I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Larry J. Sechrest 329
they were both members of the Peace and Freedom Party in the 1960s, encouraged me not
only in my student radicalism, but also in my desire to write a doctoral dissertation on
Marx, Hayek,—and—Rothbard. I’m only sorry that Murray didn’t live to see my published
work on Rand, which greatly interested him, or my Total Freedom, which devotes half of
its contents to a discussion of his important legacy.
And so: that’s not only how I became a libertarian . . . but also how I’ve become a
libertarian scholar.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra is founding co-editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies and a visiting
scholar in the New York University Department of Politics.
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LARRY J. SECHREST
BURKE, RAND, AND ROTHBARD
If one can be born an anachronism, I was. I first saw the light of day in Detroit, Michigan,
and my earliest memory—at the age of three or four—is of being taken to nearby Belle Isle
where I was permitted to wander about an old wooden schooner named the J.T. Wing. Ever
since I have been fascinated by sailing ships. My childhood fantasy was to be a designer of
such ships, but since they were no longer economically viable, there was no demand for
that sort of expertise. Therefore, I decided to do the next best thing: become a career naval
officer whose sidelines would include designing sailing yachts and writing about maritime
and naval history.
By the time I was twelve, my family had moved to Texas, and it was in the Dallas area
that I spent four years in the U.S. Naval Sea Cadets, a sort of seagoing Boy Scouts dedicated
to preparing boys for naval service. I was well on my way to the U.S. Naval Academy when,
as a senior in high school, I decided to pursue a career in theoretical physics rather than
join the Navy. I spent my first three years at the University of Texas at Arlington as a physics
major, but graduated in 1968 as a history and philosophy major.
This switch caused me to have some strange elective courses. I would imagine that
very few history or philosophy majors take courses in abstract algebra, thermodynamics,
or quantum mechanics, but I did. Why the radical change? As I grew older, my interest in
political philosophy and related disciplines also grew. Therefore, I left the physical sciences
and math for the humane sciences.
This may have been a satisfying change from an intellectual standpoint, but I soon
found out that there was little in the way of economic rewards offered to someone with my