Libertarianism – Part One – Enemies of the State

About this episode

Hello Origin Story listeners. This week we begin the long, strange tale of libertarianism and what it means to base your politics on individual freedom. To put it roughly, libertarians believe that the state is at best a necessary evil and individual sovereignty is king. These days libertarianism is largely associated with the political right but it wasn’t always like that. Starting with John Locke, the thinkers who inspired it included liberals, conservatives, anarchists and socialists. In this story, we meet French revolutionaries, British intellectuals, American abolitionists, free-trade liberals and utopian socialists, all with strong, unorthodox ideas about what the state should and should not do. Modern libertarianism begins in America after the First World War, with a loose network of malcontents later known as the Old Right. Horrified by the rise of big government in the Progressive Era and the New Deal, they want to get back to America’s first principles. In the 1940s, a slew of books from novelists and economists seed a movement committed to freedom through capitalism, forming new societies and think tanks in order to upend the status quo. You might think a fledgling cr