The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism
By Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi
Princeton University Press 2023

Imagine: a highways and byways intellectual history of a minority proposition racked with internecine disputes, adrift in contemporary social life, and dominated by a banquet of dead intellectuals, living crackpots, megalomaniacal businessmen, and oleaginous politicians.

Enticed? Probably not. Intellectual history is seldom a seductive project, especially in social thought (prepending virtually anything, from media to science, with the word “social” gives a worse version of it) which can coagulate into musings about the musings of dead people about their own fabrications.

Behold: The individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism by professor of philosophy at the University of Sand Diego Matt Zwolinski and the president of Heterodox Academy John Tomasi, both self-described libertarians.

Their book is a history of the ideas and people making up one of the prickliest political compounds in the modern world: one that took the wishy-washy historical classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill, David Hume, and John Locke and radicalized it into either a broad push for free markets and limited government or a narrow elevation of individual liberty as a moral absolute.

Now, the sorry state of post Cold War libertarianism is hardly the necessary outcome of its heritage. Also, intellectual history done well is couched in vivid personalities and settings, our authors have generally achieved that. So it is tempting to suggest the reader cast out of their mind (if ever there in the first place) their perceptions of lifestyle libertarians, the infantile Libertarian Party, and the Peter Thiels and Rand Pauls of the world so they can relish a rich history on a clean slate.

That, of course, is impossible. Despite modern (“third wave”) libertarianism is mostly accorded tentative consideration, accentuating just how marginal and unmoored it is. And although the book is topical rather than chronological, the reading experience still feels chronological: the reader is waiting for things to fall apart, waiting for balkanization, identifying strands of thought that will be twisted or highjacked (or perhaps not), waiting for the Libertarian Party to remove from its platform the condemnation of bigotry as “irrational and repugnant.”

Complicating the point, the book demonstrates how even the most repugnant and intolerant paleolibertarians can legitimately exist under the same tent as the most cosmopolitan classical liberals.

On the one hand, we can easily define libertarianism as maximizing individual freedom and minimizing state violence. Looking to the history of libertarianism we can also “see libertarianism as a distinctive combination of six key commitments: property rights, negative liberty, individualism, free markets, a skepticism of authority, and a belief in the explanatory and normative significance of spontaneous order.”

On the other hand, Zwolinski and Tomasi argue “libertarianism is an inherently flexible ideology, one that can be developed (or bent) in different ways, depending on the interests, preoccupations, or social context of the theorist.” (we might point out this is true for every theorist in every ideology everywhere for all time, which can cause one to start questioning the point of the whole exercise). The result is you get some unexpected outcomes: libertarians for closed borders. Libertarians for discrimination. Libertarians for aggressive policing (“rough justice on the spot”). “[L]ibertarianism committed to the preservation of ‘Western culture,’ deference to ‘social authority – as embodied in the family, church [and] community,’ and ‘objective standards of morality, especially as found in the Judeo-Christian tradition’” - and so on, with all these theorists arguably deriving their conclusion legitimately from those six key commitments.

And so, as you can see, a small part (indeed, the end) of the story looms over the whole of it and exhibits one of the authors’ central arguments: the plastic nature of libertarianism.

But what about the book broadly? What we can say for certain is that The Individualists is an absolute triumph: perfectly organized, tightly delivered, lucidly written, and utterly engaging. After defining libertarianism, the “three eras of libertarian thought” (primordial, Cold War, and third wave) are not simply adumbrated but told with a narrative taking the reader through Britain, France, and America, each of which radicalized classical liberalism in distinct ways, into the potent, productive, and more distinct post war period, and finally ends with the quarrelsome post Cold War situation. With this groundwork, and supported with footnotes that are a reading experience unto themselves, Zwolinski and Tomasi introduce a cast of radicals and reactionaries, and a panoply of ideas and controversies, by means of dropping the reader in disputatious trenches from anarchism to racial justice. The result is engrossing.

Is libertarianism capacious or a farrago? How does it fit in the maelstrom of contemporary politics? Can modern libertarianism not just survive as a going concern but become a politically viable ideology? Is there a usable past to answer such questions? The answers are outside the scope of this book, but for anyone attempting to do so it will be a useful resource. There are three great introductory overviews of libertarian ideas and history: Tom Palmer’s Realizing Freedom, Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism, and now Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi’s The Individualists, a worthy addition.

David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.