This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 2nd, 2003.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When you root your political philosophy and individual liberty,

you commit yourself to defending the individual against a wide variety of

encroachments.

In the individualists, authors Matt Zwolinski and John Tamasi present what they cast

as the untold story of how the emphasis of libertarian thinking shifted in response to various forces.

I spoke with co-author Matt Zwolensky last month.

This is a great way to characterize libertarianism broadly because so many people are what I like to call I got mine

libertarians, which is everything that I am personally invested in is morally

valuable. The things that I own are definitely mine and hey good luck to you and that's not really how I view

libertarianism I view libertarianism as the placing the value of the individual as foremost, that's the smallest minority.

These are the people we need to be looking out for.

Everybody as an individual without regard to almost any other attribute they may have.

And that seems to me to be the sort of the foundation of analysis for trying to decide whether or not an idea fits within

libertarianism or not.

But as you say in the book, Libertarianism has a long and widely varying history about what ideas were considered acceptable, even worth celebrating, and other ideas that have really only come along in the last hundred years or so.

So what would shock contemporary libertarians to learn about people who called themselves

libertarians and we should be clear celebrated a good bit of what we celebrate today

But what did they think at you know a hundred hundred fifty years ago that that might surprise us today. I think the most surprising group of

libertarians from a contemporary perspective are actually the American

libertarians in the 19th century.

...