Radicals for Capitalism

By Brian Doherty,

Book cover of Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement

Book description

On Wall Street, in the culture of high tech, in American government: Libertarianism-the simple but radical idea that the only purpose of government is to protect its citizens and their property against direct violence and threat-has become an extremely influential strain of thought. But while many books talk about libertarian…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Radicals for Capitalism as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is the indispensable book if you want to know what libertarianism is and where it came from. It is filled with more entertaining eccentrics than a Dickens novel. My book focuses on philosophical arguments for a minimal state, but I couldn’t get very deep into the historical background: who was making those arguments and what moved them to do it. One of the pleasures of intellectual history is encountering minds that are weird and surprising (not necessarily in a bad way), and Doherty offers a lot of them.

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