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.
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...
“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.”
First were the paleo-libertarians, led by Lew Rockwell and his Mises Institute.
Second were the academic libertarians centered around philosophers such as Loren Lomasky and Schmidtz.
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