Reason senior editor Brian Doherty was a font of knowledge on American libertarianism.
Reason senior editor Brian Doherty was a font of knowledge on American libertarianism.
S ome throwaway lines stick around.
Brian Doherty notes in 2025’s Modern Libertarianism that between the world wars, Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), “went into real estate and joined the chamber of commerce in Burlingame.” This fact, which does not even rise to the level of trivial, immediately provoked thoughts of equally meaningless yet peculiar tidbits.
During the 1960s, Ivan Bierly, a prominent employee of the Volker Fund, a cash cow milked by all things libertarian (including Read’s FEE), similarly went into real estate in the California town. A decade later, the Center for Libertarian Studies launched there.
This week, after reading Bierly’s letter, I had an overwhelming urge to email the book’s author: Sup wit Burlingame?
Then, as quickly, the realization hit that Brian Doherty, the font of knowledge on the history of American libertarianism, could no longer shed light on such obscure matters.
The Reason magazine senior editor and author of Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, died at 57 from a fall last weekend in the Bay Area. He did so after leaving readers more enlightened about Burning Man, the micronation of Liberland, underground comic books, the greedy capitalism of socialist rock stars, and, especially, the history of libertarianism.
“Libertarians’ policy prescriptions are based on a simple idea with very complicated repercussions: Government, if it has any purpose at all (and many libertarians doubt it does), should be restricted to the protection of its citizens’ persons and property against direct violence and theft,” he wrote, a la Frédéric Bastiat, in Radicals for Capitalism. “In their eyes, most modern government functions, if done by private individuals, would be seen as violence and theft.”
That 2007 history of libertarianism relied heavily on five intellectuals — Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand — to tell the broader story of the development of an outlook radical but not utopian. The story of Brian Doherty resembles not those buttoned-up thinkers but instead the more eclectic supporting cast of libertarians: the bearded and beaded Karl Hess, seasteading founding father Wayne Gramlich, and Rose Wilder Lane, who in 1968 managed to make it to the hereafter without a Social Security number.
Doherty’s own eccentricities — apparently refusing to vote, ritualistically attending Burning Man, playing bass in a series of bands — made him in a sense a typical libertarian if an unusual human.
“There was always one guy in the corner, some weird-looking dude with Brillo-pad-style hair, very intensely having a great time, almost always by himself, occasionally playing air drums,” Matt Welch recalled of his Hollywood encounters at Tsar concerts with the man who would become his Reason colleague. Welch later saw, to his shock, “that dude” at a journalistic event. They connected, though not primarily on laissez-faire. They connected on music.
And though Doherty played in art-punk bands, he exhibited ecumenical tastes that encompassed the Bee Gees, the Beach Boys, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
“He spent most of his time hanging out with people who were participants in something called the Cacophony Society, which is a group of pranksters who come out of a Dada tradition in postwar America,” Nick Gillespie, Reason editor at large, noted. “And the Cacophony Society and the Burning Man community are deeply entwined.”
Both Gillespie and Welch found humor in their Luddite-libertarian colleague. Apple updates, supermarket checkout scanners, and other technological menaces vexed Doherty. He laughed loudly, loved Murray Rothbard, lived in the desert, left a messy office, and in the end leaned on a cane.
Most knew Doherty not personally but in print.
“That is the book,” Welch explained about Radicals for Capitalism, calling it “the definitive door-stopper.” Gillespie similarly termed it “Diderot’s Encyclopédie of the modern libertarian movement.”
Brian Doherty is survived by Radicals for Capitalism and five other books. For those wishing to pay their respects, adopting Modern Libertarianism: A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States, Ron Paul’s rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired, or any other of Doherty’s babies through booksellers seems like a good way to do so. Writers truly die only when their readers disappear.