Some books become good friends. They not only stimulate our minds, but they also speak to our very souls. The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, is such a book. The two authors do everything humanly possible to uncover and reveal the deepest roots of modern and post-modern libertarianism, tracing its very diverse and tenuous strands back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, noting that, ultimately, it’s a radical form of classical liberalism. At one level, it’s a biography of the very idea of libertarianism, but at another level, it’s an intellectual autobiography of anyone who considers him- or herself libertarian.

Indeed, Zwolinski and Tomasi dig deeply into every strand of libertarianism, finding its classical liberal origins in eighteenth-century Scotland, in nineteenth-century Great Britain and France, and, in nineteenth-century America, especially in the abolitionist movements in New England and the American Midwest. Yet, the authors caution, libertarianism is not simply classical liberalism, but rather a radicalization of it. 

Libertarianism in its strict form was born at the midpoint of the nineteenth century as a radicalized version of classical liberalism. Where classical liberals treated liberty as a strong but defeasible presumption, libertarians extolled it as a moral absolute. The principle of liberty, for libertarians, is universal in the scope of its application, covering persons of all ages, races, nationalities, and genders. Its moral force is definitive, overriding any and all other competing moral values, including the “public good” to which classical liberals so often appealed to justify state action.

Much like Russell Kirk’s lineage of 29 figures in his magisterial 1953 work, The Conservative Mind, The Individualists presents its own quasi-hagiography of thinkers, both orthodox and heterodox (terms the authors employ), who populate the libertarian timescape. John Locke, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Frédéric Bastiat, Herbert Spencer, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, Leonard Read, Ludwig Von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, James Buchanan, Douglas Den Uyl, Douglas Rasmussen, Robert Nozick, David Beito, Randy Barnett, and David Schmidtz all make appearances. Unlike Kirk, however, Zwolinski and Tomasi rarely offer biographical details of their descendants, but rather highlight the intellectual contributions each made to libertarianism itself. There are a few exceptions. For example, the authors do delve into the life—at least partially—of Spooner. But, in general, the book focuses on the ideas.

Even with the presentation of this vast landscape of personalities, one must ask, what exactly does libertarianism mean, especially to Zwolinski and Tomasi? The two answer directly: “We 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.” Here again, The Individualist reflects Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, which also offered six tenets or canons of conservatism. Yet (yes, there’s always a yet with libertarianism), not all is as calm or as certain as one might first believe. That is, libertarianism is not a cut-and-dried ideology with one size fitting all, even though the authors sometimes refer to it as “an intellectual system.”

In terms of its theoretical foundations, libertarianism is uncompromising in its radicalism. In practice, however, not all libertarians were comfortable embracing the wholesale upheaval of existing institutions—and privileges. From its beginning, then, libertarianism has attracted a mix of radical and reactionary elements: those who were eager to follow the dictates of libertarian justice wherever they might lead, and those who saw in libertarianism a rationale for defending the status quo against change. The tension between progressive and reactionary elements, a tension within the very soul of libertarianism, is the major theme of this book.

The radical aspect of libertarianism is captured clearly in the book. For instance, in chapter five, dealing with “Big Business and Free Markets,” Zwolinski and Tomasi write: “Contrary to popular mythology, then, socialists and libertarians actually have more in common with each other than they do with their common ideological enemy, conservatism.” On the other side, though, are those libertarians who believe so strongly in property rights that they might very well forsake justice, even when that property originally came to someone through illiberal means.

Such a tension between the radical and the reactionary strains of libertarianism, it seems, came to a head several times in its long history, but especially in the switch from being a fight against slavery in nineteenth-century America to being a fight against socialism in twentieth-century America and, then again, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Annus Mirabilis of 1989. In the fight against slavery, the radicals were preeminent among libertarians, but in the fight against socialists, the reactionaries became preeminent.

With the collapse of the Evil Empire, however, libertarians cracked and moved into a third phase of existence, balkanizing into three distinct groups, divided between the radicals and the reactionaries. First were the paleo-libertarians, led by Lew Rockwell and his Mises Institute. This first group sought an alliance with cultural conservatives. These, according to the authors, tend to be the reactionaries, willing to defend the status quo against all comers.

Second were the academic libertarians centered around philosophers such as Loren Lomasky and Schmidtz. “Broadly speaking,” the two authors proclaim, “they were more empiricist, more pluralist, and more consequentialist.” Equally important, they were willing to tackle and even adopt “ideas and policies that had generally been associated with academic theories on the political left.” 

Third, and coming late to the overall movement of the third wave, were the Bleeding-Heart Libertarians, who, in direct contrast with the paleo-libertarians, sought to make common cause with the academic and political progressive left. One representative institution of this third movement of the third wave tackled “issues of intersectionality, structure inequality, racism, heterosexualism,” etc. The authors explicitly place themselves within and at the forefront of Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism. 

Other strands within libertarianism—such as “left-wing market anarchism” and “neoclassical liberalism”—emerged as well in the post-Cold War era.

While The Individualists is, overall, excellent, wisely written, and beautifully crafted, there are a few things with which one might quibble. 

First, while Zwolinski and Tomasi offer a fairly orthodox history of libertarianism, one must wonder not just about its political and economic origins—looking to Locke or Adam Smith—but about its theological origins. Numerous radical theologians, especially seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American Protestants (one immediately thinks of Roger Williams) and some Counter-Reformation Jesuits (Robert Bellarmine), too, should be recognized as founders of libertarianism. The authors do include one sixteenth-century Dominican, Francisco de Vitoria, in the book, but in general, the religious and theological aspects of toleration and dissent are nearly absent from the work.

Second, The Individualists would have benefitted from a more direct discussion and examination of conservatism, beyond merely labeling it the natural enemy of libertarianism. When the two authors label Thomas Carlyle as a conservative, for example, the reader will naturally express some confusion. No serious conservative in the twentieth or twenty-first century—all of whom (e.g. Kirk, Nisbet, Strauss) loved their respective genealogies—ever identifies with Carlyle or traces his or her thought back to the Scottish bigot. They may trace their ideas back to Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, and Burke, but never to Carlyle.

Robert Nisbet, arguably the most libertarian and anti-statist conservative of the twentieth century, always identified the late nineteenth-century anarchists, such as Proudhon, with conservatism more than with any form of libertarianism. Perhaps Nisbet was wrong, but it’s at least an argument that needs to be considered. Albert Jay Nock is another complicated example. Zwolinski and Tomasi rightly argue that he directly inspired the radical libertarian Frank Chodorov, but it’s equally worth noting that both Kirk and William F. Buckley saw themselves as the legitimate successors of Nock.

Third, and related to the second point, there are some historical facts, especially dealing with the American experience, that could have benefitted from further exploration. Two examples will suffice. At one point in the book, when discussing Bastiat, the authors write: “Society, for the French Industrialists, is thus divided into two great classes: one productive; the other plundering.” This is presented as an original insight on the part of the French. In America, however, the followers of Andrew Jackson, and especially Jackson himself, had been making this argument since the late 1820s. Additionally, the two authors write much later in the book, “many libertarians aligned themselves with the left-leaning Anti-Imperialist League.” Here, again, a definition of terms would have helped considerably. The Anti-Imperialist League—led by Mark Twain, E. L. Godkin, Andrew Carnegie, and a host of other notables—was, at least to this author, the single most anti-progressive (and, as such, anti-left) organization of its day.

Still, these quibbles—and they are mere quibbles—should not detract from this book. As I immersed myself in this fine book, I could not help but feel waves of nostalgia overcome me. Suddenly, I was back in the early 1990s, a two-time summer fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies, listening to the vital homilies of Walter Grinder and Leonard Liggio. Those were good summers, critical for my own growth as an academic and as a person. 

Reading The Individualists reminds me of many such good things.