Brian Doherty, In Memoriam

Ivan G. Osorio

Brian Doherty, editor with Reason and historian of the libertarian movement, passed away on Thursday, March 12, in California. His impact on the libertarian movement and on libertarian ideas is well known, but that’s not all he impacted. Brian’s interests extended to the topics of his books—from the Burning Man festival to underground comix to … well, I’m sure he would have written on some new and unexpected thing no one else could predict. 

For me, though, his passing hit closer to home. I first met Brian back in college, when we were both at the University of Florida, in the fall of 1989. We got acquainted through mutual friends, sharing interests in music, absurdist humor, comics, and ideas—including, yes, libertarianism. (I remember one conversation about the mechanics of Masonic handshakes.) We worked at the same record store (the late, great Hyde & Zeke) at different times and later played in a band together. 

Brian first reached a national libertarian audience while interning at Liberty magazine. It was a good fit, an outlet where he could comment on current events with an eye toward the bigger philosophical picture. 

A piece on NAFTA, which was then pending, seems somewhat prescient:

While my ideal for my country is unilateral elimination of trade barriers, regardless of what other nations do, there is no political constituency for such a move now. …

The time to deal protectionism a crushing blow is now—if protectionists win this battle, free traders will have to face a juggernaut that can be halted only with the greatest effort. If NAFTA goes down, protectionism will reign supreme in America’s political life.

After the December 1989 US invasion of Panama, he pointed out this interesting detail: 

On January 29, five weeks into U.S. occupation of Panama, Vice President Dan Quayle told Panamanian officials that they must do away with bank privacy in order to help in the War on Drugs. …

Is this the first time in history an invasion was undertaken in part to force a country to change its banking regulations?

And here’s one particularly philosophical bit from a book review:

Self-governance demands a larger philosophical framework that recognizes the reasons we have for letting people govern themselves, the advantages that accrue in prosperity and happiness. And it needs a concept that defines the boundaries between self-government and the government of others, the concept of rights.

Brian also interned at the Cato Institute, where he later worked as managing editor of Regulation magazine. 

Brian then joined Reason in 1994, with an extended stopover in Gainesville between jobs that summer—and some live shows by our briefly revived band, the Jeffersons, thrown in. He moved to Los Angeles and remained a resident of California for the rest of his life. 

In intervening years, I would get occasional brief updates on his writing of what became Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. Published in 2007, the book is the result of a multiyear endeavor that still stands as the definitive history of the libertarian movement (Cato book forum here).

“To the extent that libertarianism’s history has been told, it has mostly been treated as a weird, overenthusiastic little cousin to right-wing conservatism,” he explained in a Cato Unbound essay shortly after the book’s publication. “Rescuing libertarianism from that sad fate was one of my purposes, and one of the reasons I put the word ‘radical’ in its title—as part of a phrase invented by novelist and libertarian inspiration Ayn Rand to identify her own ideological mission.”

He also had a stint as Warren Brookes Journalism Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where I would later hang my hat as editor before joining Cato. But it was a long way between then and now. 

We communicated more sporadically in recent years, reconnecting every few months when a topic of mutual interest prompted one of us to share an observation that few other people would care about. (Several had something to do with Ritchie Blackmore for some reason.)

And of course, we would meet on his occasional trip to DC. While he spent the rest of his career at Reason, he continued collaborations with Cato over the years, including the 2009 book Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle over the Second Amendment.

We did stay in touch more in the past three years, though. We got our old band back together for a one-off Jeffersons reunion in 2023, part of an evening celebrating the life of another departed friend, Robert Hanrahan. After so many years of us not playing together, the show went surprisingly well, and I hope it was a proper farewell for Robert, among friends. 

Shortly after joining Cato, I took on editing his book Modern Libertarianism: A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States, published just over a year ago, which revisits parts of the story from Radicals for Capitalism and considers events since its 2007 publication. (Cato book forum here.)

In the days since Brian’s passing, it’s been heartening—though not at all surprising—to hear from mutual friends from across the various worlds he inhabited, from family to old Gainesville friends to current and past colleagues. Yet through all the various impressions from different people, he remains recognizable as the same Brian Doherty I knew. 

Brian’s death was a shock, even with the health challenges he had experienced in recent years. But it was not surprising that he was out hiking with friends at the time. Twenty-four hours in a day seemed to be too few for him, and he always seemed to try to do as much in the time that he had—his voracious reading habits were legendary. I just wish that he had had more time with the rest of us here.

His description of Robert Anton Wilson—one of his major influences—in a Liberty book review might apply as well to the review’s author: “he is skilled enough a writer to make the reader feel in their hearts the fierce indignation of which Jonathan Swift spoke on his tombstone—the indignation that lacerated his heart and spurred him to serve human liberty. Any writer that can communicate this feeling is worthy of respect and attention.”