Happy Birthday Isabel Paterson

Isabel Paterson, one of the “three furies of libertarianism,” was born on this day in 1886 on a small island in the middle of Lake Huron, Canada.

In 1943, Isabel Paterson, Ayn Rand, and Rose Wilder Lane published three founding texts of modern libertarianism: Paterson's The God of the Machine, Rand's novel The Fountainhead, and Lane's The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (Lane was the daughter of, and possibly ghostwriter for, Little House on the Prairie scribe Laura Ingalls Wilder.). Rand, who, as Brian Doherty memorably put it in the pages of Reason, was “not usually one to acknowledge intellectual debts to anyone but Aristotle,” praised The God of the Machine in the highest possible terms, consistently recommending it to her many admirers. Even after their friendship ended in bitterness in the late 1940s (a common event for both of these spirited women), Rand continued to champion Paterson's work.

A critic, bestselling novelist, and historian, Isabel Paterson was a true original. In the words of Stephen Cox, author of the splendid new biography, The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America, Paterson maintained “a belief in absolute individual rights and minimal (not just limited) government; advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism and an individualist and 'subjective' approach to economic theory; and opposition to social planning, victimless crime legislation, and any form of 'class' or 'status' society.” Paterson, Cox argues, is the earliest proponent of libertarianism as we currently know it. She died on January 10, 1960; her ideas live on.