The title bar links to it.
It's wonderful to read a summary of everything I've been studying for the past ten years. He treats the major figures of Libertarianism fairly and honestly, dealing in depth with the ideas and personalities of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman and also covers Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, Leonard Read, F.A. (Baldy) Harper and a ton of other interesting characters.
When I'm done with this book it'll take a special place on my shelf with Charles Sprading's
Liberty and the Great Libertarians [see FEE's review
here] and Jim Powell's
The Triumph of Liberty, the books that show the growth and development of the ideals of individual freedom from ancient times to today. If I had Gibbon and Macauley and Rothbard's histories, they'd be up their too. (I read Macauley's History of England online, and people I respect push the others.)
Doherty may well be the best writer of the lot, though. He breaks up the heavy going philosophical and economic theory with an occasional, well-chosen anecdote.
Since Omni pushed me into it, I'll share a couple paragraphs from the book. The first describes the "prickliness" of libertarians, but isn't properly an anecdote. The second shows the principle in action (anecdotally).
P. 19:
Like obscenity, libertarianism is something I know when I see, and other libertarians feel the same way. Many a movement libertarian's favorite pastime is reading others out of the movement for various perceived ideological crimes. As Fred Smith, head of the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, says, "When two libertarians find themselves agreeing on something, each knows the other has sold out." Libertarians are a contentious lot, in many cases delighting in staking ground and refusing to move on the farthest frontiers of applying the principles of noncoercion and nonaggression; resolutely finding the most outrageous and obnoxious position you could take that is theoretically compatible with libertarianism and challenging anyone to disagree. If they are not of the movement, then you can enjoy having shocked them with your purism and dedication to principle; if they are of the movement, you can gleefully read them out of it. Libertarians (not all libertarians, certainly, and not even many) have advocated on libertarian principle private ownership of nuclear weapons; the right of parents to starve their children; and that, if you fell off a building and grabbed onto a flagpole and didn't have the explicit permission of the person who owned the balcony, you ought to let yourself fall rather than violate their property rights by crawling to safety.
Actually, I suppose those illustrative vignettes are almost anecdotes. I think that passage of the book is destined to become the most famous.
The anecdote I had in mind to illustrate the claim made above isn't nearly as funny as the passage, so, since I closed the book on it accidently and opened on a better anecdote, I'll give you that one (it doesn't illustrate that point):
P. 255:
The Circle Bastiat boys [Murray Rothbard, Leonard Liggio, Ralph Raico and a couple others in the 1950s] were also pranksters who liked to disrupt other people's realities for their own amusement and occasionally for moments of libertarian Zen wisdom. When talking to young socialists, they enjoyed turning some of the socialists' predictable rhetoric back on them, for example, soberly explaining that socialism might have been all right in the primitive conditions of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. But in today's complex, modern machine era, surely they could see that we must have laissez-faire--it's just the irresistable motion of history, the inevitable wave of the future, no point in fighting it.
And they had more of the right of it in saying that, as well.
Doherty puts this breezy facility with words to work (so you don't have to) in his explanations of Rand's epistemology and Austrian economics, and his portrayal of Friedman brought me to read him back into the movement. (See page 300.) I think Doherty's like me, he loves Libertarianism and libertarians (not to mention Liberty), and hates hate; knows that we can't "all just get along," but prefers to present forgivable humans rather than demons to destroy. The real demons are bad policies, not the people who come up with them.
