I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

334 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
gave me a psychological predisposition toward libertarianism. Our house had perhaps
two hundred books in it and a limited number of records (although we had access to a
good public library system).
The culture in which I grew up was non-academic, and in substance it bore the influence
of the indoctrination that the British received during the Second World War. It was
also distinctive because of its religious pluralism: my mother was a devoted member of the
Church of England; my brother had become a Catholic convert when he was studying at
Oxford; my sister had become an evangelical Christian when she was at horticultural college,
while I had been sent—for reasons that I do not understand—to an evangelical
Christian Sunday school, and was (briefly) converted when I was about eleven. After attending
a private elementary school, I was sent to a Quaker secondary school, a residential,
co-educational school which offered a number of places paid for by the County’s Educational
Authority, and which I was able to attend without paying fees.
It used to be said that the Church of England was the Conservative Party at prayer;
British Quakers represented something like left liberalism at prayer—although there was
not much prayer going on, and in a religious instruction class, some surprise was registered
when I expressed interest in hearing a systematic theological defense of the views of the
Society of Friends. All this had some strange personal consequences, in that my upbringing
was quite conservative, and at the very point when one might well rebel against established
views, I found that the established views at school were, politically, on the left. The result
of all this was that I became a somewhat timid, personally conservative non-conformist—in
the sense of being unwilling to go along with established ideas and combining kind of
morally driven for established values with a strong individualism and anti-authoritarianism
in my personal attitudes. At the same time, the diversity of religious views to which I had
been exposed led me into an interest in the problem posed by a diversity of claims to truth,
and with how this should be intellectually resolved.
At British schools, one specializes in the last two years of study, and I specialized in
history, mathematics and chemistry. Our careers adviser suggested that I might study
economics, and with the intention of doing this I applied to and was accepted by the London
School of Economics. The B.Sc. (Econ) degree required that, in the first year, one studied
five different topics, and in addition to economics, I took courses in political science, history,
mathematics and logic. Economics I found utterly unappealing.
It was taught like a Kuhnian “normal science,” and used deadly dull text-books by
Lipsey and Samuelson. It so happened that the logic course was taught by Alan Musgrave,
now a Professor of Philosophy at Dunedin in New Zealand, and it was taught not in the
deadly dull manner in which logic is often taught, but as a fascinating history of problems,
attempts to solve them, and what the consequences of this were. Of all the subjects that I
was studying, philosophy appealed most. I was able to specialize in philosophy within my
B.Sc. (Econ) degree, and subsequently in my M.Sc.
Philosophy at the L.S.E. was distinctive, because of the way in which the Department
of Philosophy had been formed around Karl Popper. His ideas—and battles about them—
formed the center of my education. Popper, while I do not think his ideas have been fully
successful, has been the major influence on my philosophical views. In particular, I have