WITH FREEDOM’S FURIES, Timothy Sandefur shows how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand defended individualism and free markets while America was in the grips of Depression and war. Although these three furies have long been identified as the founders of modern American libertarianism, Sandefur treads new ground by exploring their relationships with each other and by tracing the evolution of their thought. All three women offered their own unique defenses of individual liberty, and their disagreements anticipated the differences among libertarians and classical liberals today.
Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, begins with the trio’s literary influences, particularly the novelist Sinclair Lewis. All three, he writes, appreciated how Lewis’ books “expressed the way modern mass culture penalized
