U$ Libertarianism and the Far Right

By Hank Kennedy

May 13, 2024

Much digital ink has been spilled since the hard-right Mises Caucus took over the Libertarian National Committee, the governing body of the United States’ third-largest political party. The Caucus removed the party’s longstanding support for abortion rights and opposition to bigotry from the platform. Mises Caucus leaders in State Parties have adopted anti-immigrant and anti-queer stances. Yet, this more open bigotry is not something recently injected into the libertarian bloodstream. It’s something that dates back to the time of the movement’s early days.

Rose Wilder Lane was the coauthor, with her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder, of the ever popular Little House on the Prairie books. Additionally, Lane is considered a “founding mother” of the American Libertarian movement, but she had unsavory associations with anti-Semitic, pro-fascist groups of the Right. Lane endorsed the publication Right, whose publisher, Willis Carto, went on to found and lead the virulently anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby. For seven years she wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council newsletter. The Council not only defended Francoist Spain but its founder Merwin K. Hart also adopted Holocaust denial. While Lane was writing book reviews for Hart, he was warning of the “the international Jewish group which controls our foreign policy.” Lane was not a bigot, but she was willing to work with bigots in a reverse Popular Front against Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Robert Leferve, another libertarian pioneer, too made alliances with pro-fascists and anti-Semites in the early days of the libertarian movement. Leferve set up Rampart College, an unaccredited libertarian school which published the Rampart Journal. Historian Harry Elmer Barnes contributed to the Rampart Journal and his colleague James J. Martin headed the history department. Both men were nothing less than the founding fathers of American Holocaust denial.

For the Journal Barnes wrote that “the atrocities of the Allies in the same period were more numerous as to victims and were carried out for the most part by methods more brutal and painful than alleged extermination in gas ovens.” In a different issue Barnes mocked the “almost adolescent gullibility and excitability on the part of Americans relative to German wartime crimes, real or alleged.” Barnes’ views were already apparent in his writings before he wrote for the Rampart Journal. In a 1964 article for the American Mercury, Barnes termed the Holocaust a “Zionist Fraud” concocted by “the swindlers of the crematoria, the Israeli politicians who derive billions of marks from nonexistent, mythical and imaginary cadavers…” Today the Barnes Review, named in his honor, is one of the leading journals for Holocaust denial.

Unlike Barnes, James J. Martin kept his disbelief in the Holocaust and sympathy for fascism mostly under wraps for a long period. Nevertheless, they were bedrock parts of his worldview. He wrote to his mentor, Barnes, to ask “When is someone going to debunk this story of the 6,000,000 Jews murdered in the concentration camps?” An interview with libertarian publication Reason quoted Martin as saying “I don’t believe that the evidence of a planned extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe is holding up.” In his 1977 book The Saga of Hog Island, Martin referred to the “fables emanating from Buchenwald.” In the same book he calls the well-documented Nazi destruction of the Czech town of Lidice “probably the Allies’ most publicized propaganda stunt of the war.”

1976 was the high point of libertarian acceptance of Holocaust denial under the guise of “historical revisionism,” as seen in Reason’s special revisionism issue. One of the contributors to the issue was Austin J. App, a pro-German nationalist, not a libertarian. App’s activism went back to World War II. His FBI file places him at a rally where the mass murder of American prisoners of war by the Waffen-SS was defended. Later, he served as a member of the advisory board of the Neo-Nazi National Youth Alliance and authored The Six Million Swindle and A Straight Look at the Third Reich: How Right How Wrong. App’s article for Reason, “The Sudeten-German Tragedy” said the infamous Munich Agreement which handed over a portion of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis “was not appeasement, but belated justice…”

Gary North, another contributor, recommended The Myth of the Six Million as having “presented a solid case against the Establishment’s favorite horror story…” i.e. the Holocaust. North went on to be a legislative researcher for libertarian darling Ron Paul and later supported the establishment of a Christian theocracy in the United States. Percy L. Greaves endorsed the conspiracy theory that President Roosevelt allowed the Pearl Harbor attacks to happen in the issue. In 1958, Greaves was an initial board member of Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby and he joined the notorious Holocaust denial outfit the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). Greaves’s obituary in Reason lauded him as “a long-time advocate of freedom.” For some reason, there was no mention of his membership in Neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic organizations.

Several libertarian readers of Reason were unhappy with the magazine for publishing deniers like Martin and App and those libertarians made their displeasure known in letters to the editor. Reader Kevin Bjornsson pointed out that Martin and App had written several articles for the anti-Semitic American Mercury (One of those articles, reprinted in The Saga of Hog Island, offered a defense of Mussolini’s rule) but Martin responded that Bjornsson was engaging in “guilt-by association.” Another letter from Dr. Adam V. Reed attacked North for promoting the denialist tracts, warning that “History is ignored, or distorted, at one’s own peril.” North responded “I shall continue to recommend that those interested in revisionist questions read The Myth of the Six Million and Did Six Million Really Die?” In both cases, Reason gave the deniers the last word.

Samuel Edward Konkin III was one letter writer who adored the “revisionism” issue. He wrote that the issue “kept [him] up all night reading from cover to cover.” Konklin, publisher of the New Libertarian, and founder of the libertarian school of thought known as agorism, went on to join the editorial board of the IHR. Here, he linked up with James J. Martin, who had come aboard the Institute in 1979 and stayed for the rest of his life. L.A. Rollins, also a regular Reason contributor made his way to the IHR editorial board to write articles like “The Holocaust as Sacred Cow.”

Since the publication of Reason’s revisionism issue, libertarians have reacted to the association between libertarianism and Holocaust denial in varying ways. In Brian Doherty’s court history of the movement Radicals for Capitalism he notes that “movement magazines like Reason would devote respectful issues to [historical revisionism] in the mid-1970s.” Doherty’s book also mentions in a footnote that James J. Martin “shifted into questioning the veracity of standard anti-German atrocity stories, including the standard details of the Holocaust.” Doherty’s 2004 obituary of Martin mentions his turn towards Holocaust denial as well, but he unconvincingly makes the case that Martin’s Holocaust denial was an unfortunate late career turn, not, as demonstrated, a foundational part of his worldview. Jeff Riggenbach’s obituary for Antiwar adopts a similar framing.

Other libertarian outlets don’t even acknowledge their early heroes’ embrace of denialism. The Mises Institute, whose leader stated weeks before the Unite the Right Rally that “blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people,” is one such outlet. The Institute (similar to but distinct from the Mises Caucus) hosts works by Barnes and Martin with no acknowledgment of their sympathy for fascism or denial of the Holocaust. Reason has adopted a stridently defensive tack when asked about their infamous “revisionism” issue. After Mark Ames wrote an investigative piece dredging the issue up again, Reason editor Nick Gillespie wrote a justification under the title “Did Reason Really Publish a “Holocaust Denial ‘Special Issue’” in 1976? Of Course Not.” Gillespie protests too much. It may be true that the issue was not solely dedicated to Holocaust denial, but many of the contributors were prominent Holocaust deniers and some did advocate Holocaust denial in the issue.

Since the Mises Caucus takeover, it has become increasingly clear that there is less and less daylight between modern self-styled radicals for capitalism and the American far-right. A gay leader in the Libertarian National Committee resigned due to leaders in Mises Caucus complaining that the party should be more focused on lowering tax rates than the murder of trans women. Anti-semitic dog-whistles have proliferated such as referring to intraparty opponents as “rootless cosmopolitans.” State affiliates have fled the organization due to the hard right turn, with the Pennsylvania branch setting up the Liberal Party, the Massachusetts and New Mexico branches disaffiliating, and the Virginia chapter voting to dissolve itself.

At the upcoming Libertarian National Convention, announced speakers include conspiracy theorist and independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former-President Donald Trump. This suggests a continued openness to the far-right within the Party and where the leadership sees their audience. It recalls the “paleolibertarian” strategy of libertarian eminence grise Murray Rothbard, who saw Klansman and Neo-Nazi David Duke as a model to reach out to “right-wing populists.”

As we approach the likely rematch between Biden and Trump, it’s probable that those “double haters” who have an unfavorable view of both candidates and are looking for an alternative will glance at the Libertarian Party. They should keep the movement’s distasteful history in mind when they do so. The Party has become just another flavor of the same reaction that propelled Trump to office in the first place.

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Libertarian Justice

Our New Law and Order Government proposes to have police appoint judges, calls for mandatory sentencing, three strike laws, and the whole raft of authoritarian solutions to 'crime' . What they have missed doing is to actually reform the real failure in our so called 'justice' system. That failure is the lack of a genuine jury system.

Like most judicial systems Canada's has little to do with real justice because it is all about state sanctioned law. It lacks the very basis of libertarian justice; the jury system.

Rarely are court cases in Canada heard by a jury. The prosecution can opt for a Judge in many cases of minor to serious crimes. And even in cases of very serious crimes, assualt, murder, etc. a jury is optional. It is NOT a given. It is an option. And thus it's power and relevance remains diminished in Canada, even more so than in the United States.

Yet for real justice to be done, the jury system is key to a libertarian approach to law. Ironic that those who laughingly call themselves libertarians like the Harpocrites quickly abandon any such pretext once they achieve state power. Then like Tories of old England they return to their reactionary artistocratic roots; law and order, God, Queen and Country.

They of course are really speaking of liberaltarianism, that species of false or vulgar libertarianism that is commonly called fiscal conservativism, neo-conservativism or neo-liberalism. When it comes to justice and morality they are not classical liberals nor libertarians but Burkean Reactionaries at best and fundamentalist Christians at worse. They fear anarchy and embrace law, order and good government.

The very beginings of Anarchism lay in the liberal utilitarian belief in self government and self reliance.It is about poltical justice. And as the author of that treatise William Godwin asserted it is about contractual relations between people. No contract is valid if it is not voluntary and freely entered into. This is the basis of anarchism and American libertarianism.

Punishment inevitably excites in the sufferer, and ought to excite, a sense of injustice. Let its purpose be, to convince me of the truth of a position which I at present believe to be false. It is not, abstractedly considered, of the nature of an argument, and therefore it cannot begin with producing conviction. Punishment is a comparatively specious name; but is in reality nothing more than force put upon one being by another who happens to be stronger. But strength apparently does not constitute justice. The case of punishment, in the view in which we now consider it, is the case of you and me differing in opinion, and your telling me that you must be right, since you have a more brawny arm, or have applied your mind more to the acquiring skill in your weapons than I have. OF THE RIGHT OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT

An excellent essay on Libertarianism and the Jury system; The Jury: Defender Or Oppressor outlines the ideals of American libertarians Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. See the excerpt below.

Key to Spooners idea of justice was the fact that no Constitution or law could be accepted except by the people, because it is the people who make the laws. And Spooner viewed the real Jury system as not one appointed by the State but made up by the people themselves.

Our constitutions purport to be established by 'the people,' and, in theory, 'all the people' consent to such government as the constitutions authorize. But this consent of 'the people' exists only in theory. It has no existence in fact. Government is in reality established by the few; and these few assume the consent of all the rest, without any such consent being actually given.

Interestingly this was similar to the position of the great Canadian liberal Papineau in his critique of the Act of Confederation. In light of todays controversy over what is the Canadian Nation State one should remember that the people of Canada never had any say in either Confederation or the repatriation of the Constitution. Just as we have no say in the courts.

In fact on those occasions when the people attempted to have a say in their own government, the Rebellion of 1837 and again with the Riel Rebellion, the Canadian Law and Order State of the day ruthlessly put down the rebellions. And in the case of Riel he was tried and found guilty by a Judge. A jury of his peers would have declared him a free man.

Why shouldn't every law be subject to review by the citizens? When authority springs from the people, why shouldn't it also return to them through a system of of citizen enforcement of the laws? Why shouldn't citizens have a practical, direct, effective way of defending their freedoms and property and that of their neighbors from any undue invasion of the state?

Juries by no means are a prerequisite to a libertarian judicial system, but they are practical and they can work. They've proven that. They have the added advantage of a wide-spread popularity among a broad base of people. It's only a matter of degree to take people from understanding better the concepts behind the jury's right to determine law and fact, to help them to understand other elements of libertarian philosophy. the jury can help bridge the enormous abyss between the current statist society and a future libertarian society. One of the advantages a properly organized jury offers, no matter when or where it exists is that it has its own built-in safeguards which protect it from the kinds of pressure and decay that have affected all government judicial systems. These internal mechanisms which make juries immune from this rot include: jury does not establish precedent because every case is different and must rest on its own merits

A jury's powers are limited

The requirement that all verdicts be unanimous protects minorities from the abuse of majorities

A jury does not need to be subservient to the legal community or to other minions of the state

A jury has no vested power interests to protect

A jury views justice from a layman's perspective

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Peter Drucker RIP

Peter F. Drucker the father of post modern management passed away Nov. 11. He was a student of Joseph Schumpeter and classmate with leftwing economist Karl Polanyi. And while they both came out of the ecomomic mileu of Vienna both of them rejected Von Mises and Hayek for different reasons. However in the end Drucker would end his life rejecting the very capitalist system he, like Polanyi, would attempt to ameliorate. Last weeks Business Week reported on Druckers passing and his disenchantment with capitalism;

The story of Peter Drucker is the story of management itself. It's the story of the rise of the modern corporation and the managers who organize work. Without his analysis it's almost impossible to imagine the rise of dispersed, globe-spanning corporations.

But it's also the story of Drucker's own rising disenchantment with capitalism in the late 20th century that seemed to reward greed as easily as it did performance. Drucker was sickened by the excessive riches awarded to mediocre executives even as they slashed the ranks of ordinary workers. And as he entered his 10th decade, there were some in corporations and academia who said his time had passed. Others said he grew sloppy with the facts. Meanwhile, new generations of management gurus and pundits, many of whom grew rich off books and speaking tours, superseded him. The doubt and disillusionment with business that Drucker expressed in his later years caused him to turn away from the corporation and instead offer his advice to the nonprofit sector. It seemed an acknowledgment that business and management had somehow failed him.
The Man Who Invented Management

Drucker and Polanyi as students of Schumpeter, and survivors of the economic and poltical changes occuring in the world after WWI saw the failure of Vulgar Marxism, the belief in the ultimate crisis in the capitalism business cycle would create a revolution, and its supercession not just by Keynesianism but by a new rebirth of Capitalism from the ashes of the Great Depression. Unlike the Vienna School of economists both Polanyi and Drucker shared a common concern that economics was NOT divorced from society.

However, when Polanyi argues that it is the advent of the economic logic that destroys the social fabric, and that the latter protects itself through, for instance, the social regulation of labor markets, environmental pollution, and financial speculation, he seems to be treating not only "the economic" as an autonomous extra-social logic, but also "the society" as an undifferentiated whole. When "the society" is pegged against "the economy," it becomes difficult to see how "society" may be divided between those who do and do not benefit from the rule of markets and how "the economy," including the institutions of market society, is always shaped by political struggles, animated by cultural codes, and most importantly, embedded in economic theory.Karl Polanyi: Freedom in a complex society

Gone was the Fordist production model of industrial capitalism with its Tayorist management theory of fitting the worker to the machine. The workers aspiration for revolution were dashed by the failure of the Bolshevik revolution to ignite a world revolution, with the reactionary counter-revolution of fascism, and with capitalisms rebirth through war, when it seemed doomed in the Great Depression.

Keynes, Schumpeter, and Drucker all viewed the world from the influence that the failed workers revolution of the 20th century had had on capitalism. Druckers conclusions and predictions were based on the aspirations of the worker as a human being in the corporation not as an institution but as a community. These were exactly what workers who created Workers Councils and practiced Worker Self Management, during the revolutions in Russia and Europe and later during the Spanish Civil war, were decrying capitalism for.

Drucker's model of management is the Self Management of the failed workers movement, in the same way that Keynes economics was influenced by the need for capitalism to meet the social demands of the working class, unemployment insurance, benefits, the sharing of the good life capitalism promised for all and not just the elite. Schumpeters view that capitalism must overcome its bourgoies nature, and become the capitalism of everyman sums up what this school of post-modern capitalism offered the post WWII world.


-- It was Drucker who introduced the idea of decentralization -- in the 1940s -- which became a bedrock principle for virtually every large organization in the world.

-- He was the first to assert -- in the 1950s -- that workers should be treated as assets, not as liabilities to be eliminated.

-- He originated the view of the corporation as a human community -- again, in the 1950s -- built on trust and respect for the worker and not just a profit-making machine, a perspective that won Drucker an almost godlike reverence among the Japanese.

-- He first made clear -- still the '50s -- that there is "no business without a customer," a simple notion that ushered in a new marketing mind-set.

-- He argued in the 1960s -- long before others -- for the importance of substance over style, for institutionalized practices over charismatic, cult leaders.

-- And it was Drucker again who wrote about the contribution of knowledge workers -- in the 1970s -- long before anyone knew or understood how knowledge would trump raw material as the essential capital of the New Economy.
The Man Who Invented Management

Drucker grasped the mundane fact that prosperity and democracy are the result of most people spending most of their time working for others. Somehow the crooked timber of mankind has to work as one. It has to organise and thus be managed.

After the second world war Drucker did something unprecedented: he examined a company, General Motors, as a social phenomenon. He saw it not as a Victorian sweatshop but as a living, breathing institution whose chief creative resource was its staff and customers. The resulting masterpiece, The Concept of the Corporation, appalled GM and its executives were banned from reading it. It sold millions, notably, the author noted wryly, in Japan.

Drucker was a radical conservative. A passionate capitalist, he realised that companies which behaved as mere assembly lines to enrich their owners soon fall victim to state control, as they had in fascist Germany. (He also noted that assembly lines moved no faster than their slowest operative.) Workers had in some sense to “own” their work or they would not innovate.

From this he evolved the concept of the “knowledge worker”. He invented, or first articulated, concepts such as decentralisation, privatisation, teamwork, globalisation, management by objective and corporate social responsibility. Companies must be part of American society, the American dream, he said, or good people would not work for them and bad people would capture them and need ever-tighter regulation. Drucker’s writings and preachings made corporate America respectable again after the Depression.

How my hero would have wept at Whitehall’s mad managers

The Engineer Edward Deming inspired by Druckers work developed his management model, another subversion of workers self management, TQM; Total Quality Management. Today we know it for just in time production, multi-tasking, worker empowerment, etc. all the language of the self managed workers movement now turned on its head and used against the workers to guarntee a profitable capitalist enterprize.

Drucker and Deming's ideas were not accepted by American corporations until they face two major economic crisises, the first after the Oil crisis of '74. And later after the economic melt down with black October on Wall Street in 1987.

I think that economics sticks to the behavior of commodities. Absolutely. Consider the Arab oil boycott; it was very easy to see in 1973, and I was one of the few who said it would fail, because unlike modern American economists I do know a good deal of history. And modern American economists are incredibly ignorant of history— unbelievably—especially of economic history. But cartels have never lasted ten years; the only cartels that last are cartels that systematically cut their price, and OPEC made no signs of doing so, yet it isn't going to last. All 'a cartel does is signal the end of the dominance of its industry. That's it. And people will, when petroleum becomes expensive, find ways of doing with less. People will switch to different cars. In that sense I'm very much an economist. I believe in rational behavior, economically rational, in economics, but I do not believe that it is the dominant rational behavior, it is dominant in certain situations which people see as economic situations. But look, if you take the theme petroleum and then go back to the Depression, gasoline consumption didn't go down at all because people in this country discovered that wheels are more important than food. Freedom is more important than food. Now that is not an economic fact.

And so, long ago, I saw economics as an extremely important way of looking at things. But I don't accept the idea that it is a science, that it is mathematical, that it is rigorous, and that it is autonomous. In American economics today, there is no basic economic theory—no theory of price, no theory of value, no theory of change, no theory of the correlation of technology and economics, no theory of work—all the basic problems of economics are excluded because they are not capable of being quantified. That's much earlier, that's 1920. Economics is the last discipline in which logical positivism [the doctrine that the only truths are those affirmed by the methods of natural science] still holds sway, and that's why you can predict with certainty that this is the last generation of modern economics. Because in everything else, logical positivism is gone. And you know I was born into it. Logical positivism is the result of the marriage of America and Vienna. A Conversation with Peter F. Drucker

Their work was accepted by the post War economies of Japan and Germany. With Schumpeters observation of the Creative /Destructive nature of post modern capitalism came the rebirth of these two countries as economic competitors with America. And they did by adapting their unique forms of state capitalism to fit Druckers and Demings management structures. In the case of Japan it was the hierarchical creation of MITI, the joint state, business, banking corporation, which determined production for years in the future. In Japan it also took the destruction of the unions to be able to introduce Demings TQM models of production, where the workers once again was loyal to the company. The old paternalistic capitalism was writ large across the face of Japan.

In Germany it was the model of tripartism that succeeded, where state capitalism functioned through Works Councils, which meant the unions, corporations and the state shared in the risks and wealth of the growth of the German economy. This meant workers on the Boards of corporations, and a national strategy for growth much like Japan.

Schumpeter, Drucker and Demings were the new models of post modern management of capitalism, models of comptetive state capitalisms that gave America a run for its money. America still a nation of corporations and institutions in competition with each other did not accept the Drucker model of management nor Demings until the economic crisis of the late 1980's and eraly 1990's.

It was used to smash unions, roll back wages and benefits, outsource work, privatize the public sphere, and to get more work out of workers for less. It was the Wal-Mart greeter as happy worker in the corporation as community. No wonder in his last years Drucker turned his back on corporate America who had so abused his ideas.

CR: Do you think that your writings on management lend themselves to misuse?
PD: Most people, most laymen, when they hear management hear business management, but that is their mishearing. And from the beginning, even though my first books dealt with business simply because it was the only experimental area available, my public has been, especially in this country, at least as much nonbusiness as business. And you have a very peculiar situation because in this country by merely, believe me, pure historical accident: The study of organizations is located in the business school largely because the political scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century focused on constitutionalism and thus failed to see the emergence of the civil service and of government as an institution.

Concern with the working of government came out with the New Deal. Actually, Herbert Hoover was the first one with an interest in it, but no one picked it up until the New Deal. Very late. And then it was organized as a separate discipline and called "public administration," which is probably one of the most boring things we ever created; it deals only with procedures.

And so we had no focus where one could look at the new reality of an institution after this. Even now your liberal arts tradition considers organizations to be abnormal. Here is Ken Galbraith, who writes a book which argues that there exists two institutions: first the government and then business. It never occurred to Ken that Harvard University is a very powerful institution. I once said to Ken, an old friend, at dinner, "Your last book is a tour de force but, you know, from a Harvard professor, no mention of the university as an institution is a little funny." And he looked at me and said, "My God, I never thought of that." And he doesn't know that the labor union and the hospital are institutions. A Conversation with Peter F. Drucker

And this is the very failure of the American Ruling Class, both its poltical and economic arms, remain divided, as does its ideolgy as reflected in the Free Market Liberaltarians on one hand and the Republican War Party on the other. That failure is why in Canada an American style neo-con movement has failed, because our civil society is made up of insitutions, organization, and the 'individulaist' ideology of American liberaltarianism is out of touch with the rest of the world. It is a throw back as Drucker correctly points out to the 19th century. There are no new ideas coming out of the neo-cons despite the 'neo' in their name.

Drucker on the other hand understood that modern capitalism had become dominant, that it is reflected in all aspects of society, not just the board rooms. In fact his work in the NGO and non-profit sector showed that this was no longer the volunteer sector but a growing area of new capitalist organization.

His insights, like Polanyi's, into the function of capitalism as social organization while neither Marxist nor Anarchist benefits both in adding to a radical understanding of capitalism being the dominant social realtionship of society. As much as Foucault has with the issue of governability. And while Foucault is more popular with the Left, a little Drucker could go a long way to understanding how capitalist organization dominates all social institutions including unions, academia, meals on wheels, etc. Those who fail to see capitalism as a social relation, and only as an economic system will continue to miss this point.

"Economic liberalism was the organising principle of a society engaged in creating a market system. Born as a mere penchant for non-bureaucratic methods, it evolved into a veritable faith in man's secular salvation through a self-regulating market.... Only by the 1820s did [economic liberalism] stand for the three classical tenets: that labour should find its price on the market; that the creation of money should be subject to an automatic mechanism; that goods should be free to flow from country to country without hindrance or preference."

"There was nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course. ... Laissez-faire itself was enforced by the state. The [1830s and 1840s] saw not only an outburst of legislation repealing restrictive regulations, but also an enormous increase in the administrational bureaucracy able to fulfil the tasks set by the adherents of liberalism. ... Laissez-faire was not a method to achieve a thing, it was the thing to be achieved."

"This paradox [of the need for a strong central executive under laissez-faire] was topped by another. While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate state action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way. Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not."

Karl Polanyi

Libertarian Anti-Imperialism

William Appleman Williams

I had come across Joseph Stromberg’s libertarian analysis of Anti-Imperialist American Historian William Appleman Williams, some time ago on the web and had the opportunity to cruise Stromberg’s column at antiwar.com again and thought it important enough to share.

I had not heard of Williams before, and appreciated Stromberg’s introduction to this overlooked American revisionist historian.

I came to appreciate why his socialist critique of American Empire and foreign policy would influence Americans of both the Libertarian Left and the Right. "Radicals have hailed him as a supreme anti-imperialist, while Libertarian conservatives have seen him as the ``second Charles Beard,'' renewing the perspectives of the nation's foremost historian.” says Paul Buhle.

Williams fell out of favour in the eighties and nineties as the neo-liberal ideology steamrolled over its opponents on the left after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Williams however is has not been left as an obscure footnote in history. His work is now considered essential in understanding American Imperialism in the age of Globalization.

With Stromberg’s appreciation of Williams, written in 1999 at the height of Clintons Popular Front War against Serbia, we see libertarian dialectical analysis unafraid to confront a marxian dialectic and appreciate it. Williams insight into American Imperialism became even more relevant as America pursued its new preemptive strike policy post 9/11 against the neo-cons old straw dog Iraq.

An essential aspect of Libertarian Dialectics is the praxis of revisionist history. In this we need no conspiracy theories to understand that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, and that theirs is a history of the winners and losers. Our revisionism arises from understanding this dialectic we look at history from below, not from the losers, but the actual historical actors who have created the social change in the first place, the people themselves, as individuals and as social beings.

Stromberg is not your papa's libertarianism. It is not Republicanism Right, nor is it "vulgar libertarianism" or "liberaltarianism". If Kevin Carson is a Free Market Anti-Capitalist then Stromberg is a Libertarian Anti-Imperialist.

Stromberg is a consistent and outspoken opponent of Imperialism and War from a Libertarian perspective. And he has been so when such opposition on the right was tantamount to treason, which it has been in every case of American intervention abroad regardless of the popular opposition to it. Even now as half the American population opposes the Iraq war the Right continues to wave the flag of patriotism (the last refuge of a scoundrel as Bernard Shaw said) for their boys, and girls, over there. Why they are there is less important than supporting them once they are there, says the patriot regardless of whether they belong to the Democrats or Republicans. Stromberg consistently has asked why they are there and his answer is a consistent Anti-Imperialism in the tradition of Mark Twain.

Carson and Stromberg are amongst the few and the brave, who use Libertarian Dialectics, to confront the right wing liberaltarians and those who would reduce revisionist history to being a caricature of itself; conspiracy theory. Revisionist history is not a creature of the right but of the left, its essence is historical materialism, unable to accept this basic fact, the right insists on reducing every act to those of conspiracies amongst the rulers over the ruled.

So I am pleased to offer this introduction to Williams by Stromberg and a link to the rest of the article on Williams here on my blog. As well as readers will know from my web writings I have included other references to Williams as well as examples of his writings available on the web.


William Appleman Williams:
Premier New Left Revisionist

A PROGRESSIVE HISTORIAN

by
Joseph R.
Stromberg

Last week in a discussion of Charles Austin Beard, "isolationist" Progressive historian, I mentioned Beard's influence on a number of younger scholars, among them William Appleman Williams and Murray N. Rothbard. Williams emerged in the late 1950s as the spearhead of New Left diplomatic history and has had an enduring influence on the writing of American history. "Mainstream" scholars take his insights into account but acknowledge his impact only in the most backhanded way possible. It is probably among libertarians and anti-imperialist conservatives that Williams now finds his true following.

A LIFE IN HISTORY

William Appleman Williams (1921-1990) was born in Iowa in and attended the U.S. Naval Academy. He served in the Pacific in World War II. As influences on his thought, I should mention Beard, John Adams, James Madison, Walter Prescott Webb (whose writings on the frontier – ending with The Great Frontier – treated a theme which Williams made his own), and – in a generic sort of way – Karl Marx. One doubts, however, that Williams was ever really a "Marxist," despite the Cold War liberals' joy in awarding him that title.

After the war, he took a PhD in History at the University of Wisconsin, which was still something of a bastion of the old-style Progressive history. His first book, American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947 [1952] had a small impact and led Mr. Vital Center himself – Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a founder of Cold War liberalism – to attack Williams as a "pro-Communist scholar."¹ In 1957, Williams returned to teach at Wisconsin, where he and his graduate students became known as the "Wisconsin school" of diplomatic history. Late in life, he taught at Oregon State University and served as President of the Organization of American Historians. Even in the turbulent "sixties," he was critical of New Left excesses. He would have hated the present university climate of political correctness.

A BODY OF WORK

His Tragedy of American Diplomacy [1959; 1972] was noticed by the scholarly community, although the Cold War liberals, of course, hated it. The House Un-American Activities Committee noticed his work and wasted his time with summonses which were suddenly revoked after he had spent money and time traveling to hearings. This petty harassment was continued for a while by another government agency I need not mention.

As the quagmire in Vietnam raised fundamental questions about the policies pursued – with mere differences of nuance – by Cold War liberals and conservatives, Williams began to find an audience for his ideas. Book followed book. Here I shall only mention the very important Contours of American History [1961, 1973], the two-volumes of readings in American diplomatic history (The Shaping of American Diplomacy [1966, 1967]), America Confronts a Revolutionary World [1976] and Empire as a Way of Life [1980].

Joseph R. Stromberg has been writing for libertarian publications since 1973, including The Individualist, Reason, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Libertarian Review, and the Agorist Quarterly, and is completing a set of essays on America's wars. He is a part-time lecturer in History at the college level. You can read his recent essay, "The Cold War," on the Ludwig von Mises Institute Website. His column, "The Old Cause," appears each Tuesday onAntiwar.com

William Appleman Williams Learning From History
American Radicals , American Radicals series

Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin

``I prefer to die as a free man struggling to create a human community than as a pawn of empire,'' wrote historian William Appleman Williams in 1976.

Annapolis graduate and World War II Naval officer, civil rights activist and President of the Organization of American Historians, Williams (1921-1990) is remembered as the pre-eminent historian and critic of Empire in the second half of this century. More than any other scholar, he anticipated, encouraged and explained the attack of conscience suffered by the nation during the Vietnam War. Radicals have hailed him as a supreme anti-imperialist, while Libertarian conservatives have seen him as the ``second Charles Beard,'' renewing the perspectives of the nation's foremost historian. Fellow historians consider him a great figure in American thought at large, one who looked for large patterns and asked the right questions.

Counterpunch also has an excellent article on Williams’s relevancy today in light of the new age of American Imperialism:

The Relevance of William Appleman Williams

History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy

"William Appleman Williams suggested that in spite of its best intentions American foreign policy was based largely on a one-dimensional American belief that Americans and American democracy had all the answers. The sad truth is that that belief might not be far wrong, but the inflexibility of the administrators in charge of its application has contributed to a century of failure in foreign relations.

According to Williams, American diplomacy was based on three premises, which, for all intents and purposes, have not changed and maintain a contemporary validity and relevance. The first is the humanitarian impulse to help other people solve their problems. The second principle encourages self-determination, which insists that every society have the right to establish its own goals or objectives, and to realize them internally through the means it decides are appropriate. Third-and here's the kicker-American diplomacy has typically insisted that other people cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless they follow the American formula. The contradiction evident in this third premise effectively nullifies the genuine best interests of the first two, but it also speaks volumes about the global perception of American arrogance."

American Marxism: Theory without Tradition
by John B. Judis , Washington editor of In These Times and has recently completed a biography of William F. Buckley.

The Choice Before Us by William Appleman Williams
The American Socialist, July 1957

Preface: History as a Way of Learning
Excerpted from The Contours of American History
by William Appleman Williams (1966) pp. 17-23.

Martin Luther King and the New American Frontier
By William Appleman Williams and Lewis Kreinberg
for Renewal Magazine. Originally Published April 5, 1968.

William Appleman Williams and the Myth of Economic Determinism
Steven Hurst
Manchester Metropolitan University
Paper prepared for the APG Conference, Reading, January 3-5 2003

Kindleberger on Bretton Woods
Redefining the Past: Essays in Honor of William Appleman Williams