 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. George H. Smith was formerly Senior Research Fellow for the Institute for Humane Studies, a lecturer on American history for Cato summer seminars and executive editor of knowledge products. Smith's fourth book, The System of Liberty, was recently published by Cambridge University Press. He is also a contributor to Libertarianism.org. He writes our Excursions column, a weekly essay in Libertarian intellectual history, which has reached, I think, is it number 167 this week as we record? Yeah, it's around there. It's getting close to 170. And Excursions is also available as a podcast. George is also the co-editor of Individualism, a reader, the first in a series of readers published by Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. George, you've been active in Libertarian circles for quite some time and have become one of the great experts we have on the history of classical liberalism. So how did you get started in all this? Well, I first got interested in ideas, generally speaking, when I was a sophomore in high school. That would be around 1964, I guess. And I first started reading Freethought Literature. One of the first books I read was Thomas Paine's Age of Reason. I also read Robert Ingersoll. Now, that literature, although not hardcore Libertarian all the time, is largely classical liberal. You find these passionate defenses of religious freedom, whichever sense, I believe, has been the core issue in the history of Libertarian thought. And about two and a half years later, when I was a junior in high school, I happened to catch Iron Rand on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. And I'd never heard of her. I'd never read anything by her, but I was immediately taken with her. I just liked her upfront attitude. I know that a lot of people think she was over the top, but she was a tough lady. And you had to be tough back then to be a woman writer, free market in an age in the 50s when the Soviet Union was all the rage. So I admired her immediately, and I admired her because she was so candid and unapologetic. And I think a couple months after that, I was in a local bookstore in Tucson with a friend who happened to run across the verge of selfishness. And I thought, oh, that sounds like a book I'd like. So I purchased it and read it. And it got me interested in philosophy in general and certainly in Rand's ideas. And from then, you know, it's the old, too chilly thing. It usually begins with Iron Rand. I never had that sort of, how should I describe it, orthodox attitude. I did start a students of Objectivism Club at the University of Arizona, but it was more like a philosophy discussion club. Probably because of my background in free thought. I had no patience for that true believer mentality, if you know what I mean. A lot more of those types were around back then than probably around today. And so it was kind of a philosophy discussion group. But I read more widely than just Rand. I read Rothbard, Mises Hayek, and established on the University one of the first SIL, SIL chapters on any campus, as far as I know. And what does SIL stand for? The Society for Individual Liberty. It was a precursor to ISIL, not the terrorist Islamic group ISIL, but the International Society for Individual Liberty. And Jarrett Wilstein and Roy Chowds were the two people behind that. That got me into correspondence with Roy. Later I met him and so on and so on. And then you eventually, you professionalized it in some way. Was it Institute for Humane Studies your first professional association? Yeah, well, either that or Cato. I don't recall which. My problem was lack of academic credentials. I mean, I'm gloriously uncredentialed. I don't even have a high school diploma. And launching out basically an academic career without so much as a high school diploma is not something that most people would advise one to do. I wonder how many people without a high school diploma have published a book with Cambridge University Press? Yeah, that would be a really good trivia question, I agree. Well, when David Bowes of Cato, of course, first informed me that Cambridge had agreed to publish it, you could have pretty much knocked me over with a straw. I never imagined they would. I thought without credentials. I did talk to myself, I should say, in the interest of honesty. I did talk to myself in the University of Arizona without a high school diploma. That was an interesting story on its own, right? Because my grades were so good. I just quit high school because it was very boring. But I only lasted three years at the university. I just took all the courses. I crammed all the courses I wanted to take, philosophy and history. Then I was stuck with the unappetizing prospect of another year and a half of nothing but those required courses you're supposed to take early on. Back then, the computer systems, they didn't really exist. So you could get away with stuff, like signing up for, when a heavy load was 18 credits, I'd sign up for 22 or 24, cram in everything I wanted to take, then drop the required stuff. So I could only take courses that interested me. And once they no longer interested me, I thought, well, maybe it's time to head out to the big city. In this case, Los Angeles. And I don't know what I thought I was going to do out there. Maybe open up a philosophy shop or something. At some point around this time, you did write atheism a case against God fairly early. Yes, I was 22 when I started it and 24 when it finished. It took about a year and a half. That was a funny story. I don't want to get into a lot of anecdotes. But basically, I had met Roy. After a year of working in a warehouse in the early area, I thought, well, maybe finishing college isn't such a bad idea. So I gave notice back to my books. And meantime, Roy Child shows up in LA. And he and I became very good friends. We knew of each other from our correspondence. But he came just around about a couple of weeks when I was getting ready to leave, go back to Tucson, and he didn't want to lose his friend in conversation. So he kept asking me, well, what can I get you to stay in Los Angeles? And I, you know, I'm ready to go. I quit my job. There's nothing, really. One day he says, well, how about if I got you a contract to write a book on atheism? He knew of my interest in this subject. And my attitude. You have to understand this is within a week of when I'm scheduled to leave. I go, sure, Roy. I've got no credentials, nothing. And you've got five days to get me a contract. Sure, get me a contract to write a book and I'll stay in this area. Well, sure enough, he did that. He did it through the fact that it was a canary. But he had previously talked to Ed Nash at Nash Publishing and knew he wanted someone to write a book on that topic. So he kind of lassoed me into it. But literally within a week, Roy and I were in the offices of Nash Publishing on Sunset. They were in the same building, Nathaniel Brannon, at his offices. And I signed a contract. Wow. So if ever a book fell into someone's lap, you know, that was it. And then you, I mean, this has all been leading up to the pinnacle of your career, which is becoming a columnist for libertarians. Yeah, it's called the wig view of history. What's happened in the past leads up to the glorious achievements of freedom in the present. I have to say, though, that this experience with you guys, with L.org, has really been good for me because I thought I was going to die with all of this arcane knowledge that I had been, you know, accumulating, sort of like a hamster putting stuff in his cheeks. And I thought, well, you know, what good is this going to do anyone? Because I really, you know, I probably have averaged several hours of reading a day for 45 years and practically lived in research libraries like a UCLA. And, you know, you read a lot of stuff and I was very interested in it. And I thought, well, but this is, you know, I'm never going to be able to write about all this stuff. Well, L.org Excursion Series has given me a chance to, you know, get a lot of that out. And I actually very much appreciate that because I don't feel all that time was wasted now that I spent studying. Well, then let's turn to the book. Which is a product of that hamster cheek accumulation of knowledge or partially. Yes. So we, you and I talked quite a while ago about putting together this series of readers and ended up picking individualism as the first one. So why individualism to kick off this series? Well, first of all, I want to say that this series was your idea. It's not like Marilyn or my co-editor and I came to you. So you deserve credit. People should know that this was your baby and you came to us or came to me and then I wanted Marilyn as a co-editor. So you deserve credit for that. But I don't know. You asked me to draw up a list of possible books, as I recall. And I thought there was a lot of stuff on individualism that really needed to get out there. Because as I explained in the introduction to the book, there's just these terrible misrepresentations of individualism. I start off the introduction by commenting on a recent book by, what's it called? Clarell or something? He's a professor of sociology somewhere. The myth of the individualism. Right. And he starts off talking about extreme individualism being represented by the Unabomber. Kaczynski. And I just, you know, it's one of those things. You ever pick up a book and just want to tear it up immediately? I'm reading the first page. I just thought, you know, this is really gutsy in a bad way. I mean, this is just outrageous. Introducing students. It's intended as an introduction to sociology, that this is how bad individualism is. Because you're an individualist, you'll end up being a Unabomber in effect. So anyway, I just thought there was a lot of important stuff. So we came to the agreement that individualism should be the first reader. Because there is a lot of material in there that even longtime libertarians have never read. So what, in addition to the, I have gotten the Unabomber comparison too. But in addition to that really bad, really bad description of individualism, what are some of the more pernicious ones? In the introduction, you write, individualism originated as a term of appropriate, and it has retained its negative connotations to this day among both conservative and socialist intellectuals. In what way do they kind of describe individualism? Well, the interesting thing, which I also discussed in the introduction, is that the most common criticism. And what makes this interesting is it's voiced by both people on the right, such as Edmund Burke, and by people on the left, as most notably Karl Marx. This is something conservatives and socialists have in common. Both attack individualism for what they call social atomism, and it varies, the stereotype varies. But basically it means that individualism views people, sociologically speaking, as isolated atoms, sort of on their own Robinson Crusoe items, owning nothing to society. They don't realize that they couldn't have done anything without society. The language alone requires social cooperation. In other words, to make this as brief as I can, the stereotypical idea of individualism is somehow things that the individual is self-sufficient. And it's a parody, really. Because as you guys know, you're both very well read in this literature, the leading so-called individualists such as Adam Smith, the most notable example, sociability. And the importance of social relationships is paramount in all of these people. It's not just mentioned, it's a major theme. Herbert Spencer is another example. Now, if ever there was an extreme individualist, certainly Spencer was one. You know, he's a founding father of sociology for crying out loud. And many of his volumes deal with social relationships and the importance of social relationships. The difference, of course, is that these individualists believe primarily in voluntary social relationships, not in the coercive social relationships imposed by a government. That's the difference. It's not that this Robinson Caruso idea that somehow, you know, were self-sufficient. Economics grew as a discipline, primarily by individualistic thinkers like Smith and Ricardo and these people. Economics itself is built on the idea of the importance of voluntary social cooperation. So this is just one of those ridiculous myths. There are some others as well. Some are the kind of typical individualists, and sometimes Ein Rand will be cited here, are selfish. They don't care about other people. Whereas, of course, we all know that leftists and progressives, they really care about people. That it seems to be the primary claim to fame. They really care. Well, you know, it's interesting because it's in... I was just looking at it shortly before this interview. There's a brief excerpt in The Individualism Reader by Oscar Wilde from The Solo Man Under Socialism, and I should note that socialism didn't mean in the 19th century what it necessarily means today. Was it more of a Shavian type of thing? Sorry? More of a Shavian type of thing? Well, it just meant voluntary social cooperation. You find a lot of the pre-thinkers in the 19th century talking about socialism, but they were talking about Robert Owens of cooperative societies. These were not coercive societies. Benjamin Tucker, as you probably know, the great American anarchist, called himself a socialist, but he also explicitly wrote against what he called state socialism. Socialism back then, it didn't always mean this, but it often meant the benefits of social cooperation, as opposed to state coercion. So, you know, meanings change this way. But anyway, Oscar Wilde made, I think, a fascinating point, and it's a fairly short excerpt. He says, you know, talking about selfishness, individualists being accused of being selfish. He said, you know, it's not selfish to want to live your own life according to your own judgment and pursue happiness in your own way. What is truly selfish is to insist that other people should live their lives as you think they should to be happy. It's really a very interesting insight. He said, you know, selfishness demands uniformity. It demands that everything conform to itself. And the least selfish people are those people who just think people should be left alone to live their own lives. That's the ultimate tribute you can pay to other people. You know, if you want my advice, if you want my help, that's fine. But otherwise, you're free to do what you like. Yeah, there's a quote in the Wilde essay, which I starred a bunch. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. Exactly. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. Right. And that, you know, I've read a lot of this literature and I've read at some point Wilde's soul of manner to socialism. But when Marilyn and I were going out to pick out the best excerpts, you know, sometimes when you pay that much attention, lines, individual lines were striking. I said, boy, that's really good. And when I was, you know, preparing this anthology, that, in fact, Marilyn pointed out to me, she says, you know, this is a good insight by Wilde. And it is. And it's one of those nice, very well, of course, he was a great writer and that doesn't hurt. But it's a wonderful point. I want to ask about, I seem to ask this in every episode of Free Thought, something about motives. When people are criticizing individualism or when they're, I mean, specifically when they're misrepresenting it, as you've been describing, is this misrepresentation coming from a desire to undercut this idea that may be incompatible with their preferred social organizing principles or preferred, you know, scope of government power so it's, you know, individualism is something that's threatening to their preferred worldview so we need to make it out to look really bad or is it more that these notions of individualism, the kinds that the individualists are articulating, are so alien to the way that these people, Burke and Marx and other critics, think that it's just, it's almost like they can't quite understand it. Like they're making an effort to understand it but doing a very poor job of it. Well, I think it's probably a combination of both. One way I've disagreed with a lot of my academic colleagues who are libertarians over the years, I've backed up about some arguments about this. I don't necessarily, I think generally you should presume the honesty of the motives of your adversaries but I've run across too many, shall I call them lefties in my life, in person and in print that I just think they have malicious motives. I don't think really some of these people care that much, they misrepresent individualism. I think they're just convinced that they know the way. This is a sort of, you know, anybody who stands in my way is an enemy and they certainly don't bother to read, most of them I should say. Please understand, I understand there are exceptions to this. There are intelligent lefties, there are well-meaning lefties but I'm talking sort of about run-of-the-mill types. Clareau might be an example, I don't want to pick on him in particular but misrepresentations of individualism by the left are so egregious sometimes. Spencer, of course, I've written about this on the excursions on the all.org site. My conclusion there is that they just don't bother to read them. You get this textbook myth generated. I mean, let me give you an example. I often recommended this to students years ago when I was teaching for in-soup remain studies in Cato. I said, okay, suppose you want to assess a history of political thought book or you've got one for your college class and you need to read it. Go to the index, look under Spencer. Now usually these books will have something on Spencer. He was just too big of a figure for them to ignore entirely. Sometimes it will be very short, a few paragraphs compared to, say, J.S. Mill virtually an entire chapter, even though in many respects, Spencer was far more important than Mill was, far more widely read in his time. I said look under Spencer, then go to the text. And if in a few paragraphs, one of the dominant things you read is Spencer was a social Darwinist, blah, blah, blah. I said then you can be sure that this is not a reliable text because what's happening here, not that the writer is deliberately distorting Spencer's ideas, but he hasn't read Spencer. What he has read instead are the standard secondary accounts and he's merely regurgitating what somebody else was probably regurgitating going back to a number of writers back even to the late 19th century. Now fortunately that has changed, especially with Spencer. There have been some recent studies, some by libertarian types, that Roderick Long has written some important things. There's other writers who are coming out with Spencer's stuff that's starting to correct that distorted picture. But it's an important issue, Aaron, because, you know, when you're in college and if you're excited about ideas and you're thinking, well, who would be interesting to read in more detail? And you hear that someone named Herbert Spencer let the poor die off, who cares? Which is just totally ridiculous so far as attributing that to Spencer. You're not going to be interested in pursuing that writer or philosopher later in life. You're going to think, I'm not going to bother to read that jerk. And that's a very real and unfortunately harmful effect of this sort of what I call textbook stereotypes. And there are other writers, by the way, but Spencer is probably the best example. I had that exact experience with Spencer. I don't think I've ever had a bigger dichotomy between what I was told he was saying and then what I actually read from him. It was absolutely shocking to me. It's amazing. It's like 180 degrees in some cases. It's just amazing. So the book is divided into six sections, which you stayed in the introduction is imperfect, but I thought it would be interesting the way we get into that. The first one is individuality, moral individualism, political individualism, religious individualism, and economic individualism. How did you kind of think about those sections, generally speaking, as imperfect as they are? Well, I think I also mentioned some are pretty obvious. I think it's pretty easy to spot economic individualism. Some of the other categories are difficult. Moral individualism covers a wide range of topics. So to be honest with you, some of it was just sort of arbitrary. We were long on one section and sort on another, and I said, well, we can stick this one over there. That wasn't the rule, but it did happen occasionally. But the thing I like about the libertarian tradition and I've always liked is its interconnectedness, its interdisciplinary nature. So all of these things hook up at some point. And if I could digress just for a second since I know Adam Smith has often discussed on your podcast, there's a wonderful kind of passing suggestion, and I know for the life of me I can't remember exactly where it is, probably in the theory of moral sentiments, where Smith is talking about why people are attracted to a theoretical system to begin with. And I think he talks specifically about the system of natural liberty. And he suggested that a lot of people, and I assume here he probably meant younger people, are initially attracted to it because of its aesthetic qualities, because of the way it hangs together, because of how one part connects to the next, and nicely made watch. And that gets them interested. It's that kind of excitement like, wow, this is great, and over here you got this, and it all ties together. Well, I think that is true about libertarianism, and I think it's what attracted me to it, and I think that's what you'll find in this anthology, that although there is no grand sweeping overview showing how all this fits together, I think it's quite obvious to readers how one part links up to another. So, to go back to your original question, to some extent, the divisions are arbitrary. The most difficult is the idea of individuality as opposed to individualism. I discussed that in my introduction when I get into Jacob Burkhart, who talks about the rise of individualism in the Renaissance, and when he talks about individuality, he kind of means a sense that the unique qualities of the person are worth expressing. It doesn't necessarily entail political individualism or economic individualism. In fact, since Burkhart attributed the rise of individuality to the petty despotic states, petty despots in Renaissance Italy, it actually contradicts that. But you do have this, according to Burkhart, some historians that argues it goes back earlier, you have this conception of individuals as unique and worthwhile in themselves, not as parts of a group, not as what your status is, what your ranking is in the social order, but your unique characteristics are valued for their own sake. And that's more or less what has been meant by individuality. On the mill essay in particular, which I think I first remember reading, is some sort of excerpt when I was a teenager, and it seemed to me like a very big rumination on how important it is to be a nonconformist, which I really liked when I was a teenager, but there's a line where it says, no one's idea of excellence and conduct is that people should do absolutely nothing which is a great line. And that mill one is really about developing the self, correct? Yeah, and the thing of mill, and we also include the chapter from Von Humboldt, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Mill quoted him, and you'll see the similarity between the two ideas, because what both laws were stressed was it's not just enough to have freedom of action to develop individuality, you also have to have a variety of circumstances. And what that does, it links the political, the political freedom to the cultural. So the idea would be, suppose if you had freedom in a very rigidly orthodox society, say a deeply religious society where you're not punished in the sense of you're not put in jail or fined, but if you go out of the orthodox way at all, you'll be shunned. So it's, now, you know, I would argue, well, you know, that's the way it is. I mean, you know, some communities might be like that if that's what people want to live in, that's their business, that if you really want to develop individuality, you need a cultural variety of circumstances. You need what today would be called a pluralistic society. And that's what they were defending on the social side, on the cultural side. Not just political freedom, but an arena that is diverse enough that each person can exercise his or her own unique talents in that society. And then that led to the idea of increasing individuality. That is to say, once you become good as an actor or a writer or whatever, you then become highly specialized and then you can interact with other people and you'll both benefit, all those people will benefit from the skills and insides of other people. It's really a division of labor argument applied to individual characteristics. It sounds like hate Ashburn in about 1968. Everyone can let their freak flag fly and hang out together and trade ideas, right? Yeah, but I think probably it requires fairly intelligent people. Yeah, except for that other part too. I'm not sure. I don't want to knock hate Ashbury, but I'm not sure. Yeah, but the idea there being yes. Isn't this where like the say progressive or the Marxist or someone might jump in the non-free market folks and say, look, that's a great story and it's wonderful if you've got the resources to pursue your passions and live as this autonomous being developing into a special snowflake of your own but especially under this regime of freedom that you, George Smith, advocate, lots of people are going to be destitute and dirt poor and won't have this opportunity. So you've basically, you've given a nice philosophy for the lives of the independently wealthy, but what about the rest of us? Well, that I guess presupposes the economic argument that a free market will result in vast numbers of dirt poor people and obviously we don't agree with that. You have dirt poor people under governments. To a certain extent, I think you're always going to have poor people for whatever reason. There's no magic cure to that. I think Mises once said that poverty is really the natural condition of humankind. The remarkable thing, the thing we need to explain is not why some people remain poor but why so many are no longer poor. That's the progress. I don't think, I'm not a utopian. I don't think that a free society will ever reach the point where you won't have, certainly I have people that have misfortune but I don't think you're going to have masses of people that are desperately poor for economic reasons. So that's the premise of that argument. But let's suppose it was true. What's wrong with voluntary charity? You know, whenever people ask me about that, I remember I was arguing, what's not long ago was a free thought meeting I went to and some global warming fanatic and I'm sort of neutral on that. My skepticism is about the computer models that project all of these catastrophic consequences but let's leave that aside. But as soon as he found out I wasn't completely horrified by the prospect of global warming, he started, you know, well don't you think done or done. I said, well now you seem to think this is going to lead to a catastrophic consequence. It's like, what, in 20 years? Yeah, and I said, well then gee, you must donate what 90% of your income to this cause because if it's going to wipe out the human race, then surely. Well, it turns out, of course, he doesn't really donate any while I pay my taxes. Well, that's the kind of the hypocrisy in this. Anybody who has that, oh, what about the poor? I would wager that conservatives and libertarians probably do more, show more concern for the poor than many lefties do. I think that's actually been demonstrated in terms of charitable giving in a couple studies that conservatives and libertarians give more than people on the left. Right. It's very interestingly tied to individualism in and of itself because part of the interesting question of individualism might be how you extrapolate from the way you view yourself and what you think about your own life and your own inner desires and goals to what you think the rest of society might be like, for example. And if you think about people like Adam Smith and people like Herbert Spencer who did so much championing of individual beneficence and individual charity, and then you wonder whether or not those who think that individual charity on that basis is adequate or inadequate for helping out the poor, maybe they're just extrapolating that they don't feel very charitable themselves to a broader view of society. Right. I agree with that. And I have a hard time understanding the mentality of the do as I do types. I've never understood that. Ever since I was a kid I used to wonder why is it so important that other people snap into line with what you think they should do. I've met many libertarians like that. I have this sort of insufficient theory I was going to say another word but insufficient theory of the libertarian, you know that libertarian historian was he died sometime ago, James Martin, James Day Martin. He had a theory that libertarians are born and not made. And the idea was that certain people, I don't agree with this by the way, it may be true to a certain extent, that certain people are just born with this kind of libertarian sentiment. And most libertarians I talk to certainly can identify with that in their early lives. They didn't like to be told what to do without a reason. I was like that with my parents and they caught on very early if my mother said do this and I say why? I said I'm your mother that's why. I said just give me a reason. She'd give me a reason and I go oh okay. And I suspect a lot of libertarians will identify with that. I don't know what the early training or upbringing is or the status or control types. But it's a very different way of looking at the world. It's this sort of sometimes characterized as sort of utopian view. It's what Ryan would call altruism. I know what's best for you. I've studied this problem and I know what's best for you. So when I use force against you when I pass a lot of force you to do something it's really for your own good. Now I find that deeply offensive on a personal level. It's like this said about the apprenticeship laws. He called them impertinent that government's going to come in and tell the employer and the employed we know what's best for you is that these people can't make that decision for themselves. And he used the word impertinent which I've always remembered because that's something I think libertarians sometimes miss. They talk about the economic efficiency they may even talk about natural rights but the sheer impertence of some government bureaucrat coming up to somebody and say well I've made this decision you have to buy this insurance but with this you can't do that but rest assured it's all for your own good. That just, if anything just makes me angry on a deep level that's it. Like where do you get this presumption that you know anything of this sort and if you really are convinced that you know it then why not try to convince the person? You know it's like they're trying to persuade somebody to do something instead of putting a gun at their hand. Exactly and that would be the individualism element seeing yourself as a person who designs and creates and lives your own life which has I think led many people in the classical liberal tradition to be ahead of the curve in thinking about the individual for example in one of the essays you included in the book by Mary Wollstonecraft on feminist on female women's rights for I think that exact same reason. Yeah she criticizes sort of a condescending attitude that men had towards women. Wollstonecraft was an interesting writer. I personally find her letters actually more interesting in many ways in her published work. She wrote very quickly and but it's a fascinating story her whole relationship with William Godwin and you know all that. You know that's the other thing some of these characters and it's always like to try to understand something about the writer during the nearly seven years that I wrote I was an executive editor for Knowledge Products which produced these audio tapes a combination of narration with actors reading the voices of the original characters very well done in fact Cato University has remastered them but they put a new introduction on them and a number of them and one thing I did when I wrote most of the original series on great political thinkers and one thing I did was try to understand the mindset of the person I was trying to explain because a number of the people I wrote about I didn't like like Thomas Hobbs I wrote a two-tape tape set roughly 90 manuscript pages and I'd resolved that I would read over and over again Leviathan I'd always buy three copies of a book and then I'd go through one mark it up and I'd go through a clean copy to erase any preconceptions things like that these things I went through because I did want to represent honestly the point of view I didn't want to do a hatchet job on these guys and I almost got to the point or really did get to the point where I could sort of think like Hobbs was thinking I'd say okay now my next step in this argument would be if I were Hobbs and sure enough that would be his next step so it's that kind of internal way of thinking now with great thinkers you can do that usually because they're concerned with consistency with more mediocre thinkers and really low level thinkers like politicians you don't it's it's just Deuce is wild I mean who knows but what western crafts letters kind of you said so that show that maybe about her well she led a very tumultuous life and a very interesting life I mean she was over in France during the early stages of the French revolution she wrote these very dramatic letters home because she was very pro-French revolution as were the other English libertarians at the time and she was involved with that circle of people William Godwin Thomas Payne those sort of radical wigs that met fairly regularly at forget the publisher's name he published a lot of libertarian literature but they met in the upstairs had these meetings William Blake was a member of that group and he wrote that famous poem Mary which was about Mary Wollstonecraft but there was an interesting group of people who met regularly the same was true in France of the so-called salons. Taverns were a very popular meeting place especially in Scotland the Scots loved to meet in taverns and drink until four or five in the morning then they'd all go home and I think it's the same today actually I'm sorry go ahead I think it's the same today well coffee house also very big and you know I'm starting to digress and I swore I wouldn't do this but one reason it could be misleading when you're reading somebody think well who did he read or who did she read to get these ideas many times it was from conversations that aren't recorded because they spent much of their time in social groups and that so social groups had a lot to do on my judgment with the spread of libertarian ideas especially in the 17th and 18th centuries you know I was a king which king was a king what year well this is probably pre-revolution probably King James the first wrote actually wrote a tract against coffee and coffee houses oh yes it was James the first yeah yes oh good I got my monarch right but that's interesting it wasn't just because of the supposedly bad effects on health it was also because this is where these seditious radicals and the free thinkers and you know anarchists met and so we got to watch these these you know these seditious meeting places I one of these you talk about these stories and and then teeing off of the the Wollstonecraft stuff this is similar this is a story about women's rights to a large extent I found the you have a selection in there from a trial transcript right Moses Harmon yeah can you can you tell us about that I thought that was a story yeah Moses Harmon was the editor out of what was that small town in Kansas doesn't really matter he lived in a small town in Kansas published a periodic I used to have some copies of it called Lucifer the Light Bear and this was a radical free thought paper but it also advocated free love now free love didn't mean what many people might think it means today it meant that the government shouldn't be involved in any type of sexual relationships Lucifer the Light Bear if I recall my details accurately was the first to use can I mention the four letter word in print he hadn't what he called an open word policy meaning he wouldn't censor the the only the interesting thing about Harmon he was kind of a puritan himself he lived a very conservative lifestyle but he believed that if you're going to discuss issues you've got to have this open word policy he went to prison I don't know the exact number of times twice maybe three times the last time he was quite old he was breaking hard rocks in the mid winter one of his prosecutions what was called the Markham letter Markham was a physician and he wrote a letter to Lucifer the Light Bear which they published in which he complained that a patient of his a woman had recently given birth and I don't know if it was a c-section of what it was but it required stitches and her husband had forced sex upon her and reopened the stitches and she had bled badly and he argued that this should be considered rape it didn't matter if they were married this should be rape this is a very modern perspective and we're talking what 1870s well for publishing that letter just for publishing it Harmon was prosecuted for publishing obscenity he was the main target of the Comstock Act this Comstock character really odd bizarre sadistic type character this was you know against sending obscenity through the males I remember one incident from my Freethought History where some free thinker wrote out on a postcard a passage particularly the Scipius passage from the Old Testament and there's a number of them and announced that he would be sending this through the male and sure enough they arrested him saying this was obscene material even though it was from the Old Testament but anyway what happened was the daughter of of Moses Harmon it was Lillian Harmon and she had fell in love with another anarchist free thinker this was an anarchist periodical as well named Edwin C. Walker and they resolved to get married but they didn't want any involvement of the church or the state so they had a totally private you know free market ceremony and they got prosecuted both were thrown in jail I think the man he served a longer time of Walker but it was a significant period of time and what I what Marilyn I did in the book was to publish a transcript of the wedding ceremony and it's a wonderful ceremony and at one point where Harmon says about his daughter he says I will not give her away because she is a self owner and free to dispose of her own person I mean it's just wonder I mean I'm surprised somebody hasn't made like a movie or a miniseries out of this it's a one it's sort of a tragic story people were hurt with these imprisonments but it's just a fascinating story and this again is a gripe of I know Sharon Presley and other feminists that are prominent in the libertarian movement is this individualist strain and feminism has been largely ignored by what we might call mainstream feminists and it's some of the many of these women were involved in abolitionism they're better known the Grimke sisters for example they were also individualists but it's a shame it's almost like it's sort of well if you are kind of a radical individualist feminist then somehow you don't count you're not as important and yet you have people like Lillian Harmon and E.C. Walker going to prison because they want to keep the government all together out of sexual and romantic relationships see I mean they were on the cusp of a decision on the Supreme Court for gay marriage that would have been a lot easier to get through with the government had never been involved in marriage in the first place I remember when I had a conversation we were talking we couldn't find any reference while arguing that men and women should be free to marry on any terms they want there was no mention of gay marriage and I can only speculate it really wasn't much of an issue back then I have to believe that it was an issue they would have come out in favor of it but I don't know the history of the controversy of gay marriage very much but certainly I mean you know my position as a libertarian is not so much that all gays should be able to marry or whatever it's just get the government out of marriage make it a purely civil ceremony which is a pretty individualist concept it is yeah and I think that's the ultimate solution to that because you know you have this slippery slope back to see Bill Riley that guy argue this all the time well if you're gonna like gays married if you're gonna like gays married then what if somebody wants to marry you're gonna have polygamous marriages and what if only wants to marry an animal this this question is tying together this the Lillian Hellman Harman Harman yes Lillian Harman story with the current Supreme Court decision we're waiting on raises something I was thinking like the these essays in this book are for the most part quite old yes and and so these these issues how relevant is the stuff in this book today as the editor I'm just gonna say it's very relevant and people should buy copies but I mean there's there's obviously historical interest in this stuff you know it's it's of interest to people who are into the history of ideas but do these essays still speak to us today still speak to live issues well that's an important question I'm glad you asked it I think so and I think anything any good philosophy spans time I mean it may be context bound in the sense that it applies to an issue there's no longer relevant but the principles don't apply and I would say the same is true of good psychology many great philosophers and I don't particularly care much for their actual philosophical positions I think had very good psychological insights but the the point is I think I can't think of an exception of this I mean you can deal with the abolitionist movement might be an example and I think well slavery is no longer an issue but the point is the arguments that were used against slavery certainly are and I mean to expand on that just a second just you know I can't help but to read this stuff and think of my own experiences in libertarian movement when I when I see this sort of factional disputes that occur I've had arguments like that even though the one that's being written about was 150 years ago and the in the abolitionist movement you have these inter movement debates about how to go about ending slavery and you have three major schools you have the abolitionists mainly centered in New York you have the the moral suasion abolitionist that would be William Lord Garrison and Wendell Phillips mainly who I didn't believe in political action in other words they thought they're our primary argument and these people took oaths very seriously at that time the Constitution was a pro-slavery document and they said no conscientious abolitionists can possibly swear allegiance to a pro-slavery document and that's why Garrison said the U.S. Constitution is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell so these people absolutely repudiated political action and they argued moral suasion instead and then you have the third group which is a smaller group represented by Lysander Spooner and he actually advocated slavery votes he wrote a broadside that apparently influenced John Brown and used it as sort of a model for the rate of famous rate of the aborted rate on Harpers Ferry the idea was to go down gather arms and hence the armory of the Harpers Ferry was an armory and hopefully slaves would escape and come call us around you you would arm them then they would do kind of Spartacus sort of raids on slave plantations and then run off in the hills and build their army you know a guerrilla army well that didn't go anywhere in fact the Lysander Spooner types did you guys know that Spooner actually after Brown was captured and sent to be hanged that he actually hatched a plan to kidnap the Spooner of Virginia take him out in a boat and hold him ransom for the exchange of John Brown really wow this is a Louis Perry talks about it in his book radical abolitionism I used to have a film or they call it microfilm a film of Spooner's correspondence and he actually talks about it Garrett Smith was supposed to provide the money fortunately probably the plan went nowhere but these were you know we think of Lysander Spooner all great you know no treason these were serious people I mean I'm kind of glad that that plan wasn't attempted because it would have gone nowhere but that's one of those little interesting details of history you have a Spooner selection in the book which is one of my favorite Spooner's devices are not crimes oh yeah that's great that's great wonderful that was originally published as you probably know an anonymous chapter in a book by D.O. Lewis called prohibition of failure I think was the name of it and the identity of their author wasn't known until after Spooner died and Benjamin Tucker published an obituary of him in Liberty and mentioned that he had written this piece you know I did some research on who D.O. Lewis was and actually read through the entire book he was an interesting character he was an ardent temperance movement guy but in the early history the temperance movements both in England and in America the temperance wasn't the same as prohibition temperance was voluntary Herbert Spencer's uncle, Reverend Thomas Spencer was deeply involved in the temperance movement in England when I first saw that I thought well jeez please don't tell me that one of these crazy exceptions you know everybody should be three except to drink alcohol but it wasn't like that at all these temperance people many of them were vehemently opposed to prohibition so they had people come up and take temperance those I suppose it was an early version of alcoholic synonymous something like that but anyway I appeared in a book by this guy D.O. Lewis who had some kind of nutty I don't know if there were water cures or something but he was one of those interesting characters who was pushing temperance but not prohibition and I think that's probably the reason that Spooner agreed to write that chapter and let me tell you one other thing about that if you don't mind me speculating one thing that makes that that essay extremely interesting historically Spencer I'm sorry Spooner as you know came out of the abolitionist movement I don't figure in that movement now in that movement you have the people like especially the Garrisonians who were very religious and they condemned slavery primarily because it was a sin not because it violated rights they believed it violated rights but it was part of the movement to stamp out sin now as a result of that what happens after the Civil War after the slaves are freed what happens to these people a lot of them go into the temperance movement the abolitionist movement they start to call for we got to make alcohol illegal see they're very questionable libertarians from that point of view but what Spooner I think recognized was okay my fellow anti-slavery crusaders made a big mistake because the problem with slavery is not that it's a sin it's a violation of rights it's a crime and I'm pretty sure he wrote that piece with that in mind this fellow abolitionists did not distinguish between sins and crimes and there's a very curious thing I used to spend practically live in the UCLA research library I went through the minutes of the Liberty Party which in the 1840s was formed by the abolitionists it was a single plank party abolished slavery that was it okay at some convention this was probably decades ago probably late 1840s somebody said well we got to broaden our plank this is just too narrow we got to have more here so they agreed on a second plank and guess what the second plank is prohibition of spirits talk about weird that's one of those really disconnected what sense does that make well the connecting link was the fact that these guys viewed slavery as a sin and it was part of the crusade to stamp out sin now I'm not saying there weren't some good libertarians in the abolitionist movement there were Spooner being another example of others but that's one of those fascinating little glitches in intellectual history I remember I can almost remember the day this must have been 35 years ago I pulled out this thing and it was the minutes of the convention the Liberty Party convention I sat down and read through it for about 40 minutes and I got to that part about that other plank and I just went what I did that kind of double take if I'd been drinking water I would have spit it out but that's what makes these things interesting is that you know how were these people thinking anyway I'm sorry for the long speech on the Spooner I've always waited for a chance to tell my theory about vices are not crimes and now I finally had that chance of all the essays that you collected in this book which one's your favorite now man I have several one of them it'll sound weird because it's probably the most difficult to read is the William Walliston it's an excerpt from a book it's 1720s a very little known philosopher I wrote an article on him it was my first academic article in the journal Libertine Studies on him back in well god 76 or something Murray Rothbard's journal and he's fascinating he was very well known on his day his book was the best seller it's virtually unknown today even historians of philosophy don't know much about it but it excited a lot of interest but anyway it's I forget what we call the excerpt but it's a discussion of individuality being part of the human personality that's a very interesting tradition in the Libertarian tradition it also pops up in the 19th century with Thomas Hodgkin sometimes characterized as the extensional view of private property the basic idea here is in the justification of property rights it's not just the Lockean although there's some of this in Locke when he talks about mixing one's labor with the land it's the idea that private property is an extension of the self because you can't live in the real world without property and when you create something or when you trade for it or buy it that thing becomes part of you an extension of you in effect now I'm obviously over simplifying this but that's the general idea so it's not just like there's your stuff out there that people can take and it doesn't affect you what these people tried to do was make part property external property part of the individual an essential part of the good life for the individual that's very clear in the excerpt from Walliston and it's also also very clear in the excerpt from Thomas Hodgkin so those are two of my favorites as we mentioned at the beginning of this episode this reader individualism a reader is the first in a series from Libertarianism.org so what can our readers look for our readers of this book and readers of the site look for next the next reader will be called Critics of State Education a reader this will have the most almost all of this will be virtually unknown I did an article many years ago on the so-called Voluntaries in Britain and these were very principled opponents of state education I don't think there's a modern argument against state education that wasn't used by these English or British writers from roughly 1843 to about 1860 it's a fascinating movement almost never mentioned I discussed it somewhat in my Cambridge book System of Liberty but it's almost never mentioned and I wanted to go back because I spent probably a year writing that article and Xeroxed off these mountains of pages because UCLA had a pretty good representation of that literature it's very hard to find a lot of you can't even find on Google books I had to order stuff from England I knew what to order because I was already familiar with the literature but it involves names like Edward Baines Jr who was the editor of the Leeds Mercury the most influential provincial paper in England Edward Myle who was the editor of a paper called The Nonconformist in which Herbert Spencer wrote his first articles in his early 20s anyway this isn't that kind of compromising well you know we should have voucher and this was just no keep the state out of education all together and these people were also most of them were congregationalists they were also very active in providing free schools for children they were at the forefront of free education provided by charity so it's a fascinating story and it will include more than just writings from those people but the writings from those people are just virtually they've just forgotten it's almost as if they've never been written and believe me they are wonderful I mean I'm calling things like compulsory education characterizing it as child kidnapping and Baines saying things like and they reputed it any government aid to schools Baines once said that when the government offers help it's like the help of a policeman with a handcuff and the end of it that once you get into this system you won't be able to get out the state will grow more and more intrusive more powerful it will drive voluntary schools out of existence and you'll end up pretty much with the nightmare bureaucratic system we have today they were very clear about their predictions it's one of the best examples of social predictions that if you let the government get its foot in the door it's just going to expand and expand and expand it's a wonderful collection and like I said maybe Spencer that libertarians have read but I would say a good 90% of that book even hardcore libertarians will be totally new to them Marilyn and I are and I want to give a shout out to Marilyn Marmite Co editor because she undertakes a lot of the grunt work on this stuff and I probably would never get these out at all if it weren't for Marilyn so thank you Marilyn for your help but anyway I'm very excited personally about getting this out because it brings out this whole raft of literature that's just been something that you forgot thank you for listening if you have any questions you can find us on twitter at Free Thoughts Pod that's Free Thoughts P-O-D Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel to learn more find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org