Born on November 16, 1938 in Brooklyn, Robert Nozick began his intellectual life as a young socialist but ended it as one of the twentieth century’s fiercest defenders of property rights and limited government. Raised in a Jewish immigrant household, he joined Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party youth wing and helped organize the Student League for Industrial Democracy, yet his curiosity soon led him beyond doctrinaire leftism. While studying at Columbia and later Princeton, he encountered thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand, whose...

Albert Jay Nock’s life spanned the transformation of the United States from the laissez‑faire America of the late nineteenth century to the managerial state of the New Deal. Born on October 13, 1870 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Nock studied Greek and Latin in the classical curriculum at St. Stephen’s College. He was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1897, but church life proved too confining; within a few years he left the pulpit to write for American Magazine and to edit The Nation. In 1920 he and bookseller B. W. Huebsch launched The Freeman, a weekly that presented essays by radicals and...

Few twentieth‑century champions of laissez‑faire economics have cast a longer shadow than Leonard Edward Read. Born in Hubbardston, Michigan in 1898, Read founded the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and wrote nearly thirty books and hundreds of essays. He forged a link between nineteenth‑century classical liberals like Frédéric Bastiat and the modern libertarian movement. For Read, the cause of liberty was a moral calling as much as an economic doctrine; he believed that free markets required virtuous citizens and that the greatest work an individual can perform for society is to...