2025 Theses Doctoral

American Libertarianism: A Philosophy, a Movement, a Sensibility, 1960-1995

McIntosh, Whitney

This dissertation traces the development of American libertarianism as a philosophy, movement, and sensibility in the late twentieth century. Modern libertarianism first emerged amid the 1960s rights revolutions and anti-Vietnam war activism, when libertarian student protesters opposed the state as a war-making apparatus. Libertarians fused together several intellectual schools of thought—including Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, F. A. Hayek’s Austrian School economics, and Murray Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism—into a unified philosophical tradition. This tradition holds individual liberty as its highest value and seeks to diminish the state by abolishing government intervention in the economy, ending interventionist foreign policy, and repealing laws about private conduct.

Combining methods from intellectual history and political history, this dissertation then examines how libertarians built movement organizations to cultivate, fortify, and disseminate their ideas. Over the course of the 1970s, libertarians quickly gained the financial backing of billionaires David and Charles Koch to establish movement organizations, such as the Libertarian Party, Reason magazine, and the Cato Institute. In the process, libertarians developed an intellectual culture characterized by uncompromising philosophical positions, yet a surprising ability to build bridges between anti-statists. Libertarians, moreover, forged a shared libertarian sensibility that transcended the movement’s ideological divisions—a sensibility defined by its individualism, contrarianism, dogmatism, but also a commitment to intellectual pluralism.

Scholars have primarily examined libertarians as key allies of conservatives and have investigated libertarians’ linkages with the far right. This dissertation, by contrast, understands libertarianism as a cross-cutting impulse in American life that defies left-right distinctions. Modern libertarianism, at its core, is most concerned with individual liberty over market liberty, which lends it appeal to a broad range of constituencies beyond the Right.

This dissertation demonstrates how libertarians have maneuvered across the political spectrum, working with liberals, leftists, conservatives, and far-right actors to augment individual liberties and dismantle the state in a variety of ways, from the creation of cryptocurrency to the privatization of the federal government. While the movement dispersed in the 1980s, libertarians took the sensibility that they had cultivated within the movement into many intellectual pursuits, policymaking endeavors, and activism. By tracing the diffusion of libertarian ideas, this dissertation explains how a libertarian sensibility has since flourished in American life.