Leonard Liggio, a great libertarian scholar and institutional
activist, has died.
Liggio was quite literally one of the first mere handfuls of
youngsters that arose in the 1950s to advocate and spread modern
American libertarian ideas, as a leader in a pro-freedom group
called Students for America and as part of a small gang of young
radical libertarians led by Murray Rothbard called the Circle
Bastiat.
As part of his personal libertarian education, Liggio attended
Ludwig von Mises’s New York University seminars and was briefly
part of Ayn Rand’s circle. He worked for the only libertarian
funding institution of the 1950s, the Volker Fund. Volker served to
keep those ideas alive and its advocates eating during a period of
such fallowness in libertarian ideas that Volker had to go out and
find libertarian thinkers to support and fund, rather than
wait for people to come to them.
Liggio served during his over six decades of libertarian
scholarship and educational activism as president of the Mont
Pelerin Society, the Philadelphia Society, and the Institute for
Humane Studies, and more recently executive vice president of
academics at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. He played some
role in nearly every institution pushing libertarian ideas from
1950 to now; see his
resume.
Liggio allied with Murray Rothbard in a mid-sixties attempt at
finding common cause with the American left on peace and
anti-imperialism and anti-corporatism in the fascinating journal
Left and
Right. Because of his willingness to reach out and speak
to the left he became, I’m pretty sure, the only future president
of Mont Pelerin
to be condemned in
Barron’s (inaccurately, to be sure) for being part of
a dedicated conspiracy to “overthrow…our form of government by
Socialist seizure of state power.”
Personally, Liggio was one of the faculty at the first
libertarian conference I attended, an Institute for Humane Liberty
and Society seminar in the summer of 1988. He was the least
outwardly colorful and voluble of the faculty (which also included
George Smith, Randy Barnett, and Leonard’s old pal from Students
for America and Circle Bastiat days, historian Ralph Raico). But
his calm erudition helped even raw, green undergrads grasp and
value that there were layers and layers to this set of libertarian
ideas, that they were not just bracing wild radicalism (though they
were that, and all the better) but also deeply rooted in the
history and ideas of Western civilization, a truly humane, yes,
approach to the social order that promised not just liberty per se
but also peace and wealth. Liggio was also of immeasurable help as
I researched my 2007 history of the libertarian movement,
Radicals for Capitalism.
Liggio never wrote as much as his fans and students would
have wanted; would that all he knew had been laid out on the page!
When contemplating the rise of formerly obscure and derided
ideological notions to prominence, though, it’s worth remembering
that it takes a very special type of person to hack a path through
thickets of contempt and derision, launching institutions that
clear fresh space in the idological landscape, in contrast to the
(often certainly very skilled and admirable) types who can then
slot themselves into institutions and spaces that those pioneers
created.
Liggio was a pioneer, and while many may not remember his
name, what he did to cement and spread libertarianism will echo in
American and world history for a very long time to come. Liggio
had, as one admiring student of his once told me, a vast
thousand-year vision of the slow spread of liberalism across the
globe, one that allowed him to contemplate both past and present
with equanamity, neither despairing for liberty’s future nor being
unrealistically enthusiastic about its imminent victory. He was the
man I met and was impressed by in 1988: inspired and inspiring but
calm and steady in the promotion of these ideas, and the organizing
and aiding of students and intellectuals who wanted to understand
and promote them better.
Liggio writing about
his own intellectual history.
A
thorough interview he gave to Students for Liberty in 201o
discussing his role in studying and promoting libertarian
ideas.
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