Here’s a portion of an old unpublished manuscript (from 2002) that discusses the foreign policy of the so-called Old Right, a coalition of conservatives and libertarians who opposed the aggressive and interventionist foreign policy of the United States after the 1930s. I have been meaning to update this for years, but I’m declaring defeat for now and posting it in case it is useful to anyone.
Here you’ll find mostly a succinct summary of the political thought of some of the more notable anti-interventionist theorists form the 1940s, 50s, and 60s such as John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Frank Chodorov, and some early Murray Rothbard.
The footnotes may be of interest. This was completed before the Mises Institute published Rothbard’s The Betrayal of the American Right, and so lacks a consideration of that content. The primary source material used for background here is Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right and Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right, plus a variety of shorter works. At the time I wrote this, all of the books I just mentioned were out of print and nearly impossible to find. Thanks to the growth of the web and the re-issuance of all these books, my writings on this topic seem far less novel, although I do think it’s a decent short summary of the primary strains of thought in the anti-interventionist foreign policy debate at the time.
A Brief History of the Old Right by Ryan McMaken
5:51 pm on January 7, 2014
