Free-wheeling and frivolous

Why didn´t you listen?

"Radicals for Capitalism" by Brian Doherty is a self-professed free-wheeling history of the libertarian movement in the United States. I suppose "free-wheeling" is a warning to the reader that the work isn't properly speaking a scholarly one. And Doherty himself is apparently a former punk rocker!

Still, his book is well researched and quite extensive (740 pages). I'm not an expert on libertarian history, but the book does seem to cover pretty much everything, at least as far as the post-war era is concerned. Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Party are all prominently featured.

When reading "Radicals for Capitalism", don't skip the endnotes! The libertarian movement has long been characterized by factional in-fighting, and alternative versions of many episodes exist. Thus, in the main text we read that Ludwig von Mises once called Ayn Rand "the bravest man in America" (sic) while in the endnotes, Doherty mentions another version, according to which Mises considered the exasperating Rand to be "just an ignorant Jewish girl".

What struck me when reading Doherty's book is the sectarian and even frivolous character of much libertarian activity. Ayn Rand's personality cult around herself is a case in point. There is also Murray Rothbard's strange attempts to infiltrate the far left and conspire with Maoists. Another weird phenomenon is dubbed "hippies of the right", and then there was Michael Oliver, who attempted to create a libertarian nation on the Minerva reefs in the Pacific. The attempt came to an inglorious end when Tonga (hardly a great power) sent a gunboat and evicted the libertarians from the atoll! The entire book is teeming with precocious teenagers reading science fiction novels, and there was even a "space cadet" faction within the Libertarian Party.

The Libertarian Party was modestly successful for a while, but mostly because it put itself forward as a real political party, supporting right-wing populist causes, taking money from big business, and more or less forcing the rank and file hippies to build stable party branches (or leave). There are also some think tanks and magazines which attempt to make libertarianism intellectually respectable. Overall, however, the libertarian movement (at least judging from Doherty's book) seems to be more fringey than the left! And the far left is *very* strange, as we all know.

I recommend "Radicals for Capitalism" for everyone who wants a broad overview of the US libertarian movement.

PS. In keeping with the free-wheeling traditions of libertarianism, the book seems to exist with several different covers. My cover shows the American eagle, rather than a tocsin. Is that an underground edition? ;-)