that the winners of market competition are worthier individuals, making inequality justified. Koppelman criticizes not only these thinkers' moralization of the market, but also their attempts to equate individual freedom with self-sufficiency and dismantle the very political institutions that in fact support freedom. Koppelman demonstrates the limits of this kind of libertarianism by analyzing how libertarian ideas have undermined the efficacy of anti-discrimination law and drug policy, and fueled a climate change denial campaign funded by the Koch brothers.

Yet in setting up these two traditions as foils for each other, Koppelman reifies both traditions and misses how they often overlapped. Critically, Koppelman presents a static image of Hayek that is limited to his ideas in the middle of his career. He skips over Hayek's later skepticism of democracy and his proposals for "limited democracy" where the nation's chief executive could not change the law, and the powers of two elected assemblies would be substantially limited. When travelling to Chile in 1977 and 1981 under Pinochet's dictatorship, Hayek proclaimed, "I personally prefer a liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking liberalism." Indeed, many of Hayek's qualifications to his ideas fell away as he aged, while his prescriptions for policies and the allies he chose to work with became more and more fringe. Late in his life, Hayek gave up his long-held beliefs about fixed exchange rates, instead proposing the denationalization of the currency and the introduction of competitive currencies—a system that presaged cryptocurrency.²² Only through an interrogation of the evolution of Hayek's ideas can we see how they often contained a radical dream for freedom, but also antidemocratic and inegalitarian impulses. In searching for a usable past for the Left, Koppelman unwittingly reinforces an untarnished image of Hayek that many on the Right also seek to cultivate—one that is frozen at mid-century, uncritical of Hayek's radical proclivities, and solely focused on his support for freedom and prosperity. While libertarians have long extolled Hayek, Rand, and Rothbard, the libertarian who became a household name in the postwar era was the popular economist Milton Friedman. In her rich biography, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, Jennifer Burns builds a picture of Friedman not as a free-market ideologue, but rather as a thoughtful analyst with an extraordinary intellect. She follows Friedman's trajectory from his childhood in Rahway, New Jersey through his time as a graduate student in economics at the University of Chicago, a period when he worked for the federal government, and his return to University of Chicago in 1946 where he became one of the nation's leading economists and an advisor to the Nixon and Reagan administrations. While Burns does not label Friedman a "libertarian" for the simple reason that many libertarians oppose the state management of money that Friedman supported, his general framework in fact synthesized libertarianism's basic precepts—"free market economics, individual liberty, and global cooperation" (p. 15). In short, Friedman did more than any other libertarian to make libertarian ideas appealing to the mainstream.

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is both a biography of Friedman and a history of the economics discipline and its uses in public policy over the course of the twentieth century. Burns traces the birth of modern quantitative economics, describing the fall of political economy and institutionalist economics, as well as Friedman's formative work in the emergent postwar neoclassical synthesis. While Friedman's contributions to the discipline were many, he is most notable for restoring the pivotal role of money and monetary policy to macroeconomic analysis and calling for a fixed growth rate for money to control inflation. Burns uncovers fresh material on how Friedman benefited from close collaborations with women who were economists—Rose Friedman, Dorothy Brady, and Anna Schwartz—all of whom were "hidden figures" in the discipline given the gendered constraints of the era. At every juncture in his career, Friedman worked with these economists to publish field-defining books on the consumption function, the monetary history of the depression, and the book that brought him popular acclaim, Capitalism and Freedom (1962).

Burns presents a vision of Friedman as a policy analyst, whose catalogue of policies—from universal basic income, negative income tax, a voluntary army, to school vouchers—she contends have much to offer to Americans across the political spectrum. In focusing on this side of Friedman, however, Burns spends comparatively less time on the Friedman who played a hugely influential domestic and international role as "a symbol and figurehead to American conservatives," libertarians, and the broader Right (p. 436). While often referencing his Newsweek columns, Burns says relatively little of his 1980 PBS series, Free to Choose, which spread his ideas to Americans and made him a star, nor Friedman's ongoing engagement with the Mont Pelerin Society, which was a key organization that advanced neoliberal ideas. And when approaching Friedman's public prescription of "shock treatment" in Chile in 1974, Burns minimizes Friedman role in the economic crisis and argues that he played "almost no role in policy design" (p. 372). She castigates the "pre-Twitter mob of the global left" for exaggerating his influence and seizing upon his "celebrity to gain greater visibility" (p. 376). By limiting her analysis to the six days Friedman appeared in Santiago, she avoids wrestling with Friedman's role in the University of Chicago department that trained the "Chicago Boys" who designed the policies in Chile that he prescribed, which ultimately led to the crash of the Chilean economy, the impoverishment of half the country's population, and enduring inequality.

Burns at once asserts that Friedman had enormous influence as a "touchstone of the vast transformation in economic and political ideas that had shaped the twentieth century," and also does not hold Friedman accountable for the negative consequences of the neoliberal policies that he advocated, whether entrenched inequality, austerity politics, the gutting of social welfare, or the precarity of labor (p. 436). Whereas Koppelman—and to an extent, Tomasi and Zwolinski—face libertarians' "corruptions" head on, Burns often acknowledges but never fully interrogates the expansive influence of Friedman's ideas beyond the discipline of economics and policymaking. Yet his influence is remarkable and undeniable. Friedman's belief that "the economic market is a freer, more democratic market than the political marketplace," and his persistent and vocal distrust of government action has fostered deep disillusionment with democratic politics and the state in the United States and abroad (p. 371).

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All three of these books elect to describe a respectable, usable libertarian tradition—and aim to do so for a mainstream audience. This is notable given that scholarship on libertarianism has long been split between mainstream academia and a libertarian scholarly circuit. Since the 1970s, libertarians have built a formidable intellectual counter-establishment with their own journals, presses, and research centers with which mainstream scholars rarely interact. By speaking to a broader audience, these three books, by contrast, open up the field by pushing the boundaries of existing periodization and appraising key libertarian intellectuals from new angles. They also remind us that we are still in need of balanced, rigorous, and archivally-based research on the many facets of libertarianism, on which there is still very little work. New histories are needed in cyber libertarianism, gay and lesbian libertarian activism, the science fiction subculture within libertarian circles, as well as of libertarian organizations and institutions across the country.²³

In new research, scholars should also interrogate how libertarian ideas have found their ways into both left- and right-wing politics. Libertarian critiques of state power and assertion of bodily autonomy have long been identified on the Right, where right-wing activists have opposed the welfare state, called for tax reform, critiqued American expansionism, protected gun rights, and resisted mandatory vaccination. But these critiques have also made their way into liberal and left-wing politics through opposition to the carceral state, the war on drugs, and pro-choice activism. Libertarianism is protean in form: attaching itself to many kinds of intellectual pursuits, policymaking endeavors, and activism across the political spectrum. Only through balanced historical inquiry into the many uses and applications of libertarianism will we fully comprehend its trajectory into the twenty-first century.