A while back, freethinker had a request: “name the most overrated and underrated libertarian thinkers”

Here are the most underrated:

1. Robert Nozick. Super-duper smart, always open and probing, and incredibly well-read. Somehow other libertarians seem to undervalue that he independently became one of the world’s greatest philosophers, perhaps because they have not done the same.

2. Herbert Spencer: In his day, he often was considered perhaps the greatest thinker of his time or even his century. That wasn’t quite right, but he did build a comprehensive system for the social sciences, understood the primacy of sociology and anthropology, outlined some of the better arguments for liberty, developed an early version of complexity theory, and the “Social Darwinist” caricature of him was exactly that. He even influenced literary theory and rhetoric. On the more practical side, read Social Statics.

3. Gustav de Molinari. He tried to think about governance more seriously than the other late 19th century, early 20th century Belgian libertarians. He understood the primacy of war, focused on futurism, and flirted with both anarchist and multi-lateralist constraints on state power. He hasn’t received much attention since Murray Rothbard promoted his ideas, though see these works by David Hart.

4. Whichever critic of slavery was libertarian enough to count as libertarian for your purposes. Bartolomé de las Casas? Lysander Spooner? William Lloyd Garrison? Take your pick.

Ayn Rand and Ludwig Mises belong in a separate category, because they both have overzealous disciples who so overrate them. That in turn makes them somewhat underrated almost everywhere else. Rand’s cocktail party analysis of the sociology of capitalism-hatred remains one of the great contributions to political thought, plus she reaffirmed the necessary high status of the business producer. Mises’s Liberalism and also Socialism were two of the best books of the first part of the 20th century. So I am happy to call them both underrated, subject to the above not entirely insignificant caveat.

The most overrated libertarian qua libertarian might be Milton Friedman. He is not overrated as an economist, if anything he is still considerably underrated. But as a libertarian? For a guy that smart, I’m not sure he added much to the corpus of libertarian ideas, and I recall one closing segment to a Free to Choose episode where he couldn’t out-argue Peter Jay on some basic issues of political philosophy. And have the Friedmanite ideas of school vouchers and social security privatization really held up as so central? Friedman and Rothbard really didn’t like each other, and each was right about what the other couldn’t do.