I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Steven Yates 389
a number of conversations with friends who sent me back to Ayn Rand and to the appropriate
section of a top-flight bookstore, where I discovered works such as Murray Rothbard’s
For a New Liberty, Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Henry Hazlitt’s Economics
in One Lesson, and Tibor R. Machan’s anthology The Libertarian Alternative. (If anyone
had told me that Tibor and I would one day be colleagues in the same philosophy department,
at Auburn University, I would have said they were nuts.) These provided perspectives
on the topic of liberty other than Rand’s, whose philosophy of Objectivism differed in
certain respects from libertarianism in any event. Finally I came across two works by
respected academic philosophers: Libertarianism by John Hospers and Anarchy, State, and
Utopia by Robert Nozick. I would also discover the two volumes of The Open Society and
Its Enemies by Sir Karl Popper. I began to devour it all, and to attend a study group led by
a member of the local Libertarian Party.
As a result of this reading as well as my experiences with the sciences and with the
philosophy of science, I became even more convinced that professional philosophy was
where I belonged, and suddenly my goals seemed clear as a sunlit spring morning: attend
graduate school, work toward a doctorate, and then become a professor of philosophy at a
major research university. I set about doing just this.
I became a “lapsed libertarian” in graduate school in the 1980s. I was studying history
and philosophy of science and cognate areas such as epistemology (the branch of philosophy
concerned with the sources, nature and limits of knowledge). My course work was demanding,
and politics was pretty much off my mind. But there were signs of things to come, had
I been looking for them at the time. There were also very early signs of the eventual breakdown
of my commitment to the atheistic, hyperrationalistic libertarianism many libertarians
had inherited from Ayn Rand and her disciples.
After graduation in 1987, which began my full-time pursuit of a tenure-track appointment,
what I ran into was what struck me as an irrational push to get more women into
philosophy. I was told openly at a professional meeting that “our department is under
extreme pressure to hire a woman.” I ran into this again and again. Most of these women
were either unpublished or had publications limited to the small but growing corpus of
radical feminist journals. Some did not even have Ph.D.’s. Combining this with the fact
that I’d had a number of articles and book reviews either in print or forthcoming before
receiving the Ph.D., and was nevertheless bouncing around in non-tenure track positions
from university to university to university year after year, my libertarian sensibilities began
to reawaken. Their impetus was my growing battle with the affirmative action mindset
that lay behind the aggressive push to hire women regardless of their (often marginal)
qualifications.
They awakened fully when I came to Auburn University in 1988, where Tibor Machan
had been teaching for several years. We became friends. He was instrumental in helping
me return following a year of near-unemployment. During that year, a radical feminist the
philosophy department had hired to a tenure-track job nearly tore the department apart.
She had left after one year, having hated everything about the university, the town, the
region (it was the South, after all!) and the climate. With her having washed out, I was able
to return.