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 The logo of the Libertarian Alliance | |
| Predecessor | Radical Libertarian Alliance and Mises Centre UK |
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| Formation | 1977 |
| Founders | Mark Brady, Judy Englander, David Ramsay Steele and Chris Tame |
| Type | Think tank |
| Headquarters | London |
| Website | www |
The Libertarian Alliance (LA) refers to two libertarian think tanks in the UK. Originally one organisation, it split in 1982. One Libertarian Alliance was renamed "Mises UK" in 2017; the remaining Libertarian Alliance holds regular meetings in London.
The Libertarian Alliance was founded to advocate the abolition of taxation and government intervention in economic and social life. [1]
With ancestral ties to the Liberty and Property Defence League of Lord Elcho and Sir Ernest Benn's Society of Individualists, the LA was founded in the 1970s by Mark Brady, Judy Englander, David Ramsay Steele and Chris Tame in Woking. It was an alliance of libertarians, minarchists, anarchists, and classical liberals. The LA was perceived to be the continuation of the Radical Libertarian Alliance founded by Brady and Tame in late 1971, or the earlier Young Libertarians founded by David Myddelton in the late 1960s. [2]
The principles of the LA were formulated by the founding members, and written out by David Ramsay Steele in its first Tactical Note. [3] At its founding, the LA had no official leader, but had a chairperson, secretary, and a treasurer. The Alternative Bookshop, formed in 1978, became the unofficial hub of LA activities for a time. [2] The Alternative Bookshop, with Tame as its manager, was advertised in the National Association for Freedom's publication, The Free Nation. [4]
In 1982 a power struggle within the organisation caused a split. [5] From then until 2017 there were two groups calling themselves the Libertarian Alliance and using the same logo and using the phrase "Let a Thousand Libertarian Alliances Bloom!". [2]
The organisation led by Chris Tame from 1982 until his death in March 2006, was led by Sean Gabb from 2006 to 2017, whose involvement with the Libertarian Alliance dated back to December 1979. The Tame-Gabb Libertarian Alliance owned the libertarian.co.uk website, and managed The Libertarian Alliance Blog. In 2015 Gabb's Libertarian Alliance was recognised by HMRC as an educational charity. [6]
The Tame-Gabb LA for many years held dinners and conferences with high-profile speakers as Adam Smith Institute Director Eamonn Butler and libertarian writer Claire Fox in 2006, [7] anarcho-capitalist philosophers David D. Friedman and Hans-Hermann Hoppe in 2008, [8] and LGBT activist Peter Tatchell and Conservative Party Member of Parliament Steve Baker in 2010. [9] Since 2010, there have been no such events, with the focus being on publications, social media, and the Free Life Podcast. [10]
The Tame-Gabb Libertarian Alliance was a member of Backlash, which was formed in 2005 in order to oppose a new law criminalising possession of "extreme pornography".
In June 2017, Gabb gave the Libertarian Alliance to Keir Martland, who renamed it Mises UK. [11] [12] Mises UK maintains the Libertarian Alliance Archives, which "include nearly 800 pamphlets in print and from more than 150 authors". [13] As of 2023, the website is offline.
The Libertarian Alliance run by David McDonagh holds regular talks in London. [14] There is evidence of a rapprochement between the two Libertarian Alliances, with some of these talks being given by Sean Gabb and Keir Martland. They also maintain archives of the Libertarian Alliance magazine "Free Life". [15]
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American economist of the Austrian School, economic historian, political theorist, and activist. Rothbard was a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement, particularly its right-wing strands, and was a founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, history, economics, and other subjects.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German-American academic associated with Austrian School economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism, and opposition to democracy. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), senior fellow of the Mises Institute think tank, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics, or Mises Institute, is a nonprofit think tank headquartered in Auburn, Alabama, that is a center for Austrian economics, right-wing libertarian thought and the paleolibertarian and anarcho-capitalist movements in the United States. It is named after the economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) and promotes the Misesian version of heterodox Austrian economics.
The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was a British political party of the left, established in 1893 at a conference in Bradford, after local and national dissatisfaction with the Liberals' apparent reluctance to endorse working-class candidates. A sitting independent MP and prominent union organiser, Keir Hardie, became its first chairman.
Llewellyn Harrison Rockwell Jr. is an American author, editor, and political consultant. A libertarian and a self-professed anarcho-capitalist, he founded and is the chairman of the Mises Institute, a non-profit promoting the Austrian School of economics.
Libertarian perspectives on foreign intervention started as a reaction to the Cold War mentality of military interventionism promoted by American conservatives, including William F. Buckley Jr., who supplanted Old Right non-interventionism.
Paleolibertarianism is a right-libertarian political activism strategy aimed at uniting libertarians and paleoconservatives. It was developed by American anarcho-capitalist theorists Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell in the American political context after the end of the Cold War. From 1989 to 1995, they sought to communicate libertarian notions of opposition to government intervention by using messages accessible to the working class and middle class people of the time. They combined libertarian free market views with the cultural conservatism of paleoconservatism, while also opposing protectionism. The strategy also embraced the paleoconservative reverence for tradition and religion. This approach, usually identified as right-wing populism, was intended to radicalize citizens against the state. The name they chose for this style of activism evoked the roots of modern libertarianism, hence the prefix paleo. That founding movement was American classical liberalism, which shared the anti-war and anti-New Deal sentiments of the Old Right in the first half of the 20th century. Paleolibertarianism is generally seen as a right-wing ideology.
The Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) was the student organisation of the British Conservative Party from the late 1940s to 1986. It was created to act as a bridge between the student movement and the Conservative Party. It produced several magazines, and had regular Assembly meetings in which motions would be voted on. It had supported some controversial actions, such as the legalisation of various drugs, and the privatisation of the Trident nuclear missiles. There was continual tension between central party, which funded the organisation, and the Federation – which often used the funds on exploring unconventional policies.
Thomas Ernest Woods Jr. is an American author, podcast host, and libertarian commentator who is currently a senior fellow at the Mises Institute. A proponent of the Austrian School of economics, Woods hosts a daily podcast, The Tom Woods Show, and formerly co-hosted the weekly podcast Contra Krugman.
FOREST is a United Kingdom smokers' rights group primarily funded by the tobacco industry which campaigns against what it sees as "excessive regulation" of smoking and tobacco products.
In the United States, libertarianism is a political philosophy promoting individual liberty. According to common meanings of conservatism and liberalism in the United States, libertarianism has been described as conservative on economic issues and liberal on personal freedom, though this is disputed. The movement is often associated with a foreign policy of non-interventionism. Broadly, there are four principal traditions within libertarianism, namely the libertarianism that developed in the mid-20th century out of the revival tradition of classical liberalism in the United States after liberalism associated with the New Deal; the libertarianism developed in the 1950s by anarcho-capitalist author Murray Rothbard, who based it on the anti-New Deal Old Right and 19th-century libertarianism and American individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner while rejecting the labor theory of value in favor of Austrian School economics and the subjective theory of value; the libertarianism developed in the 1970s by Robert Nozick and founded in American and European classical liberal traditions; and the libertarianism associated with the Libertarian Party, which was founded in 1971, including politicians such as David Nolan and Ron Paul.
Christopher Ronald Tame was a British libertarian political activist. He is best known as the founder and Director of the Libertarian Alliance, a free market and civil liberties think tank.
Right-libertarianism, also known as libertarian capitalism, or right-wing libertarianism, is a libertarian political philosophy that supports capitalist property rights and defends market distribution of natural resources and private property. The term right-libertarianism is used to distinguish this class of views on the nature of property and capital from left-libertarianism, a variant of libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an anti-authoritarian approach to property and income. In contrast to socialist libertarianism, right-libertarianism supports free-market capitalism. Like most forms of libertarianism, it supports civil liberties, especially natural law, negative rights, the non-aggression principle, and a significant transformation of the modern welfare state. Practitioners of right-libertarianism usually do not self-describe by that term and often object to it.
David Ramsay Steele is a British author. He has published several works, such as The Mystery of Fascism: David Ramsay Steele's Greatest Hits, Orwell Your Orwell: A Worldview on the Slab, Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy and From Marx to Mises: Post-Capitalist Society and the Challenge of Economic Calculation. Since 1985, he has been Editorial Director of Open Court Publishing Company. In 1997, he co-wrote with Michael R. Edelstein Three Minute Therapy: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life, a psychological self-help book based on Albert Ellis's rational emotive behavior therapy, re-released in paperback, 2019. In 2013, he co-wrote with Michael R. Edelstein and Richard K. Kujoth Therapy Breakthrough: Why Some Psychotherapies Work Better than Others, a study of cognitive-behavioral therapy arguing for its superiority to psychodynamic therapy. From 1963 to 1973, Steele was a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB). In 1970, he became aware of the historical debate over economic calculation and between 1970 and 1973 underwent an intellectual conversion from SPGB Marxism to libertarianism. He later co-founded the Libertarian Alliance and in 1982 would be identified with one of the two factions that resulted in the split of the group.
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Libertarianism in the United Kingdom can either refer to a political movement synonymous with anarchism, left-libertarianism and libertarian socialism, or to a political movement concerned with the pursuit of propertarian right-libertarian ideals in the United Kingdom which emerged and became more prominent in British politics after the 1980s neoliberalism and the economic liberalism of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, albeit not as prominent as libertarianism in the United States in the 1970s and the presidency of Republican Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.
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The Labour Representation Committee was a pressure group founded in 1900 as an alliance of socialist organisations and trade unions, aimed at increasing representation for labour interests in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The Labour Party traces its origin to the LRC's foundation.
The Alliance for Workers' Liberty (AWL), also known as Workers' Liberty, is a Trotskyist group in Britain and Australia, which has been identified with the theorist Sean Matgamna throughout its history. It publishes the newspaper Solidarity.
The Future of Freedom Conference is regarded as the first explicitly libertarian conference series ever held in the United States. Debuting in 1969, the conference's keynote speaker was Austrian economist Prof. Ludwig von Mises.
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