“Both Rand and Rothbard, overeager to seal the case for expelling the state from the economy that economic arguments alone apparently could not clinch, had to cast themselves as participants in a Manichean struggle against unscrupulous wrongdoers with impure motives. This already betokened a deep complacency about the validity of their own views, such that anyone who disagreed with them must be a deliberate enemy of truth; and it marked the beginning of the anti-intellectualism that continues to disfigure libertarian thought. The virtually unanimous opposition of scholars and intellectuals to a view as self-evidently true as libertarianism seems to be to Rand and Rothbard must, they thought, be a function of the intellectuals’ perversity”

— Jeffrey Friedman (political scientist)

rather than of weaknesses of libertarian argument and evidence
Source: “What’s wrong with Libertarianism”, p. 452

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Jeffrey Friedman (political scientist) 6

American political scientist 1959

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