Rediscovering "Left & Right"

In my last post, I referred briefly to the journal Left and Right — subtitled “A Journal of Libertarian Thought” — launched in Spring 1965 by Murray Rothbard, Leonard Liggio, and George Resch. As Justin Raimondo explained in An Enemy of the State, his biography of Rothbard, Left and Right “never had a circulation of more than a few thousand, but its influence on a whole generation of libertarians was to effect an intellectual sea-change. Without funding, or promotion, Left and Right found its way to pockets of libertarian supporters on campuses across the nation. From Berkeley to the University of Kansas to the University of North Carolina, libertarian student organizations inspired by Rothbard’s call to reclaim their legacy as the ‘true’ Left sprang up overnight — and suddenly libertarians were being noticed.”

There’s no question that Left and Right had a tremendous influence on me and on the late Samuel Edward Konkin III, who crafted the Movement of the Libertarian Left to recapture the spirit of that journal. In its mere nine issues, Left and Right presented Rothbard’s manifesto, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” his “Liberty and the New Left,” Liggio’s “Isolationism, Old and New” and “Early Anti-Imperialism,” Harry Elmer Barnes’ “Pearl Harbor After a Quarter of a Century,” and brilliant editorials on everything from the Black Revolution, to SDS, to flag desecration (extremely pertinent right now), to the CIA, to the Ninth Amendment, and to the importance of Che Guevara.

There are few more valuable things libertarians can do today than visit those pieces and begin reforming their ideas about classical liberalism, statism, and American history. Lucky for us, all nine issues of Left and Right are available for FREE download as PDF files from the Ludwig von Mises Institute. You’ll find them right here.

-----
Technorati Tags: New Libertarian, Movement of the Libertarian Left, Libertarian