Christophe Bourseiller, The Saga of the Libertarians. From Ayn Rand to Elon Musk, Les Éditions du Cerf, September 10, 2026, 275 pages, €20.90
One day in 1980, in a New York libertarian bookstore where books were free, a young French comedian asked for a bag and was told that it cost six hundred dollars. Since then, the comedian has become the historian of fringe ideologies, a researcher on the far right since 1991, and the author at Les Éditions du Cerf of a New History of the Ultra-Left and Conspiracy Theory, Anatomy of a Religion. Bourseiller starts from this memory to recount, from Ayn Rand to Elon Musk, how a tiny current ended up sitting at the White House table.
Libertarians and Libertarians
The book arises from a vocabulary misunderstanding, and Christophe Bourseiller knows both banks of the river, having been active in the anarchist Revolutionary Organization before his friend Mel Gordon, the dedicatee of the volume, introduced him to America’s libertarians. Across the Atlantic, the English word, which we translated as libertarian, also designates proponents of unconstrained capitalism. The investigation traces a thread from nineteenth‑century anarchists, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who wrested anarchism from chaos in 1840, or Max Stirner and his egoist property, to the Belgian Gustave de Molinari, who as early as 1849 cast security as an industry left to competition, and showed that the hatred of the state suffices to weld these disparate thinkers. In 1955, the essayist Dean Russell proposed reserving the word libertarian for friends of liberty, while liberal had slipped to the left. Placed at the top of the page, a line from Mikhail Bakunin, “The freedom of others extends mine to infinity”, softly signals what separates the two lineages: the freedom one shares and the freedom one possesses.
The prologue distinguishes two meanings of extremism, and the second, which targets those who push an idea to its ultimate consequences, places libertarians, advocates of abolishing the state, among the extreme capitalists. In childhood, Murray Rothbard defended Franco at the family table when his parents, Polish Jewish immigrants, raged for the Spanish Republicans; then in 1965 he co-founded the Left & Right journal, joined in 1968 a small Californian far‑left party, and early in the 1990s aligned behind Pat Buchanan, renouncing free immigration. He wrote in 1968, “my political opinions have not changed one iota during these twenty years”, a confession the book deems appropriate for its time, though what came after would disprove it. A political chameleon, the current swapped the gray suits of the old Right for the shimmering velvets of the counterculture, and each transformation confirms the historian’s view that libertarianism is “a vast empty shell containing everything and its opposite.”
A Sect in the Name of Freedom
Alissa Rosenbaum arrived in New York on February 19, 1926 with fifty dollars, and her first purchase was an English edition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. From the family pharmacy pillaged by the Reds to the six million copies of The Fountainhead, the author unfolds this life like a novel and enters the circle that the novelist, who now signs as Ayn Rand, ironizes as the Collective. There one wears a dollar sign on the back of the jacket, and a preference for Mozart over Brahms earns perpetual exclusion. Having for six months become Nathaniel Branden’s patient, the darling disciple, Murray Rothbard is told that his ailment stems from his wife’s religious faith, before a private tribunal convicts him in absentia. To the same Branden, her unfaithful lover, the Prophetess of Reason one evening proclaims “I will destroy you as I created you!”, a scene the former actor recounts with exact timing.
The paradox of a movement devoted to the individual scales up. In October 1973, Libertarian Forum hailed the coup of General Augusto Pinochet as a revolution, in a Chile whose stadiums had turned into prisons. Peter Thiel confessed in 2009, “I no longer believe that liberty and democracy are compatible.” and the theorists of the Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, imagine a CEO‑King appointed by a board, aided by an artificial intelligence and ruling over former citizens who are now clients. On the Honduran island of Roatán, the private city of Próspera, guarded by armed men, forced many residents into exile. Bourseiller is right to connect Ayn Rand’s salon with these grotesque startup monarchies. In both cases, liberty run to the extreme ends up demanding a master to guarantee it, and if one recalls Dostoevsky, he attributed this reversal to Chigaliov in The Devils.
Promised Lands
Among libertarians, fiction often leads the way. Little House on the Prairie, which Rose Wilder Lane would have written in place of her mother, is regarded as the first fictional sketch of a libertarian society, and a Library of Congress study in 1991 ranks Atlas Shrugged just after the Bible among the books that have most influenced Americans. From the secret refuge where John Galt gathers his bosses on strike, arises the “libertarian Zionism,” as adherents term it, which the historian recounts with amused narration. Werner Stiefel’s geodesic-dome ark capsizes in the Hudson, catches fire, reaches the Bahamas, and sinks in a hurricane. The Minerva Reefs, proclaimed a republic south of Fiji, disappear at every high tide, and the walls built against the waves—the author wryly calls them a dam against the Pacific in reference to Marguerite Duras—give way before annexation by the King of Tonga. In New Hampshire, the village of Grafton sees its roads crumble and bears wandering into gardens as newcomers slash the municipal budget.
To these shipwrecks answers a terrestrial conquest, documented step by step. Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk surround Donald Trump for a second term. Atlas Network, founded in 1981 by Antony Fisher, a fortune made in battery farming, funds in the 2020s four hundred fifty‑seven organizations in ninety‑six countries. Fourteen of its members entered Bolsonaro’s administration, and it is through Atlas that Javier Milei—two of whose cloned dogs are named Milton and Murray—drafted the program he implements in Argentina, a chainsaw laid on his desk. In the tally of ballots, the libertarian candidate of 2024 weighs in at 0.4 points, and Christophe Bourseiller is a thousand times right to oppose that tally with the arithmetic of foundations and checkbooks, augmented by a cultural conquest amplified by the Web, making this handful of activists a victorious minority. France, which the author regards as the village that still resists, does have its Libertarian Party, whose meeting on March 29, 2026 gathered fifteen people in a rock bar in the 20th arrondissement, and Bourseiller took notes there, as he questioned French figures of the movement, from Alain Laurent to Vadim Asadov.
The prose of Christophe Bourseiller flows like a feuilleton and punctuates its climaxes with the timing of an excellent humorist. It is a map of a political continent that the French reader knows very little about. The bookseller in 1980 asked six hundred dollars for the bag, and evidently this book is worth every cent.
The article The Saga of the Libertarians, the Hate of the State in Command first appeared on Lythrum Press.
