Brian Doherty To Discuss Radicals for Capitalism Today on C-SPAN!: 6PM and 9PM ET

Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty will be talking about his great new book, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (Public Affairs) today on C-SPAN's BookTV. He'll be on at 6pm and 9pm (both ET) today.

For more info, go here.

For details on and an excerpt from the book, go here.

A retroactive reason to subscribe to Reason: If you had already bought a year's worth of the magazine of "Free Minds and Free Markets" for less than $20, you'd be able to check out a wonderful excerpt from RFC about Milton Friedman, "the 20th century's most influential libertarian."

Update: Watch Doherty on the Web here.

Comments

joe | February 10, 2007, 10:19pm | #

Ugh, Doug Bandow?

This next question is brought to you by Newports, yo!

Ken Shultz | February 11, 2007, 2:02am | #

I caught the Doherty interview.

I thought it interesting, the observations about utilitarian libertarians and natural rights libertarians essentially being of one spirit. I suppose I've long suspected, perhaps subconsciously, that utility libertarians tend to come from the left and that natural rights libertarians tend to come from the right--I wonder is that true outside of libertarianism? I think of conservatives as being more about costs and benefits and leftists as thinking that people have a natural right to things.

Speaking as a libertarian who tends to emphasize the natural rights side, I suppose I've always been a little suspicious of utilitarian libertarians. To me, they often seem to be offering libertarianism up as some superior form of planning that the government will hopefully adopt someday. That misses the point entirely from where I'm standing. ...not that I don't see the usefulness of libertarian policies.

But maybe that's why we're so often (mis)identified as conservatives in the media--maybe people tend to associate utility arguments as an exclusively conservative domain. I don't think natural rights are necessarily thought of as an exclusively liberal kind of thing.

Max | February 11, 2007, 7:31am | #

Mr. Doherty didn't require much prompting from the interviewer, did he?

Now I want to read _It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand_.

disinter | February 11, 2007, 1:20pm | #

Video of the interview here:

http://disinter.wordpress.com/2007/02/11/brain-dohertys-c-span-interview/

Graphite | February 11, 2007, 5:30pm | #

I thought it was an excellent interview and it looks like an intriguing book. I just ordered my copy.

I doubt he saw this, but I can just see Jonah Goldberg turning red when Mr. Doherty said, "Without the libertarian parts of conservativism, conservatives don't really bring much to the table."

Guy Montag | February 11, 2007, 7:41pm | #

Brian Doherty made an excellent showing on Booknotes this weekend. Try to catch it on a rerun if you missed it (or at the Wordpress URL someone else posted above) and before the Randoids attack him and all records of the show for calling Ayn Rand a Libertarian.

This was one of my favorite interviews on that show ever. Almost as good as the final Brian Lamb hosted episode when he interviewed Tom Wolfe.

Only advice to Mr. Doherty: Visit a barber a few days before going on TV and find a new shirt tailor. All of your words were great and you tell great stories too!

kevrob | February 12, 2007, 6:44am | #

I'm going to listen to the interview later. For future reference, you might want to point out that C-SPAN makes their channels available as both video and audio streams on the intertubes, so even if you are uncabled and have dial-up you can listen to @ ~20 kbps, or even timeshift the feed with something as lowtech as a casette recorder that takes a patch cord from your audio output jack. (TotalRecorder or JetAudio or the like makes life easier.)

Kevin

ed | February 12, 2007, 8:36am | #

Interview? His studio mate barely got in 10 sentences. Nice job, however, and he did give Rand more credit than I thought he would, and in a less snarky way than one might expect, given Reason's ambivalence toward its birthmother.