If you’re an undergraduate or graduate student with interests in libertarianism, anarchism, and intellectual history, you might be interested in a Virtual Reading Group I’ll be running this Spring through Students for Liberty on “The Origins of Radical Libertarianism in America.”

Here’s the official description:

Many of the most important debates among contemporary libertarians are mirror images of debates originally held over one hundred year ago. Can a minimal state be justified on libertarian grounds, or is anarchism the only consistent libertarian position? Are natural rights the proper foundation for a moral theory? Do children have rights? Are intellectual property rights justifiable? What is the best strategy for making progress toward a free society? All of these questions were taken up by American libertarians in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in the pages of Benjamin Tucker’s periodical, Liberty. In this course, we will read a selection of these debates. Part of our goal in doing so will be historical in nature – to understand the origins of libertarian thought in America, its intellectual context, and its significance for later libertarian thought. But another part of our goal is purely philosophical – to see whether the arguments made by these early libertarians stand up to critical scrutiny, and whether the positions at which they ended up are ones with which we have good reason to agree.

We’ll be reading lots of fascinating, obscure, provocative stuff you’ve probably never heard of before from Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, Victor Yarros, Dyer Lum, Gertrude Kelly and more. We’ll meet electronically once every two weeks for an hour and a half or so, and talk about the ideas. No papers, no homework, no expensive textbooks. It’s libertarian education at it’s finest!

Apply today!