What is a libertarian? For the political scientist Sébastien Caré, it is “to hold together, in a coherent system, the defense of individual freedoms, that of economic freedoms and the fight against imperialism”. Motivated by a distrust of institutions, the movement is part of thinkers like Thoreau and Liberals who, from the years 1910 to 1950, sought an alternative to a conservative, puritanis and carried on military intervention. Libertarianism only officially emerged in the 1960s.
The Trump II administration is closest to the libertarian thought that the United States has known: cuts in all public spending, withdrawal from multilateral speakers, an announced deregulation of the economy. It also gives body to the worst feminists’ fears: allegiance of white billionaires to a partial president vis-à-vis authoritarian regimes, freezing of all the interventions in support of the cause of women, “male energy” called its wishes by Mark Zuckerberg, open doors to the Misogyne Influencer Andrew Tate in the Maga. That this libertarian trend has associated with conservatism for white men is a reversal rather than a parentage. Indeed, ideology was born from a libertarian and progressive impulse, nourished by influential women who saw it as a path of salutary emancipation. Here are four.
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912)
In an America where slavery is abolished, but where women are not equal to men, Voltairine de Cleyre struggles, alongside anarchists and defenders of free love, for the right to dispose of his body, and against another slavery: that, sexual, of the matrimonial home. She defends black on white the private property and the personal enrichment of women: capitalism is salvation in the face of the Church and the State, whose standards harm women. “The domination of the Spirit by the Church and the domination of the body by the State are the two causes of sexual slavery,” she writes, a feminist before the letter.
The following three are described as “founding mothers” of libertarianism, to use the words of the historian Jim Powell.
Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968)
She is none other than the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, creator of The little house in the meadow. His thinking is cemented in hostility towards New Deal, Roosevelt’s revival policy to remedy the great depression in the 1930s. For Wilder Lane, the remedy for the crisis could well be worse than evil, by giving the public power an too important place in the lives of citizens. In Give Me Liberty, An essay published in 1936,, It castigates those who are “blind to America and adoring Europe” marked by totalitarianisms. She is also the author of a novel committed to the condition of women at the beginning of the century, Diverging Roads, Recounting the trajectories of two friends: one got married in his native village, the other embraces a travel life. She herself divorced (daring for the time), it is the second path she took, refusing to remarry to preserve her creative autonomy.
Isabel Paterson (1886-1961)
Self made womanself -taught and from a poor family, Isabel Paterson becomes a renowned literary criticism at the new York Herald Tribune. His test The God of the Machine has become a classic for libertarians, since it denounces it that a too powerful state kills in the egg the creative energy of individuals necessary for the progress of civilization. For her, “there is no common good”, and American commitment in wars is the logical and disastrous extension of the State intervention in the economy. She criticizes the “humanists”, who find in the distress of others an opportunity to do good, “putting herself in the place of God”.
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
If she has never had tender words for libertarians, Ayn Rand has nevertheless been a decisive source of inspiration and remains for them a tutelary and intimidating figure. Refugee of USSR, Rand pleads for a refocused, anti -racist, and deeply individualistic state. The libertarian avant-garde passed through his show, like the intellectual Robert Nozick, by Murray Rothbard, at the origin of the Libertarian Party or the economist Alan Greenspan, who were his students. The libertarians’ referencing economist, Milton Friedman, admired him. The Republican Senator Rand Paul is named in his tribute, etc.
Hike gives body to the American dream in his novels-flies The lively source (1943) and The strike (1957) with figures of heroic entrepreneurs alone against all. Of men … and women. In his novels, they are captains of industry or feared editorialists, and lead men to the baguette. If Rand has never proclaimed feminist, it was despite itself. Athée, pro abortion (which made her criticize Reagan greenly), rejecting any superstition or “tribal thought”, she has always been far from the American conservative right. Finding a virtue of rational selfishness, it warns women against sacrificial love, and altruism that pious societies traditionally expect from them. “To say I love you, you must first know how to say I“.
Libertarianism, with which the American conservative figures are associated in power, has moved away from the moral code which forged it: a progressive thought and a rampart individualism with authoritarian drifts. Once is not custom, the story has filtered the ideas … and did not retain those that women have worn.
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