MY SOCIAL “ENLIGHTENMENT” (such as it is) began with my friendship with Joseph A. Galambos, as Andrew J. Galambos was known when I met him in 1957. At this time, Galambos and I were colleagues on the technical staff of the Air Force consultancy Ramo-Wooldridge before that company became TRW. He was an astrophysicist calculating trajectories for Atlas ICBMs before the advent of high-speed digital computers. I was studying engineering rocket thrust controls to put missiles into certain trajectories.

AN ACCOUNT OF MY INTELLECTUAL PATH has to start before I was born—with my grandfather, Spencer Heath (1876–1963). He taught me most of what I know about thinking, and my own thinking is very much an outgrowth from his.

IT MAY BE A BIT BOLD OF ME to submit my story for Walter Block’s libertarian autobiography series. I’m less distinguished than most of its contributors and I’m more fluent in the idiom of conservatism than that of libertarianism. But the latter really isn’t a problem; there’s little difference between a genuine American conservative and a Rothbardian libertarian. For me, there’s none at all. I’ll offer my story as proof.

FOR ME, BEING A LIBERTARIAN has a lot to do with being a philosopher.

It also “helps,” I guess, that I grew up under the post-war communist government of Hungary—and then under the stern totalitarian hand of my father, who reared me for several years after I escaped from Hungary at age 14. (I say “reared me” but what I mean is “ordered me around constantly, in the most disapproving and hostile manner.”)

IN A WAY, IT ALL BEGAN with Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson. In my junior year of high school my friend Steve Brecher had gotten me to read Ayn Rand’s novels. I don’t recall how he got me to read them. He probably appealed to the natural perversity that I revealed in our first intellectual conversation.

I’M FROM ITALY, a country with little room for classical liberalism and laissez-faire economics, both culturally and politically; but I grew up in a family sympathetic to classical-liberal ideas and my parents taught me to think for myself. In high school I had the good fortune to meet a non-leftist teacher of philosophy. So I was open to the culture of liberty, but the way I became a scholar of libertarianism has the character of an accident.

WINSTON CHURCHILL, of whose Big Government values I have not been fond, did have a great gift for words. He once famously said, ‘Any man under thirty who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over thirty who is not a conservative has no brains.”

MY WINDING UP IN SOMETHING of a libertarian camp was not from reading Ayn Rand. If anything, it was from having been brought up in a tiny town (in Minnesota) where everyone worked for a living, having some experience in farm and factory as a teenager, and, mostly, from my professional reading down through the years, and trying to figure things out.

AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER, I have always been a libertarian. Of course when I was a child I had never heard the word, but I was one. I had an inquisitive mind, and was always asking “why?” whenever a grown-up issued a pronouncement. If the answer made sense, I’d usually accept it. If not, I didn’t.