John Hospers passed earlier this month at the age of 93. He received an Electoral College vote in 1972 from a Virginia Elector who did not want to vote for Richard Nixon OR George McGovern.

Dr. Hospers was the first openly gay candidate to receive an Electoral College vote, and his running mate Tonie Nathan was the first woman and the first American Jew to receive an Electoral College vote

This is Hospers’ account of his encounters with philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand:

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John Hospers, the Libertarian Party’s first presidential candidate, has died at

age 93. He was both the least and most successful of the party’s nominees: His

1972 campaign received fewer popular votes than any of its successors (not

surprisingly, since he was on the ballot in only two states), but it also was

the only campaign to get a vote in the Electoral College, thanks to a

libertarian-leaning elector who couldn’t bring himself to cast a ballot for

Nixon. (Hospers told the tale of his presidential run in an entertaining memoir

for Liberty [pdf].)

Hospers was a rarity: a professional philosopher who admired rather than

despised Ayn Rand. He had a brief friendship with the novelist that ended, as so

many of her friendships did, with Rand expelling him from her life; you can read

his memories of their relationship in another two Liberty articles [pdfand pdf].

Despite their falling out, she was an influence on Hospers’ politics, tugging

him in a libertarian direction even as Rand refused to apply the L-word to

herself. Along with his many books of academic philosophy, Hospers would write

Libertarianism(1971), a general introduction to the libertarian worldview.

Hospers was more hawkish than most members of the libertarian movement, pushing

back against the LP’s dovish positions through his involvement with the Defense

Caucus, which supported a more active foreign policy. Later he joined the GOP,

where he was a member of the Republican Liberty Caucus. As a result, many people

associate him with the right wing of the movement, but that was only partly

true: He leaned left on many environmental issues [pdf] and, as an openly gay

man at a time when that entailed greater risks than now, he was certainly no

social conservative.

Hospers wrote a film column for Reason in the ’70s and periodically contributed

articles on other subjects to the magazine as well. I knew him slightly when I

worked for Liberty, and I found him unfailingly courteous and friendly; we

disagreed on many things, but he always came across as someone who enjoyed

rather than was offended by disagreement. Requiescat in pace. (from Reason.com)

Libertarian Thoughts Reborn

by John Hospers

I was born in Pella, a town of about 5,000 in central Iowa. It began as a Dutch

colony in 1847, settled by a group of emigrants from Holland who were rebelling

against certain Dutch laws and regulations of the State Church of Holland. My

great-grandfather, John Hospers, was leader of the Second Emigration to Iowa in

1849. He and his wife and eight children made the move to Iowa on the suggestion

of a missionary who said that this portion of Iowa had the richest soil in the

world.

My great-grandfather, whose diary of the journey I still possess, was en route

from Holland to Iowa for about two months. He lost two children on the way when

scarlet fever broke out on the ship. He landed in New York and traveled by boat

up the Hudson to Albany, where he buried yet another child who had contracted

scarlet fever. Then via the Erie Canal to Buffalo, and a Great Lakes steamboat

to Chicago (described as “a flourishing city of 23,000 souls”), finally overland

to his Iowa destination. Here were thousands of acres of land waiting, as he

thought, to be cultivated for human use.

My great-grandmother, born in 1839, was still alive when I was a child (she

lived to be 100). I remember her descriptions of the endless vistas of land, of

felling trees and the labor required to build on it, and the howling of wolves

in the distance at night before she went to sleep. (We conversed in Dutch, which

she spoke much better than English.)

Concepts like “government assistance” were entirely alien to these settlers.

Life was precarious, but when illness or natural catastrophe struck, relatives

and neighbors were there to give assistance; it would not have occurred to them

to ask money from the government any more than to rob their neighbors’ houses.

God had given them this rich land, was that not enough? When I grew up there was

some envy of the rich, but no bitterness or resentment. If Henry Ford was a

millionaire, it was because he had earned it through inventiveness and industry,

and my father, proud owner of a Ford, was grateful to him for helping to make

the horse-and-buggy days obsolete.

I vividly remember the Roosevelt election landslide of 1936. One of my uncles,

owner of a clothing store in Newton, thirty miles away, deplored the results of

the election, and was sure that from then on taxes would gradually rise as

people became more dependent on government for services. My uncle’s close

friend, Fred Maytag, manufactured (and his company still manufactures) washing

machines and refrigerators. Maytag feared that the risks involved in starting an

industry or invention would become so great because of high taxes, that the

entire industry would go bankrupt, thus leaving thousands of workers unemployed.

“This is the end of freedom in America!” he predicted.

Though the political complexion of Pella could be described as laissez faire,

the same could not be said of attitudes toward religion. While members of other

sects (or no sect at all) were not harassed – the Constitution respected freedom

of religion, and the Dutch emigrants were second to none in their respect for

the Constitution – most people in the community were members of the Reformed

Church of America (“the Dutch Reformed Church”). Dissenters were viewed as

outsiders, but also as the potential beneficiaries of spiritual reformation.

There were at least a dozen Reformed churches in the community. Theirs was not a

revivalist-style of worship of the dancing-for-Jesus type – the residents had

only contempt for such shenanigans; rather, church was more like a catechism in

which one learned The Truth and was told how to act on it. It was almost a case

of “if you accept such-and-such premises, these are the conclusions that

follow,” except that one was expected also to accept the premises. These

premises became increasingly questionable to me as I came to think on my own.

For example, I was taught that Jesus is the Son of God, co-eternal with Him, but

at the same time that he lived on the earth for some 33 years and died like

anyone else. I wondered how Jesus could be a son – isn’t a son an offspring of a

father, and didn’t the father have to be there first? And yet, we were taught,

this son, like the Father, had been present before the creation. How could a

biological organism living at some particular place and time also exist at all

places and times? I would learn later from reading Santayana that the word

‘eternal’ is ambiguous, meaning either timeless, like the number system and the

truths of mathematics, or everlasting, that is, existing throughout time, like

the material universe, so-and-so many years. But this still didn’t solve the

problem of how a being – who spoke and issued commands – could be both timeless

and everlasting, as the received doctrines taught.

Much of the religious teaching we received seemed to be not in the Bible itself,

but a creation of the doctrine-makers like those who wrote the Creed of Nicea in

385, deciding which books were to be included in the Christian Bible, and

through careful selection of words trying to cast some light on theological

questions such as how a temporal Jesus could also have been a timeless God. It

was all very puzzling, and I became increasingly skeptical about it all.

It did, however, give me a keen appetite for philosophy, which as yet I knew

nothing about. In college I came to read David Hume’s Dialogues concerning

Natural Religion, which presented in rich detail the same problems that had

tormented me. I still wonder how I could have survived without it. It was my one

consolation at a time when I was being inundated with conflicting views.

Meanwhile there were other fascinating subjects. At age ten, chancing to read

the school encyclopedia’s article on astronomy, I devoured everything I could

find to read on the subject, soon exhausting the resources of the town library

and the college library. By the time I was a freshman in college (Central

College, in Pella), the dean, who taught the astronomy course, turned it over to

me, saying “You know more about it than I do.” And so at age eighteen I was

teaching a course for college juniors and seniors. I delighted in every minute

of it, and decided that explaining complex concepts was something I wanted to do

forever. I would take the class to the college observatory late at night and

show them the rings of Saturn in the telescope, and certain double stars we had

discussed in class. I would take the class imaginatively through millions of

light-years of space, and it seemed to be as much of an adventure for them as it

was for me.

Astronomy, however, was not a prominent subject in American colleges. A cousin

who was majoring in literature advised me to shift my major subject to something

‘more practical’, with the result that two years later I had my Master’s degree

in literature from the University of Iowa, equipped, I hoped, to teach

Shakespeare and Shelley to not-so-eager undergraduates.

Then fate took another quick and unexpected turn. I received a generous

scholarship from Columbia University, and decided to pursue the Ph.D. in my

favorite but hitherto neglected subject, philosophy. Equipped with the degree in

literature, aesthetics was a natural division of philosophy in which to pursue a

major. By the end of the second year at Columbia I had finished my Ph.D.

dissertation, Meaning and Truth in the Arts, which was published by the

University of North Carolina Press. It was often cited in the literature and

remained in print for about 35 years.

I taught Humanities at the undergraduate school of Columbia University, leading

the class through the ‘great classics of Western civilization’ (ancient Greek

the first semester and the moderns the second semester). All the while, I was

drinking in the cultural life of New York – theater, concert halls and opera

were only a few minutes away by subway. But an invitation to a more permanent

job came from the University of Minnesota, through my Iowa University professor,

Wilfrid Sellars. I taught aesthetics, ethics, philosophy in literature,

epistemology, and other subjects at Minnesota, and wrote a fairly lengthy book,

Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, which became quite influential. It is

now, in 2003, in its fourth edition, and a paperback edition remains in

considerable use in the United Kingdom.

When an invitation came from City University of New York, however, I found it

impossible to say no. The most dramatic event of the decade for me was meeting

Ayn Rand. She gave a talk at Brooklyn College in 1960, on “Faith and Force: the

Destroyers of the Modern World” (later printed), after which I asked her to

lunch. She said she could spare an hour for me – but more than four hours later

we were still sitting there immersed in philosophical conversation. I described

our conversations in a two-part article in Liberty, “Conversations with Ayn

Rand” (1990), and will not repeat the description here.

She was indeed a philosopher of stature, I decided at once, but more versed in

traditional metaphysics and ethics than in “philosophy with a linguistic turn”

in which I was more at home. It seemed to me that many philosophical issues have

their origin in the use and misuse of language, and it was difficult to share

that orientation with someone of a different philosophical background. If she

had only been trained in Oxford instead of Leningrad, I thought. I think I

understood where she was coming from more than she understood where I was. On

some issues, such as ‘truths of logic’ vs. contingent truths, and ways in which

aesthetic value can be called objective, we never did come to agreement.

Nevertheless, this was not the end of our exchanges: I was invited to one of the

NBI lectures, and within a week thereafter I was invited to her apartment for

discussion – just the two of us, no one else. We met regularly many times

thereafter, starting at about 8 p.m. and continuing till 2, 4, or even 6 in the

morning. Meanwhile I was reading Atlas Shrugged (I was ashamed to confess to her

although I had heard a lot about it the length of the book was forbidding and I

had not read it before) – teaching in the daytime hours, writing on my ethics

book in the evening, and spending the wee small hours eagerly devouring Atlas.

We agreed to spend the first few discussion sessions on Atlas. I was lost in

admiration of the development, the structure, the climaxes, the dramatic

speeches, and gave her the reasons for my admiration. I had assumed that many

people had already shared such reflections with her, but in fact, to my

surprise, almost no one had. Instead, there were either carping critics who read

without insight into what she was about, or mindless enthusiasts from whom she

gleaned nothing. I was quite sure that they had read it only superficially; and

that most of the content had escaped them. After a devastating review of it

appeared in the National Review, I heard Buckley say on television that he had

never read the book.

In any case, Ayn kept inviting me back. She saw my marked copy of Atlas and

said, “May I trade you?” removing mine and putting a new signed copy of her own

in its place. I noticed (and she noticed that I noticed) ‘little things’ such as

the fact that reference to the god Atlas occurred only once in the entire novel,

and why section headings had been given the titles that she gave them. She gave

a knowing smile when I said “I don’t want to pull a Dr. Stadler on you, but…” In

turn, I appreciated her description of a conversation she had had long ago with

Isabel Paterson, in which Isabel had planted a seed of Atlas in her mind: “What

would happen if all the producers went on strike?”

As to the content of the novel, however, the things that critics had ridiculed

became for me the main source of its power: its underlying philosophy. For me it

was as if something with great life and energy was being reborn. The political

and economic beliefs in which I had been brought up, were now living again as an

explicit philosophy rather than as a largely unexamined set of assumptions never

discussed in family gatherings but always there lurking in the background. Now

with Ayn Rand, they came to life, and I seemed to come to new life with them.

One evening after a long discussion she said to me, “You are not at all like the

liberals of today. You have a nineteenth-century mind, and I intend that as a

compliment. You do believe in liberty; now why don’t you do something about it?”

At first I thought she meant that I should give up teaching and do something

else. But no: “You are in the greatest profession in the world. Mostly you are

unrewarded for what you do. But you deal with IDEAS. The world is full of bad

ideas, ideas that could mean the end of the world itself. And the only

substitute for bad ideas is good ideas. The world is starving for good ideas. In

your life you should have many opportunities to acquaint people with good

ideas.”

Here, I thought, I am sitting with someone who grew up in Russia, in the shadow

of the arch-exemplars of bad ideas, Lenin and Stalin. And she has expressed in

her works what happens when bad ideas are accepted on a massive scale, and, she

has just spent twelve years of her life writing Atlas, which presents it for all

of the world to see. First, “just a little bit of evil,” in the form of the

state giving to some (as a token of ‘government generosity’) by robbing others,

perhaps in some small little-noticed way. But then the disease spreads, and the

state gains a stranglehold on people’s lives so that they come to depend on it

and can no longer exist without it. And then the state comes in for the kill,

destroying the civilizations it proposed to save. (In years that followed I

would read the “Gulag” trilogy and many other works by Solzhenitsyn,

reemphasizing her point about the decline and fall of nations,)

Ayn condemned all existing governments as intrusive, as restricting people’s

freedom and violating their rights. But she didn’t find them all equally

intrusive. She thought highly of the America envisioned by the founders, minus

the slavery. She saw it as the nearest approach thus far in history to a

‘constitution of liberty’, a republic, not a democracy, its citizens possessing

the right to do as they chose as long as these choices involved no violation of

the rights of others.

I was somewhat skeptical of people’s references to ‘government with the consent

of the governed’: certainly not all of them had consented. Most people have not

consented to the system in which they were born; and if you can’t get unanimous

consent even in a small roomful of people; how can you get everyone’s consent to

the constitution of a nation? Some people will approve of capital punishment,

others will condemn it totally. Not everyone will agree on what ‘cruel and

unusual punishment’ means. People have conflicting desires and convictions, and

perhaps no one gets exactly the system that he wants.

There is, of course, an enormous difference between life in the United States

and life in the Soviet Union, a most conspicuous difference being that people

are free to leave the one but not the other. But she did say, and later wrote,

that in any enterprise involving two or more persons, the voluntary consent of

all parties is required. But I was uneasy: if there has to be unanimous consent

in starting a business or forming a club, why not also in the formation of a

government? If numbers are what makes the difference, why not say so outright?

And if numbers don’t make the difference, why doesn’t the unanimity rule apply

not only to clubs but to the millions of American colonists in 1789?

I never seemed to get a clear answer on this, but perhaps, I thought, I was

missing something essential to the argument; and I had learned, when I continued

the questioning, not to push her too far, lest the mood of pleasant intellectual

interchange be lost.

Through the passing weeks, memories of people I had met, and bits of

conversation with them, and speculation about what they would think or say,

would intermingle in my mind: Ayn Rand, Hank Rearden, Fred Maytag. What a

combination! One evening I was invited by Ayn to join Ludwig von Mises and his

wife, and Henry Hazlitt and his wife for an evening’s conversation in her

apartment. I felt honored, and enjoyed the occasion although no new thoughts

were born that evening. I had met Hazlitt before, when I had a chance to praise

him for his Economics in One Lesson.We exchanged letters and phone calls

occasionally around the time that he moved from Washington Square to

Connecticut. Ayn had chastised him for not reviewing her Objectivist Ethics in

his book on the welfare state. He responded that he didn’t understand her views

enough to comment publicly on them. She was less than pleased by this: how could

he not understand her when she wrote in plain English? But I think their views

were ultimately irreconcilable: Hazlitt was very much a utilitarian, and favored

a laissez faire society simply because it had more total utility than any

alternative.

As for Mises, Ayn admired him greatly and gave me a copy of his book Socialism,

though the one I came most to treasure was Human Action. I wish I had attended

his Thursday evening seminars on economics at NYU – but I was very busy as it

was, and many of these Thursday evenings were spent in discussions with Rand. I

did meet Mises again at one of the last lectures he gave, at Long Beach State

College in the late 1960s. He was well into his 80s then and ever so sweet and

accommodating to students no matter how ill-informed their questions, but never

enough to blunt the precision of the points he was making. I deeply regretted

that I had never studied under him.

As program chairman of the American Society for Aesthetics, I had invited Ayn to

address their annual meeting in Boston. As critic I could not simply say how

great her remarks were and then sit down, so I offered criticisms on her new

paperArt and Sense of Life which my colleagues considered quite mild. But

apparently she thought I had betrayed her. She cut me off after that, as she had

already done with so many others, interpreting disagreement as betrayal. I never

saw her again. As the months went by, I came to miss her enormously. I missed

especially her parting words after each meeting: not “Good night,” but “Good

premises.”

Not long after that I accepted a position as chairman of the philosophy

department at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Among other

things I became faculty adviser to the Ayn Rand Club there. And, in the course

of time a representative of the newly formed California Libertarian Party

suggested that I go to Denver where there would be a meeting of freedom-oriented

people throughout the nation to discuss whether a national Libertarian Party

should be formed with Dave Nolan, the founder of the Colorado party, in charge.

(I wrote about this in a 1998 paper in Full Context and wrote at length about

the 1972 presidential campaign in an article in Liberty, Vol. 6 No. 2.)

I went to the exploratory meeting on a June weekend in Denver in 1972. My book

Libertarianism had been published the previous year, and some of the delegates

in Denver had copies of it and even quoted from it on the convention floor.

There were two days of discussion on platform and principles, and I was

delegated to write the party’s Statement of Principles. It was then argued

whether or not this party in its infancy should float a candidate for U.S.

president, and it was decided that the response should be yes. I was somewhat

overwhelmed when I got the nomination: there were people there far better known

in libertarian circles, both Ed Clark and Ed Crane were there at the convention.

But the outcome, I think, was the result of the fact that my book had already

been trumpeted as a kind of ‘textbook of libertarianism’.

I was a little bit thrilled, and a little bit terrorized. One day I was a

college professor, and the next day a candidate for the nation’s highest office.

I knew I would never attain to that office – anyway I was a complete unknown –

and was not at all sure that a virtually unknown party having a presidential

candidate so early on, was a good idea. But, I thought, perhaps initiating a

political party that stood for liberty more unambiguously than the existing ones

might succeed, and even lead to something bigger, as the dissolution of the Whig

Party had done for the newborn Republican Party in l856.

Ayn Rand had said to me: “if you believe in freedom, why don’t you do something

about it?” Here, suddenly, was an unexpected chance to do something, however

small. Perhaps it would all come to nothing – a flash in the pan. But then

again, perhaps not. We would never know unless we tried.

At any rate, having a captive audience in a college classroom was worlds away

from a public meeting devoted to a specific agenda. To be a political candidate

was to be a target of ignorant and often hostile questioning, when one had

thirty seconds or less to answer, as often happened on radio programs I was

involved in during the campaign. “What will you do for me if elected?” someone

asked, and I would reply “I’ll leave you alone to live your life as you choose.”

Or: “How are you going to have education without government?” I would be asked,

explaining that there are few if any communities who would not gladly pay

something voluntarily for the education of their children, and reminding them

that in the entire Constitution there was not one mention of government in

connection with education. But it would take many a lesson in simple economics,

I decided, to convince most people of something that seemed obvious to those of

us who had studied it. It would be a long haul, to say the least. But gradually

I resurrected a bit of the preacher in me and learned to give brief (but

necessarily incomplete) answers, and to construct bon mots to throw back at the

challenger.

And thus passed the campaign of 1972: one day Dallas, the next day Houston, the

following day Tulsa, then Chicago and so on to New York and Boston. Most

exciting of all was Seattle: Tonie Nathan, the vice-presidential candidate, and

I were pictured on millions of brochures that went out to every voter in the

state, along with the Statement of Principles. Sometimes I would be recognized

walking on the sidewalks of Seattle.

There were many radio interviews, TV interviews, and many meetings thereafter on

college campuses and university lecture halls, especially in California.

The biggest surprise of the campaign, heard by millions of listeners and

viewers, and intoned by Vice-President Spiro Agnew (as prescribed in the

Constitution), was the announcement, “…and one electoral vote to John Hospers

for president, and one to Theodora Nathan for vice-president.” I had known about

this for several weeks but kept it secret – Roger MacBride, an elector from

Virginia (he became the presidential candidate in 1976), threw his vote from

Republican to Libertarian in a sudden unexpected move. In the next few weeks I

was flooded with a myriad of letters and telephone calls – “Congratulations!”

and “Remember, I voted for you!”

I had met Mises and Hazlitt, but not Murray Rothbard, the encyclopedic

libertarian scholar. Rothbard was hardly an object of great affection in Randian

circles, and she had never once mentioned him to me. But we met one day at a

lunch at USC, and I was afraid that my association with Rand might cause some

hostility; besides, he was a hundred times the libertarian scholar that I was. I

told him on meeting him that it was he and not I who should have been the

presidential candidate. He said he didn’t want the job, and wished me well. As

things turned out, though an anarchist he became prominent in Libertarian Party

circles for the next decade or more. I read several of his books: the one that I

admired the most was the shorter book Power and Market. But I also greatly

admired his Man, Economy, and State, though disagreeing with parts of his Ethics

of Liberty, even devoting a meeting of the Karl Hess Club to a presentation of

my partially dissenting view. (I had read some economics, but never had even one

course in the subject.)

Then, at seventy years of age, came my compulsory retirement from teaching. I

took this event as a personal loss, for I believed I was still able to conduct

classes as well as ever. I totally revised my book Human Conduct, the manuscript

of the first edition of which I had delivered on foot back in 1961 from Ayn

Rand’s apartment to the Harcourt Brace office few blocks away, promising her

that I would mention her ethical views if there were ever a second or third

edition (a promise which I kept). I continued to write, though my 1998 article A

Libertarian View of Open Borders in the Journal of Libertarian Studiesmade me

some enemies within the Libertarian Party. These sins may have been partially

atoned for in my essay “Thoughts on Democracy” in Tibor Machan’s 2002 anthology

Democracy and Liberty. Not long thereafter I was invited to Indianapolis, where

Tibor Machan interviewed me for an hour-long video on my life and work, which is

listed in the Classics of Liberty series published by the Liberty Fund of

Indianapolis.

In 2002 I returned to USC to attend an ongoing seminar. In Philosophy Hall,

where I had taught so many classes through the years, fresh young faces were

writing their final exams. Since I had now been retired for more than ten years,

they did not know me and I did not know them. My portrait hung on the stairs

leading to the Hoose Library of Philosophy. I spoke with Ross, the head

librarian: did anyone remember me after all these years? Yes, he said, but they

remember you as presidential candidate more than as head of our department. Do

they read any of my books, which are here on the library shelves? Yes, he said,

they are out most of the time, and some of your articles, such as the one on

truth in fiction and the one on free-will and psychoanalysis, are still read

quite a bit. What about my essay on artistic creativity, which was the

presidential address I gave to the American Society for Aesthetics in l983, here

in this auditorium? No, that was probably too far back for our students to

remember. What about the magazine I inherited when I came, The Personalist, in

which I published manuscripts from some then-unknown philosophers such as Tibor

Machan and Doug Rasmussen, which no one had been willing to publish before

because of their libertarian slant? Well no, he suspected that only the authors

of those articles would still remember them after that much time.

Time passes, I reflected with some disappointment, and in the end all is

forgotten. Has the result been worth the effort? It was all so important to me

at the time, and now it is as if none of it had ever existed. Meanwhile time

speeds on, or struggles on, or slouches on, as the case may be, and most of

people’s fond hopes and dreams remain unrealized. Well, don’t expect to live for

others and don’t expect them to live for you – didn’t Ayn Rand teach you that at

least, among many other things, all those years?

But that was only one of the things. Another was: in general, bad ideas have bad

consequences, and good ideas have good consequences. Twenty years ago a student

of mine at USC, George Squyres, suddenly quit school and did manual labor for

years, like Howard Roark. He never graduated, and I didn’t hear from him again

until the summer of 2002, when I ran into him at the national Libertarian Party

meeting in Indianapolis. He is even now heading a committee dedicated to

revamping the Libertarian Party platform after some years of comparative

inattention. He has chaired a committee designed to set forth the tenets of

libertarianism in bold strokes and expand its influence on society, so as to

help it become what we, the starry-eyed visionaries of 1972, had dreamed of but

failed to achieve. Perhaps we hadn’t given our movement enough publicity, or

perhaps the time was not yet ripe. We knew all along that it would be a long

haul, didn’t we?

And so it is: hope springs eternal, and perhaps this hope can still be realized,

here in America, while we are alive and able to witness for ourselves the

unfolding of events, perhaps even able in some degree to influence them