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Codevilla, Anthony. The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do about It . New York: Beaufort 2010. Pp. xxvi, 150. Index. 978-0825305580. $12.99. Paper. I Class is a libertarian issue. When today’s believers in free markets hear someone mention “class struggle,” they may be tempted to think of Karl Marx. The rhetoric of class conflict has been largely Marxist during the past century. But students of libertarian history know that classical liberals Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer pioneered class analysis before Marx (he gave them credit for doing so). Class was a central feature of the work of such libertarian stalwarts as Franz Oppenheimer, Albert Jay Nock, and Frank Chodorov. Class theory formed the heart of libertarian and one-time SDS leader Carl Oglesby’s neglected classic, The Yankee and Cowboy War . An article on class theory was featured in the very first issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies . And class analysis has continued to be an aspec...

Of the thinkers and writers commonly identified today as market-oriented left-libertarians (that is, leftists —opposed to workplace hierarchies, cultural authoritarianism, arbitrary exclusion on the basis of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and aggressive war—who are also market-oriented libertarians —opposed to aggression against people’s bodies and justly acquired possessions), almost all are anarchists; Chris Matthew Sciabarra is perhaps the only relatively visible one who’s not. The question is: how contingent is this connection ? It is possible, for instance, that many left-libertarians have been influenced by Murray Rothbard, and that they affirm both anarchism for something like Rothbard’s reasons for doing so and left-libertarianism on the view that it’s a logical extension of Rothbard’s views. But this explanation wouldn’t cover those whose links with Rothbard are, like mine, pretty tenuous. And it would really just push the fundamental question back a step, in any ca...