The Libertarian Tradition

The Libertarian Tradition

A podcast by journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and educator, Jeff Riggenbach (1947–2021).

Jeff Riggenbach
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 most famous work was The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. No Treason is his most anarchistic political tract (1867).
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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...
Jeff Riggenbach
Browne is known as the libertarian investment guru who wrote books like How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. 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.
Jeff Riggenbach
Textbook commissions, especially from Texas, decide what ideas will be within any book. Political pressure now makes textbooks promote special interest groups.
Jeff Riggenbach
Ferris' book The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature is about the symbiotic relationship between science and liberalism. He thinks science caused liberty. Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights posits that rights are self evident. She thinks the novel caused liberty.
Jeff Riggenbach
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, but getting our ideas out there is required. The remnant exists and they will find us.
Jeff Riggenbach
"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."...
Jeff Riggenbach
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?...
Jeff Riggenbach
Freethought, de Cleyre 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."...
Jeff Riggenbach
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."...
Jeff Riggenbach
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...
Jeff Riggenbach
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...
Jeff Riggenbach
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...
Jeff Riggenbach
Milgram reflected on Etienne de La Boetie's key insight about the politics of authority, the will to bondage, and the eager embrace of voluntary servitude. He devised an ingenious test for their influence on the ordinary individual...
Jeff Riggenbach
"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."...
Jeff Riggenbach
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...
Jeff Riggenbach
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."
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
Flynn was a liberal - a classical liberal. He held to the delusion that the state can be reformed. He gradually became more libertarian, more individualist. He was considered a member of the old right, while never being on the right...
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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...
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.
Jeff Riggenbach
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.