I SEEM TO MEET A LOT of libertarians these days: in pub (bar) conversations, bus stop chats and lawn mowing encounters with the neighbors. Political discussions in England usually begin and end with a harangue against the once-revered National Health Service. But I was on a long train ride from Edinburgh to London a few weeks ago and fell into a desultory conversation with an American visitor.

FROM 1982 TO 1986 I attended a Quaker boarding school, The Friends’ School, Saffron Walden in East Anglia, not far from Cambridge. Quakerism was formerly a persecuted religion. Consequently, the modern teaching purposely took a broad-ranging attitude to the study of religion and social systems. From the ages of 12 to 16, we had classes relating to the study of all the world’s major religions, and their social and political systems.

WHEN WALTER BLOCK ASKED ME to contribute my autobiography sketch to a collection from people explaining how they came to be libertarians and/or Austrians, I replied that I would read those that he had already received. Then, if it appeared that I could put something together that might be interesting enough to fit, I would be happy to do so.

I WAS INTRODUCED TO Murray Rothbard the economist long before I came to know him as a radical libertarian anarcho-capitalist activist. Reading Rothbard, beginning in the early 1960s, was a great experience for me, but that was not my introduction to libertarianism.

ONE OF THE (VERY FEW, perhaps the only) problems I have with the publication output of Murray N. Rothbard is that he never wrote his autobiography. Don’t ask me which of his articles or books I would wish not to have been written, so as to leave room for this non-existent autobiography.

MY GOOD FRIEND WALTER BLOCK has embarked on a noble project, but by encouraging libertarians to tell their life’s story, he risks narratives as exciting as my next door neighbor’s slide show, “Two Years in Tibet With the Katz Family.”

Also, with many of the libertarians I know, instead of inquiring, “How did you become a libertarian?,” Walter might have asked: “Where did you go wrong?”

I AM FLATTERED THAT WALTER invited me to contribute to this list of reflections on how one became a libertarian. Like most things in life, there is a simple answer, and a complicated one. The simple answer is that, in 1979, I ended up at Grove City College and was exposed to the lectures and then writings of Dr. Hans Sennholz.

I GREW UP IN FORT WORTH, Texas, in a working-class household dominated by my father. He regarded all Democratic politicians and labor leaders as thieves and voted Republican; however, his political views had little effect on me at the time because they were theoretically uninformed and I saw no bearing on my life of the cupidity of others.

UNTIL 1983, I WAS ALMOST untouched by political philosophy. Growing up in a small town in the geographical triangle of France, Germany, and Luxembourg, I hated borders, because the customs officers always gave us children a hard time when we had forgotten our passports or had smuggled two packages of coffee from Luxembourg back home to Germany. My family had relatives in France and Luxembourg.