The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.
Three weeks ago, I made a few very brief remarks on the importance of psychology for libertarians
and sketched the lives, careers and ideas of two particular intellectuals, the libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz
and the libertarian psychologist, Timothy Leary, both born in the year 1920.
Today, I'd like to add a few comments on a couple of later libertarian psychologists,
one born in the 1930s and another born in the 1940s.
The first of these two psychologists, Nathaniel Brandon, was born on April 9, 1930 in Brampton, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto.
Or so you might say today, though perhaps you'd say a place that's called home by around half a million people is too big to be considered a suburb.
But neither was it any kind of suburb back in 1930 when Nathaniel Brandon was born.
Back then you probably had to cross at least a little bit of country if you set out to travel the 20 or 25 miles that then separated Brampton from Toronto.
Brampton was a small town of not much more than 5,000 souls at the beginning of the first decade of the Great Depression.
It may have been half again as large as that, maybe 7,500 residents, when Nathaniel Brandon left the Toronto area behind to begin his undergraduate studies at UCLA a few years after the end of World War II.
In the years in between, when he was a high school student in Toronto, young Nathan Blumenthal, for so he was known at the time, had read a novel called The Fountainhead by a Russian-American novelist who signed herself Ayn Rand.
The book had a big impact on him.
Between the ages of 14 and 18, he wrote 40 years later during the 1980s when he was himself in his 50s,
I read and re-read The Fountainhead almost continuously with the dedication and passion of a student of the Talmud.
By the time he was 19, Brandon recalled in the 80s, anyone could read aloud any sentence in The Fountainhead
and I could recite the essence of the sentence immediately preceding as well as
the sentence immediately following. I had absorbed that book more completely than
anything else in my life. Little wonder then that shortly after he arrived in
Los Angeles in the late summer of 1949, he wrote a letter to Ayn Rand asking her
various questions about the philosophical implications of passages
in the Fountainhead and her earlier novel, We the Living.
Barbara Brandon, in her 1986 biography of Rand, reports that Nathan believed back then
that he had identified philosophical inconsistencies in Rand's work and wanted to get to the bottom
of them.
Somewhat to his amazement, Rand answered his letter, inviting him over for an evening of
and so began one of the most famous partnerships in the history of the libertarian tradition.
Over the next 18 years, Brandon read Atlas Shrugged in manuscript before it was published,
developed a 20-lecture course on the basic principles of objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy,
and offered that course for a decade under the auspices of the Nathaniel Brandon Institute, NBI,
Unquestionably, the largest and most important libertarian organization of the 1960s in terms of its impact on younger libertarians of the time and its influence on the subsequent development of the libertarian movement.
Once Brandon's relationship with Ayn Rand ended in 1968, he returned to Los Angeles where he established an extremely successful independent practice as a psychotherapist, did some lecturing and published a long series of books on topics in psychology.
His name is known today to millions who know nothing of his youthful association with Ayn Rand.
To these readers, Nathaniel Brandon is a psychologist, a principal figure, perhaps the principal figure in the self-esteem movement in contemporary humanistic psychology.
Of all the judgments we pass in life, Brandon wrote nearly 15 years ago in his book, The Art of Living Consciously, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.
Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness.
It is confidence in the efficacy of our mind, in our ability to think.
By extension, it is confidence in our ability to learn, make appropriate choices and decisions, and respond effectively to change.
It is also the experience that success, achievement, fulfillment, happiness are right and natural for us.
The survival value of such confidence is obvious, so is the danger when it is missing.
Back in 1969, in the first of his psychological books, The Psychology of Self-Esteem,
when he had first offered this idea as the key to any theory of human psychology
In a study capable of withstanding close scrutiny, Brandon had noted that the establishment of Wilhelm Wundt's experimental laboratory in 1879 is often regarded as the formal beginning of scientific psychology.
When one considers the views of man and the theories of his nature that have been put forth as knowledge in the past hundred years, it remains a moot question whether the starting date of the science of psychology lies behind us or ahead.
The relevance of Brandon's concept of self-esteem to libertarianism seems obvious enough.
If people lack the self-confidence he describes, they can hardly be expected to welcome the
idea of a free society, a society in which they would be, literally, on their own, responsible
for the consequences of their own decisions and actions.
But there's more to it than just that.
As far back as the late 1950s and early 1960s, Brandon was telling his students at NBI that,
if there is one infallible test of self-contempt, it is a person's willingness to live under force,
his willingness to accept as a moral principle that others have the right to dictate his
thoughts and his actions, his willingness to submit his mind and his life to the arbitrary
The man who submits to force when he has no choice is not immoral, provided he identifies his plight as evil, but the man who considers it moral, considers it right, that others should force him, deserves what he gets.
As Brandon saw it 50 years ago, living in society can contribute to the survival of an individual, but only to the extent that the members of that society are rational and productive.
Do you need? Is your survival enhanced by men who think? Yes.
Do you need? Is your survival enhanced by men who refuse to think? No. They have nothing of value to offer you.
by the same principle you have need of your survival is enhanced by men who produce men who have
objective values to offer you in exchange for the things you have produced but you certainly do not
need men who produce nothing you certainly do not need men who attack you and feed off you as
parasites offering you no value in exchange for that which they take is your survival enhanced
by Living Among Looters, Robbers, Criminals?
Clearly not.
You profit from dealing with producers.
You do not profit by dealing with men who instead deal with you by physical force or
fraud.
Men who produce nothing, who attack you and feed off you as parasites, offering you no
No Value in Exchange for That Which They Take, Who Deal with You by Physical Force or Fraud.
Sure sounds like the state to me, but Brandon did not have the state in mind when he formulated
these phrases.
He acknowledged in the first of the three lectures in the Basic Principles of Objectivism
course that concerned themselves with political economy, that throughout history, most governments
Governments have acted on principles diametrically opposed to their proper function and their
only moral justification, for instead of acting as men's defenders, governments have acted
as men's oppressors.
Yet, like Rand, whose ideas he was, after all, presenting, he insisted that though it
may sound ironic when one considers the extent to which most governments in history have
To many young libertarians of the time, this sounded not only ironic, but outright paradoxical.
In Brandon's defense, however, it must be acknowledged that very few libertarians of
of Our Sword in the 1960s were anarchists.
The most popular version of libertarianism back then was a very austere version of what
Sam Conkin later unforgettably dubbed, minarchism, and it was this version of libertarianism
that Nathaniel Brandon presented in his NBI lectures.
If there were unavoidable implications in certain of his statements about the willingness
to Live Under Force, what 400 years before the French writer Etienne de la Boitie had
called the Will to Bondage, well, so be it.
That was for his mostly youthful students to sort out for themselves.
After all, Nathaniel Brandon had never set out in the beginning to be any sort of political
philosopher.
He was interested in political philosophy and later used the word libertarian to describe
In a general sense, he told interviewer Brian Lamb on the Booknotes program on C-SPAN in
1989, 30 years after first delivering the lectures on political economy, from which
I've been quoting, I'm a libertarian.
If you mean by that an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, I'm not an anarchist, as some
Some libertarians are just an advocate of individual rights and a very minimalist view
of government.
Still, political philosophy had never been Brandon's idea of a career.
He had decided in high school that he wanted to be a psychologist.
He had earned a B.A. in psychology at UCLA, then had earned an M.A. in that same field
at New York University, all in the same years when he was reading Atlas Shrugged in manuscript.
He had begun practicing as a psychotherapist while still living in New York, lecturing
on objectivism and running NBI.
It had not been until the late 1960s, after what I suppose you might call his divorce
from Ayn Rand, that he had finished up his Ph.D. and begun devoting himself full-time
to psychology and psychotherapy, but it had been in the background the entire time.
So if Brandon's discussion of anarchism in his NBI lectures of the 1960s seems inadequate,
even laughably inadequate by today's standards, we should probably cut him a little slack.
He said of anarchism back in the early 60s, for example, that, strictly speaking, it is
not a political theory, but a rejection of political theory.
Some claims that men need no government, no political system, and that any man should
be free to do anything he pleases in relation to other men.
And this is certainly not what anarchists of our sort were claiming then, or around
a decade later, when in the form of books like Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty
and David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, it began to attain a somewhat wider circulation.
Plenty of his younger students ended up anarchists a few years down the road in any case.
One case in point is the libertarian social psychologist Sharon Presley.
Born in 1943 during Nathaniel Brandon's freshman year in high school, Presley grew up all over,
dividing her own high school years in the late 1950s and early 1960s between Central
High in Kansas City and Belmont High, less than a mile from Los Angeles, celebrated MacArthur Park.
She graduated from Belmont in 1961 and set off to study psychology in Berkeley.
A year later, in the summer of 1962, between her freshman and sophomore years at the University
of California, at the age of 19, believing herself to be totally apolitical, she discovered and read
Atlas Shrugged
to me.
On the whole, reading Atlas shrugged was a major, major influence on my life.
According to Clatch, Presley began attending objectivist lectures, NBI lectures, in San
Francisco and meeting other like-minded people.
But it wasn't long before some of those like-minded people had led her away from objectivism completely.
By 1967, Clatch notes, scarcely five years after her ecstatic discovery of Atlas Shrugged,
Sharon identified as an anarchist.
By this point, Presley was in graduate school at San Francisco State.
Five years later, in 1972, armed with a new M.A. in psychology, she set out for the East
Coast to find a Ph.D. program she felt was a good fit for her interests.
After a brief time in Washington D.C., she landed in New York City, where she embarked
on her doctoral studies under Stanley Milgram at the City University of New York, co-founded
laissez-faire books in her spare time, and began attending the libertarian conferences
and conventions that were beginning to be a familiar feature of the movement landscape
in those years.
In the nearly four decades since then, she has made impressive contributions to the libertarian
and Tradition in three distinct ways, first as an intellectual historian specializing
in individualist anarchism, second as an advocate and activist for libertarian feminism, and
finally as a social psychologist.
A good example of how Presley looks when she's wearing her intellectual historian hat is
Exquisite Rebel, the best of the currently available scholarly books on Volterine de
Declare, a good example of how she looks wearing her libertarian feminist hat is freely displayed
at the website of the Association of Libertarian Feminists, and a good example of how she looks
wearing her social psychologist hat is her recent book, published last year, Standing
Up to Experts and Authorities, How to Avoid Being Intimidated, Manipulated and Abused.
We live in a culture, Presley writes, that encourages deference to authority and discourages
critical and independent thinking.
We are motivated to be seen as competent, and we seek social approval.
At root, these are the reasons that people are so easily intimidated by experts, so deference
to authority, so unwilling to stand up and question.
He cites the sociologist Robert Bierstadt, however, crediting him with a distinction
that I think is useful.
Experts, he says, use persuasion.
He points out that expertise, skill and knowledge in a particular area is something we are free
to accept or not.
Authority, however, uses coercion.
Authorities are those who have power over us whether we agree to it or not.
For example, government bureaucrats or police officers.
It seems to me that the implicit, though unstated, premise of Presley's book is the same as the
one that implicitly underlies Brandon's books.
The premise that people who lack self-confidence, people who suffer from low self-esteem, aren't
likely to support efforts to achieve a free society, or even to understand why a free
Society is a desirable goal, and that the best solution to this problem of sheep-like
people is guidance and advice designed to persuade them that they would benefit by being
more self-assertive and engaging in more critical thinking about the claims of experts and authorities,
and to help them gain access to other resources they can use to become less sheep-like in
their thinking and behavior.
These are, by the way, my own words. Neither Presley nor Brandon ever refers to anyone
as sheep-like. Presley does, however, recommend Brandon's books. She calls him THE expert
on the psychology of self-esteem, who not only discusses why self-esteem is crucial
to healthy psychological functioning, but also gives practical steps on how to increase
Pressly sniffs disdainfully at the many superficial simplistic books of rah-rah affirmations of
dubious value.
Nathaniel Brandon, she maintains, does not write such books.
Neither does she.
Standing up to experts and authorities is partly a running description of pertinent research
on deference to authority, complete with informative notes that enable any reader to look up Pressly's
sources independently, and partly a compendium of sensible advice, more or less in the spirit
and tradition of the late Anne Landers, for people who are dismayed at how quickly and
easily they lie down and serve as doormats for authority figures, and are determined
to change.
By the way, some listeners might be interested to learn that the quotations I read earlier
Here from Nathaniel Brandon's lectures on Objectivism, the NBI lectures created in the
late 1950s and early 1960s, were taken from another recently published book, The Vision
of Ayn Rand, The Basic Principles of Objectivism, by Nathaniel Brandon, published by Cobden
Press, one of those worthy small publishers by whom the libertarian tradition has again
has been, and again, been well served during the past century and a quarter.
This first-ever print edition of Brandon's NBI Lectures, one of the most influential
works in the history of the modern libertarian movement, will be of immense value to anyone
interested in the history of libertarianism.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.
The Theory of Money and Credit