January 22 is a convenient reminder that modern American libertarianism did not begin only in seminar rooms, courtrooms, or party platforms. It also began on the book page, where a few writers treated state worship as an intellectual mistake rather than a civic duty. In 1943, three books appeared that, as one later institutional summary puts it, “changed American politics forever.” Those books were Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Together, they supplied a moral and analytic vocabulary that later...
















