Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is Reason magazine senior editor Doherty’s splendidly researched 2007 survey of Libertarian thinkers and activists, from Ayn Rand to Murray Rothbard and beyond, and it is full of colourful stories about the once well-known figures who settled the frontier of American radical individualism and free-market theory.
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement by Brian Doherty.
This is Reason magazine senior editor Dougherty’s splendidly researched 2007 survey of libertarian thinkers and activists, from Ayn Rand to Murray Rothbard and beyond, and it is full of colourful stories about the once well-known figures who settled the frontier of American radical individualism and free-market theory. Dougherty is especially good at explaining complex ideas in simple language while never taking his eye off the typically eccentric personalities that made it so.
I love the flavour it gives you of the time. In the late 40s/early 50s some of these right-wingers, like William Mullindore, who was vice-president of Edison in Southern California, and Leonard Read, all these businessmen types went off to Bretton Woods and all took acid together. This was the very beginning of acid. Mullindore said it really plugs you in and gives you voltage for thinking. He used electric company metaphors to describe his experience. Hilarious.
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Anne C Heller is a magazine editor and journalist. She has been the managing editor of The Antioch Review, fiction editor of Esquire and Redbook, the features editor of Lear’s, and the executive editor of the magazine development group at Condé Nast Publications, with a special emphasis on money and finance. In her biography of libertarian Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, she documents the life of one of capitalism’s most fervent defenders. She blogs on libertarianism and associated issues at www.annecheller.com/
