Abstract:
This thesis examines the ideas and history of the conservative magazine, The Freeman, from its debut in October 1950 to its overhaul at the start of 1956. The Freeman gives us a unique, unvarnished window into the cobbling together of an ideology in its formative years, and insight into how conservatives of all stripes hoped to market their ideas in a period of transition for the Right. It was in the pages of the Freeman that what we know today as libertarianism would form. The Freeman reveals this post-World War II libertarianism as a complex mixture of voluntarism, attitudes toward the natural world and totalitarianism, the ideas of the Old Right, and classical liberalism, which had never quite gone out of style in America and enjoyed resurgence partly due to the arrival of émigrés from a broken, totalitarian Europe. Moreover, the Freeman is also a record of the split in conservative ranks after World War II, when the anticommunists and traditionalists who would found the National Review recognised definitively their views were incompatible with the more radical ‘individualists’ of the Freeman. The Freeman traces the turbulent story of the nascent conservative movement in the early 1950s, which was finding its feet and attempting to become a potent force at the start of the decade, but would ultimately collapse under its contradictions. In doing so, the Freeman expands our understanding of the libertarianism and deepens the currently limited scholarly exploration of this ideology and movement which is growing in importance.