Here is Murray Rothbard’s hilarious and exciting story of the rise and fall of the libertarian involvement in New Left politics.
Not only was it militant on the war, but it was also no longer doctrinaire socialist — a pleasant change indeed from the Old Left. On the contrary, its ideology was vague enough to encompass even “right-wing libertarians.” In fact, there was a good deal of instinctive libertarian sentiment in that early SDS which was to intensify for the next several years. There was a new hunger for individual freedom, for self-development, and a new concern about bureaucracy and technocratic statism that boded well for SDS’s future.
And here was the New Left which, while admittedly inchoate and lacking a constructive theory, was at least arising to zero in on many of the educational evils that we had been denouncing unheeded for over a generation.
