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By Daniel J. Flynn
Journal of Libertarian Studies
September 10, 2025
Abstract
Relying on live-ink letters discovered in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022, this article provides a fresh look at an old controversy: Murray Rothbard’s bitter parting from the inner orbit of Ayn Rand. The correspondence from Rothbard to National Review senior editor Frank S. Meyer pertaining to the Randians details Rothbard’s rollercoaster of responses toward the Collective. The letters on Rand begin shortly before the release of Atlas Shrugged in October 1957 and end after the publication of an unsigned 1961 Newsweek article belittling the novelist. The newly discovered correspondence undermines the persistent claim that Rothbard fabricated unflattering descriptions of the Objectivists in response to their accusing him of plagiarism. The letters, sent long before Nathaniel Branden leveled those charges, reflect the general description of the group in Rothbard’s “Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult,” issued in 1972. The article further details the influence of Meyer’s Moulding of Communists on Rothbard in his structuring of “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.
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On the day of Atlas Shrugged’s release, Murray Rothbard wrote Frank S. Meyer to further justify another about-face on Ayn Rand, a subject the two had previously discussed. “Thanks for trying to save my soul,” he wrote Meyer in the recently unearthed October 10, 1957, letter. “You know, however, that I have always been an extreme libertarian purist, anti-prudence, atheist, natural rightser, Aristotelian, etc. so that whatever shifts I may make in a Randian direction will be a logical development and not any sudden conversion. No matter how much you disagree with her system I think you should hail her as a great genius and system-builder” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Meyer failed to disabuse Rothbard of his enthusiasm. Rand eventually did. Perhaps more accurately, her lieutenant, Nathaniel Branden, especially did.
The story of Murray Rothbard’s close encounters of the Rand kind, first told by Rothbard to a mass audience in 1972, the year of Frank Meyer’s death, has been retold in the Rothbard biography An Enemy of the State (Raimondo 2000, 109–35), in the Rand biographies Goddess of the Market (Burns 2009, 182–84), Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Heller 2009, 295–301), My Years with Ayn Rand (N. Branden 1999, 229–31), and The Ayn Rand Cult (Walker 1999, 28, 33–34), and in countless articles, speeches, and podcasts.
This article offers fresh information on an old story: Rothbard’s contemporaneous observations of his 1950s interactions with Ayn Rand and “the Collective,” the group of admirers who surrounded the novelist. Original, live-ink letters discovered in a Pennsylvania warehouse in 2022, as part of research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, provide Rothbard’s perspective not from more than a decade later or distilled through the intermediary of other authors, but firsthand and conveyed in real time to an older, more experienced friend whom he knew as a skeptic of the burgeoning philosophy of Objectivism. The Rothbard file folder contains, among other items, thirty-five letters between him and Frank and Elsie Meyer, of which six letters from Rothbard pertain directly to novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. This warehouse find came within a larger trove that included scores of folders that hold documents pertinent to other figures of relevance on the postwar American Right. Meyer, an ex-Communist, National Review editor, and exponent of fusionism, met Rothbard in 1954 (as a November 28 letter from Rothbard that year shows) and remained friends with him until Meyer’s death in 1972 (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Atop using his friend as a sounding board in these letters, the younger man relied on him again, in a way that has gone largely unnoticed, when he opted to finally publicize what he had observed and experienced among Rand, Branden, and company.
Many of the charges Rothbard ([1972] 2025) issued against Ayn Rand and her followers in a public way in 1972 he had shared privately with Meyer fifteen years earlier. This included using the word “cult” to describe the group that surrounded Rand, noting their humorlessness, and observing the way emotion frequently overwhelmed reason in their leader in contradiction to her philosophy. In at least one instance, the letters provide an account somewhat different from the one Rothbard gave years later. Two letters present evidence that weighs in Rothbard’s favor in disputes that outlived the various parties involved.
In the passage quoted above, for instance, Rothbard speaks of always subscribing to natural rights and Aristotelian views. For the last sixty-seven years, some Objectivists have claimed that Rothbard swiped his Aristotelianism and beliefs about natural rights from Rand. He did personally acknowledge a “debt” to her in developing his appreciation of Aristotle and natural rights (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 14–15). The idea that this required a hat-tip citation whenever he wrote about such concepts, or that a man with three degrees from an Ivy League institution had been ignorant of Aristotle and natural rights before he entered Rand’s inner orbit, seems like a difficult position to defend. Nevertheless, this conjecture continues to animate discussions many decades after the initial dispute.
“Murray Rothbard never cites Ayn Rand once in any of his works in which he defends Aristotle, in which he defends natural rights, or free will—ideas he clearly got from Ayn Rand without giving her a single citation,” Objectivist writer James Valliant claimed on a 2021 podcast. His interlocutor, Jonathan Hoenig, a Fox News Channel talking head, speculated that Rothbard “largely fictionalized” his accusations against Rand. “It’s a load of bullshit, basically, just designed to denigrate Ayn Rand because he was called out plagiarizing her,” he said to Valliant. “Am I summing it up?” Valliant maintained during the podcast that Rothbard “got Aristotle and natural rights straight from Ayn Rand” (Hoenig and Sotirakopoulos 2021).
But in a postcard to Frank Meyer postmarked October 10, 1957, nine months before Nathaniel Branden originated that charge and shortly before Rothbard became a member of sorts of the Collective, the economist described Aristotelianism and natural rights as long-held, core beliefs (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). The plagiarism charge, heretofore regarded as outlandish by non-Objectivists, would seem even weaker given Rothbard’s words typed months before he faced an accusation he could hardly have prophesied. Furthermore, the imputation that a petty Rothbard libeled Rand and her followers in revenge for their exposure of his “plagiarism” cannot stand based on these letters that sat unnoticed since their receipt in Woodstock, New York, nearly seven decades ago.
Rothbard had detailed privately to Meyer in a December 4, 1957, letter the same notion of a rigid, conformist atmosphere within the Collective which imbued “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; Rothbard [1972] 2025). Any genesis story on Rothbard’s claims cannot, therefore, attribute their origins to Rothbard devising them as a tit-for-tat response to Branden’s charges of plagiarism. This does not mean, as letters presented later in this article demonstrate, that a degree of vengeance did not motivate Rothbard to publicize what he saw and experienced. An August 24, 1958, letter clearly shows Rothbard seeking to engineer a small amount of payback against people he regarded as his slanderers, and an undated letter from 1961 exudes schadenfreude in response to bad press received by the Objectivists (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
Rothbard’s ([1972] 2025) published reflections on Rand and the Collective arrived with the perspective of years removed from her orbit and jaundiced by the events that led to the bitter parting of two figures of massive import among libertarians. His recently discovered correspondence with Meyer snapshots his views, complex and changing from one letter to the next, while he was inside the group. A reader gleans both what attracted him to the novelist and what ultimately drove him away. Once upon a time, long before Rothbard’s public criticism of Rand, as friend Ralph Raico would later put it, “Murray was very enthusiastic about Ayn” (Raico [2013] 2016).
Rothbard Shrugged
Murray Rothbard first ventured into Ayn Rand’s orbit as a twentysomething Columbia University PhD candidate short of his doctorate. Rand biographies claim that the brothers Richard and Herb Cornuelle, both affiliated at various times with the William Volker Fund (which generously supported, among others, both Rothbard and Meyer), took the Ludwig von Mises disciple to her salon-apartment in 1952 (Burns 2009, 144; Heller 2009, 251). Rothbard credited Herb Cornuelle with the introduction (Rothbard 1989, 27).
From a distance, the Circle Bastiat meetings at Rothbard’s apartment and those attended by the Collective at Rand’s apartment looked the same. Both featured advocates of liberty discussing philosophical topics at a high level in Manhattan, a place not as hostile to those ideas as Moscow but nonetheless quite unfriendly to them. The similarities evaporated upon closer inspection. Rothbard, for instance, noted that Circle Bastiat meetups included “song composing, joint moviegoing, and fiercely competitive board games.” He described them as a “helluva lot of fun” (Rothbard 1989, 27). Few ever described the agora of Objectivism at 36 East 36th Street as fun.
Whereas his encounters with Ludwig von Mises in the early 1950s fueled his intellectual output until the end of his days, the young Rothbard found Rand’s dogmatism off-putting and draining. Her tremendous intellect and individualism, however, seduced him into coming back. He first returned for two nights in the summer of 1954. This time, he ventured into her domain accompanied by the Circle Bastiat. Internally, he found himself intellectually taking Rand’s side in her browbeating of George Reisman but rooting for his teenage friend (Raimondo 2000, 110). As he explained three years later to Rand, the visits left him exhausted, depressed, and threatened by a perceived potential loss of independence should he continue to see her (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12–16). So, again, he stayed away.
Three years later, after one of the Circle Bastiat obtained an early copy of Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard, now boasting a PhD in economics from Columbia University, found himself not merely intrigued by but enamored of Rand and her ideas (Heller 2009, 295–96). His vacillation, if nothing else, remained consistent.
He wrote her an especially obsequious fan letter on October 3, 1957, the aim of which seemed, at least in part, to return him to Rand’s good graces. To that end, he emphasized his internal defects to explain what had earlier pushed him away from her. His absence, in other words, stemmed from a problem of his and not of hers. Hyperbole constituted most of this letter that its writer insisted lacked hyperbole. He noted his regret that his mother had been able to read merely Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy but never such a work as Atlas Shrugged, which he called “the greatest novel ever written,” from “a mind that I unhesitatingly say is the most brilliant of the twentieth century” (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12–16). The overstatement here wasn’t necessarily puffery. Rothbard, writing on the day he had finished reading the novel (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12), probably believed much of what he wrote. Countless others, after all, would experience similar exhilaration upon completion of Atlas Shrugged and also regard it as a profound accomplishment.
Rothbard again returned to Rand’s orbit, but for a much longer period than his previous forays. This time, he became not so much a visitor but a member of sorts of the Collective, the small but growing coterie surrounding the Russian immigrant. His letters to Meyer reflect enthusiasm, hesitation, and seeds of the issues that would eventually sunder him from the group.
“We’ve seen Ayn a few times, a couple of times ourselves and once with the whole group,” he wrote Meyer on December 4, 1957. “When Joey [Rothbard’s wife] and I were up there alone, everything went fine, since I asked her questions and she answered them, which is about the only relationship the Randians enjoy having with others: as lecturers. You know I am a 98% Randian: I like their atheist-rationalist-libertarian-Aristotelianism. However, when the group got to Ayn’s a bit of strain set in: in fact, despite her nice words at the end, I could see that fanatical hatred in her eye” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Rothbard had unwisely submitted to a course of what he described to Meyer as “Brandian psychoanalysis” for his “phobia,” identified elsewhere as a fear of travel (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; Heller 2009, 297). Rand lieutenant Nathaniel Branden lacked proper credentials at this point to conduct such treatment (Heller 2009, 297–98), and the information he collected, in providing him potential leverage against jaded or jilted members of the group, made such sessions a conflict of interest. Much of this did not occur to Rothbard at the time, as he described the psychoanalysis to Meyer as “pleasant.” He noted that Circle Bastiat members Ralph Raico and George Reisman also visited Branden to cure their illnesses, and that Reisman’s problem remained unknown to him (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
If Rothbard did not yet grasp the imprudence of turning over personal secrets to a man more interested in collecting and keeping followers for Ayn Rand than in helping his patients overcome various mental health ailments, he at least understood his own place in the Objectivist orbit as tenuous. Part of this involved his wife JoAnn, whose Christianity clashed with Objectivism’s zeal for atheism. “Joey says that she would like to see the day when George, Ralph and I are all cured,” her husband continued in that December 4 letter to Meyer, “and then spit in Nathan’s face and walk out; this would be swell but I’m afraid things will come to a head long before that” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
Rothbard went on to enumerate various points of disagreement between himself and the emerging guru. While Rand had once socialized among peers, to include Isabel Paterson, Ludwig von Mises, and Henry Hazlitt, she increasingly operated in a curated world inhabited by vetted admirers (Burns 2009, 114, 125–32, 141; Heller 2009, 245–51). Despite the subservient tone of his October letter to Rand, Rothbard, though two decades her junior, constitutionally did not fit for long in any such sycophantic environment. The fact that he dared to disagree with and even ridicule her demonstrated this. He wrote to Meyer that while Rand’s belief in natural rights appealed to him, he regarded her extension of them to animals as crazy—and confessed to joking about the natural rights of cockroaches with his clique. Rothbard pointed out his belief, contra Rand, in natural instincts and disbelief, contra Rand, that “everyone on the same intelligence level could do anything in any field on the comparable intelligence plane.” He noted a split on the seemingly uncontroversial idea of making support of children compulsory for parents, which, despite Atlas Shrugged’s reputation as a kid-free zone, Rand endorsed. The group’s harsh rejection of his idea of private courts similarly alienated him, he wrote (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). He claimed in the letter that the Randians joined him in support of private police forces, though Nathaniel Branden later cited that as an idea held by Rothbard that Rand rejected as a recipe for civil war, so it is possible that Rothbard misunderstood (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; N. Branden 1999, 230). He opined to Meyer that “to the Randians no differences are minor, and all are crucial,” and that emotion rather than reason governed many of the leader’s pronouncements (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
To illustrate this controversial point, he juxtaposed Rand’s embrace of her Random House editor, who had rejected her ideas but not her book, with her rejection of a classical liberal whose love of God seemed more powerful than his love for Atlas Shrugged. “Bennett Cerf is ‘really’ and metaphysically a great libertarian because he liked Atlas, even though ‘he doesn’t agree to specific issues,’” Rothbard reported to Meyer as the chief Objectivist’s subjective outlook, “while Leonard Liggio is a son of a bitch because he didn’t like Atlas, and also not really a libertarian” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). This intolerance extended, perhaps especially, to the small but growing group of admirers who imitated Rand: Rothbard further told Meyer in that December 4, 1957, letter that his younger associates, Raico and Bruce Goldberg, drove the Collective “wild with fury” by embracing a “logical positivism” that they integrated with Randian ethics (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). This disagreement set off an explosive conflict.
As Rothbard described it to Meyer, Nathaniel Branden and others at the meeting declared Ayn Rand not only the greatest mind since at least Aristotle, but the greatest person as well. Those who did not share this view, Rothbard noted, they labeled as evil. They further acknowledged that Randians were obligated to collectively spurn any person holding such an evil opinion. Both Raico and Goldberg dissented. They conceded that Rand ranked as one of the greatest minds of the century. They just regarded Ludwig von Mises as her intellectual superior. This set Branden and others off. While this blowup involved Randians and not Rand herself, and Rothbard received the story distilled telephonically from Raico and Goldberg, the tale likely evoked in their older friend a déjà vu of sorts concerning the unease he had felt at Rand’s dressing down of Reisman more than three years earlier (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; Rothbard 1989, 28–29).
By the late 1980s, Rothbard recalled the Goldberg excommunication slightly differently from what he had communicated to Meyer in the December 4, 1957, letter. In Rothbard’s 1989 Liberty article, the question did not pertain to the greatest mind in history. Instead, Branden asks, “Who has been the most intellectually important person in my life?” And to this perfunctory question presupposing rote answers of “Ayn Rand,” Goldberg answers not “Ludwig von Mises,” as Rothbard had told Meyer contemporaneously with the excommunication, but “Ralph Raico,” who followed Goldberg out of the Collective just as a grateful Goldberg had earlier followed Raico into libertarianism (Rothbard 1989, 28–29). Possibly time played mischief with memories of the event. Possibly time allowed for the accumulation of more detail that provided greater accuracy. Possibly what Rothbard wrote to Meyer in 1957 and what he wrote in Liberty in 1989 both happened. What is definite is that in certain details, the depiction of this event in 1957 differed from the depiction of it thirty-two years later.
The December 1957 experience so jarred Raico and Goldberg—the latter of whom four years later would pen a brutal review of Rand’s For the New Intellectual (Goldberg 1961)—that they called Rothbard at two in the morning with their concerns. Rothbard confessed to Meyer in that December 4, 1957, letter an impulse to immediately share this information with him through a morning-part-of-the-night call, of the type regularly dialed and received on Meyer’s farmhouse’s line, but that his financially “embarrassed” situation restrained him (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). “Do you know the Randians are a grim lot?” he continued. “Even at their most friendliest, which we had seen till recently, they are at best genial, never wildly dramatic and humorous in the Grand Tradition. Ayn’s doctrine is that a sense of humor is permissible: provided one [laughs] at one’s enemies” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
Circling the Wagons
A few weeks later, Rothbard, writing in longhand atop a carbon copy of a typed December 28 letter sent to William F. Buckley Jr., asked Meyer to disregard his negative depiction of Rand and her followers from his previous letter. It was, he had since discovered, a misrepresentation. He now knew what they had really meant. And what was that? He did not say. He did fixate on attacks on Atlas Shrugged in the letter to Buckley, so possibly a circle-the-wagons effect hastened the reorientation of Rothbard’s epistolary depictions of the Collective and its leader (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
In the October 3, 1957, letter, Rothbard had offered to Rand to write letters to the editor on behalf of Atlas Shrugged, which he noted he had already done in response to a negative article on the book by former Communist Granville Hicks in the New Leader (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 15–16). He had continued this crusade in the late fall by writing a letter objecting to a review in Commonweal (Raimondo 2000, 120–21).
He had lamented in an October 8 letter to Meyer the critique of Atlas Shrugged by Helen Beal Woodward in the Saturday Review (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Therein, Woodward (1957, 25) had praised Rand’s talent while describing the book as “the equivalent of a fifteenth-century morality play” with “stylized vice-and-virtue characters” that “serve as dummies on which to drape the author’s ideas.” Atlas Shrugged, Woodward wrote, “sets up one of the finest assortments of straw men ever demolished in print.” Rothbard had noted to Meyer, National Review’s “Books, Arts, and Manners” editor, that the “idiot” who wrote that piece also wrote “stupid” reviews for his magazine. The fact that Woodward conceded Rand’s abilities, and fixated less on her ideology than on the notion that her ideology overpowered aesthetics and story and all else, made for a more damaging review than a politicized review in which the prejudices of the critic, rather than the faults of the author, became apparent. He wrote Meyer, “I think I would have preferred an outright leftist attack than this moronic nonsense that makes the book out to be some sort of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
Now, in late December, Rothbard’s ire turned toward the section of National Review that libertarianish Frank Meyer oversaw. Months earlier, Meyer had taken over the “Books, Arts, and Manners” section from Willi Schlamm, after the tempestuous Austrian clashed with his National Review cofounder, William F. Buckley Jr., and fellow senior editor James Burnham. The departure elevated Meyer to editor of the reviews section and facilitated the arrival of Whittaker Chambers, a fellow senior editor who had likely viewed Schlamm’s involvement in the magazine as one reason to rebuff its editor’s repeated invitations to him to join the staff (Tanenhaus 1998, 491–500; Flynn 2025, 218–19). Early in his short National Review tenure, Chambers wrote an infamous, or famous (depending upon one’s perspective), review of Atlas Shrugged that was published in the December 28, 1957, issue. Technically, Meyer oversaw the section that printed the review. However, his newness in the position and the magazine’s desire to hold on to a figure of Chambers’s stature made any potential question of tempering the review moot. An intervention seemed unlikely for another reason: laissez-faire governed Meyer’s editing as well as his economics.
Chambers had already submitted a review of imprisoned Yugoslavian dissident Communist Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, which he demanded the magazine suppress, which it did, until he delivered part two of the review, which he never did. Based on the false supposition of a forthcoming completed Chambers review, Meyer rebuffed, as correspondence from September 1957 shows, attempts by the better-suited Slobodan Draskovich, a Yugoslavian who had witnessed his father’s murder by the Communists and who had spent several years in a Nazi concentration camp, to review his countryman’s book (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Rothbard had noted to Rand in his October 3 letter to her that John Chamberlain, a figure within National Review’s orbit who was far more amenable to Atlas Shrugged’s outlook, might instead review her book for the magazine if Chambers did not produce a review—information likely gleaned from conversations with Meyer (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12–16).
The idea of a Chamberlain rather than a Chambers review necessarily unleashes what-might-have-been, counterfactual histories of the American Right. But, in contrast to his handling of the Djilas volume, Chambers did submit a full review of Atlas Shrugged, one that forever alienated Rand from Buckley, Chambers, National Review, and much of the burgeoning conservative movement. The backup Chamberlain review, which ultimately appeared in The Freeman, prophetically described the book as “so deftly plotted, so excitingly paced, and so universal in its hero-villain intensity, that it will carry its message to thousands who would never be caught dead reading a textbook—or even a difficult article—on economics” (Chamberlain 1957, 56). While Chamberlain mentioned the author’s “dogmatic ethical hardness” (55), his article mainly consisted of elongated quotations from the novel—hardly the stuff to inspire visceral hatred of the type engendered by the Chambers piece.
From labeling Atlas Shrugged “a remarkably silly book” in the second paragraph to judging in the penultimate paragraph that it commands, “To a gas chamber—go,” the Chambers (1957, 594, 596) review struck as less criticism than condescension. For Chambers, Rand owed a debt not to Aristotle but to a less fashionable thinker: Friedrich Nietzsche. Chambers objected in a philosophical sense to what he dubbed materialism informing the work and in a literary sense to caricatures instead of characters populating its pages. He judged, “Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world” (595).
The review had the opposite effect on Rothbard of what Chambers had intended—at least initially. Rothbard’s early December letter to Meyer sounded in places like Chambers’s late December review for Meyer’s section in National Review. In that December 4, 1957, letter, Rothbard had described Objectivism to Meyer as “a little cult, whose ‘mass base’ consists of a corporals’ guard of stupid young Jewish girls,” that appeared “perilously close to outright insanity, if not over the brink” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Yet after reading Chambers’s harsh review, Rothbard rallied around the Randians. “I am surprised and chagrined to find that the only right-wing best-seller of the decade—Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged—has received its most unsympathetic and unfair review in the pages of National Review (Dec. 28),” Rothbard wrote Buckley on the same date in a missive that he shared with Meyer. “It is no wonder that our intellectual and cultural life is dominated by the Liberals” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). The three-page letter to Buckley resembled a three-page April 8, 1956, letter published by Commentary in June of that year in which Rothbard objected to Dwight Macdonald’s snobbish piece in the publication’s pages about the birth of a new magazine, National Review (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Eventually, however, Rothbard adopted a position that, though substantively different, was tonally the same as the one expressed by Chambers so controversially in the pages of National Review.
The Moulding of “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult”
In his December 28, 1957, letter to Buckley, Rothbard cited Chambers’s comparisons of Rand with Adolf Hitler as the “most outlandish error” of his review (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). He came around, judging that “the Rand line was totalitarian,” comparing the movement that coalesced around her to the ones that ultimately surrounded “Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao,” describing Nathaniel Branden as “the Führer,” and labeling Objectivism “a totalitarian Cult” (Rothbard [1972] 2025, 1989, 27–28). This conclusion did not seem a far cry from “To a gas chamber—go.”
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www.lewrockwell.com
Journal of Libertarian Studies
September 10, 2025
Abstract
Relying on live-ink letters discovered in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022, this article provides a fresh look at an old controversy: Murray Rothbard’s bitter parting from the inner orbit of Ayn Rand. The correspondence from Rothbard to National Review senior editor Frank S. Meyer pertaining to the Randians details Rothbard’s rollercoaster of responses toward the Collective. The letters on Rand begin shortly before the release of Atlas Shrugged in October 1957 and end after the publication of an unsigned 1961 Newsweek article belittling the novelist. The newly discovered correspondence undermines the persistent claim that Rothbard fabricated unflattering descriptions of the Objectivists in response to their accusing him of plagiarism. The letters, sent long before Nathaniel Branden leveled those charges, reflect the general description of the group in Rothbard’s “Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult,” issued in 1972. The article further details the influence of Meyer’s Moulding of Communists on Rothbard in his structuring of “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.
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On the day of Atlas Shrugged’s release, Murray Rothbard wrote Frank S. Meyer to further justify another about-face on Ayn Rand, a subject the two had previously discussed. “Thanks for trying to save my soul,” he wrote Meyer in the recently unearthed October 10, 1957, letter. “You know, however, that I have always been an extreme libertarian purist, anti-prudence, atheist, natural rightser, Aristotelian, etc. so that whatever shifts I may make in a Randian direction will be a logical development and not any sudden conversion. No matter how much you disagree with her system I think you should hail her as a great genius and system-builder” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Meyer failed to disabuse Rothbard of his enthusiasm. Rand eventually did. Perhaps more accurately, her lieutenant, Nathaniel Branden, especially did.
The story of Murray Rothbard’s close encounters of the Rand kind, first told by Rothbard to a mass audience in 1972, the year of Frank Meyer’s death, has been retold in the Rothbard biography An Enemy of the State (Raimondo 2000, 109–35), in the Rand biographies Goddess of the Market (Burns 2009, 182–84), Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Heller 2009, 295–301), My Years with Ayn Rand (N. Branden 1999, 229–31), and The Ayn Rand Cult (Walker 1999, 28, 33–34), and in countless articles, speeches, and podcasts.
This article offers fresh information on an old story: Rothbard’s contemporaneous observations of his 1950s interactions with Ayn Rand and “the Collective,” the group of admirers who surrounded the novelist. Original, live-ink letters discovered in a Pennsylvania warehouse in 2022, as part of research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, provide Rothbard’s perspective not from more than a decade later or distilled through the intermediary of other authors, but firsthand and conveyed in real time to an older, more experienced friend whom he knew as a skeptic of the burgeoning philosophy of Objectivism. The Rothbard file folder contains, among other items, thirty-five letters between him and Frank and Elsie Meyer, of which six letters from Rothbard pertain directly to novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. This warehouse find came within a larger trove that included scores of folders that hold documents pertinent to other figures of relevance on the postwar American Right. Meyer, an ex-Communist, National Review editor, and exponent of fusionism, met Rothbard in 1954 (as a November 28 letter from Rothbard that year shows) and remained friends with him until Meyer’s death in 1972 (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Atop using his friend as a sounding board in these letters, the younger man relied on him again, in a way that has gone largely unnoticed, when he opted to finally publicize what he had observed and experienced among Rand, Branden, and company.
Many of the charges Rothbard ([1972] 2025) issued against Ayn Rand and her followers in a public way in 1972 he had shared privately with Meyer fifteen years earlier. This included using the word “cult” to describe the group that surrounded Rand, noting their humorlessness, and observing the way emotion frequently overwhelmed reason in their leader in contradiction to her philosophy. In at least one instance, the letters provide an account somewhat different from the one Rothbard gave years later. Two letters present evidence that weighs in Rothbard’s favor in disputes that outlived the various parties involved.
In the passage quoted above, for instance, Rothbard speaks of always subscribing to natural rights and Aristotelian views. For the last sixty-seven years, some Objectivists have claimed that Rothbard swiped his Aristotelianism and beliefs about natural rights from Rand. He did personally acknowledge a “debt” to her in developing his appreciation of Aristotle and natural rights (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 14–15). The idea that this required a hat-tip citation whenever he wrote about such concepts, or that a man with three degrees from an Ivy League institution had been ignorant of Aristotle and natural rights before he entered Rand’s inner orbit, seems like a difficult position to defend. Nevertheless, this conjecture continues to animate discussions many decades after the initial dispute.
“Murray Rothbard never cites Ayn Rand once in any of his works in which he defends Aristotle, in which he defends natural rights, or free will—ideas he clearly got from Ayn Rand without giving her a single citation,” Objectivist writer James Valliant claimed on a 2021 podcast. His interlocutor, Jonathan Hoenig, a Fox News Channel talking head, speculated that Rothbard “largely fictionalized” his accusations against Rand. “It’s a load of bullshit, basically, just designed to denigrate Ayn Rand because he was called out plagiarizing her,” he said to Valliant. “Am I summing it up?” Valliant maintained during the podcast that Rothbard “got Aristotle and natural rights straight from Ayn Rand” (Hoenig and Sotirakopoulos 2021).
But in a postcard to Frank Meyer postmarked October 10, 1957, nine months before Nathaniel Branden originated that charge and shortly before Rothbard became a member of sorts of the Collective, the economist described Aristotelianism and natural rights as long-held, core beliefs (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). The plagiarism charge, heretofore regarded as outlandish by non-Objectivists, would seem even weaker given Rothbard’s words typed months before he faced an accusation he could hardly have prophesied. Furthermore, the imputation that a petty Rothbard libeled Rand and her followers in revenge for their exposure of his “plagiarism” cannot stand based on these letters that sat unnoticed since their receipt in Woodstock, New York, nearly seven decades ago.
Rothbard had detailed privately to Meyer in a December 4, 1957, letter the same notion of a rigid, conformist atmosphere within the Collective which imbued “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; Rothbard [1972] 2025). Any genesis story on Rothbard’s claims cannot, therefore, attribute their origins to Rothbard devising them as a tit-for-tat response to Branden’s charges of plagiarism. This does not mean, as letters presented later in this article demonstrate, that a degree of vengeance did not motivate Rothbard to publicize what he saw and experienced. An August 24, 1958, letter clearly shows Rothbard seeking to engineer a small amount of payback against people he regarded as his slanderers, and an undated letter from 1961 exudes schadenfreude in response to bad press received by the Objectivists (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
Rothbard’s ([1972] 2025) published reflections on Rand and the Collective arrived with the perspective of years removed from her orbit and jaundiced by the events that led to the bitter parting of two figures of massive import among libertarians. His recently discovered correspondence with Meyer snapshots his views, complex and changing from one letter to the next, while he was inside the group. A reader gleans both what attracted him to the novelist and what ultimately drove him away. Once upon a time, long before Rothbard’s public criticism of Rand, as friend Ralph Raico would later put it, “Murray was very enthusiastic about Ayn” (Raico [2013] 2016).
Rothbard Shrugged
Murray Rothbard first ventured into Ayn Rand’s orbit as a twentysomething Columbia University PhD candidate short of his doctorate. Rand biographies claim that the brothers Richard and Herb Cornuelle, both affiliated at various times with the William Volker Fund (which generously supported, among others, both Rothbard and Meyer), took the Ludwig von Mises disciple to her salon-apartment in 1952 (Burns 2009, 144; Heller 2009, 251). Rothbard credited Herb Cornuelle with the introduction (Rothbard 1989, 27).
From a distance, the Circle Bastiat meetings at Rothbard’s apartment and those attended by the Collective at Rand’s apartment looked the same. Both featured advocates of liberty discussing philosophical topics at a high level in Manhattan, a place not as hostile to those ideas as Moscow but nonetheless quite unfriendly to them. The similarities evaporated upon closer inspection. Rothbard, for instance, noted that Circle Bastiat meetups included “song composing, joint moviegoing, and fiercely competitive board games.” He described them as a “helluva lot of fun” (Rothbard 1989, 27). Few ever described the agora of Objectivism at 36 East 36th Street as fun.
Whereas his encounters with Ludwig von Mises in the early 1950s fueled his intellectual output until the end of his days, the young Rothbard found Rand’s dogmatism off-putting and draining. Her tremendous intellect and individualism, however, seduced him into coming back. He first returned for two nights in the summer of 1954. This time, he ventured into her domain accompanied by the Circle Bastiat. Internally, he found himself intellectually taking Rand’s side in her browbeating of George Reisman but rooting for his teenage friend (Raimondo 2000, 110). As he explained three years later to Rand, the visits left him exhausted, depressed, and threatened by a perceived potential loss of independence should he continue to see her (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12–16). So, again, he stayed away.
Three years later, after one of the Circle Bastiat obtained an early copy of Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard, now boasting a PhD in economics from Columbia University, found himself not merely intrigued by but enamored of Rand and her ideas (Heller 2009, 295–96). His vacillation, if nothing else, remained consistent.
He wrote her an especially obsequious fan letter on October 3, 1957, the aim of which seemed, at least in part, to return him to Rand’s good graces. To that end, he emphasized his internal defects to explain what had earlier pushed him away from her. His absence, in other words, stemmed from a problem of his and not of hers. Hyperbole constituted most of this letter that its writer insisted lacked hyperbole. He noted his regret that his mother had been able to read merely Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy but never such a work as Atlas Shrugged, which he called “the greatest novel ever written,” from “a mind that I unhesitatingly say is the most brilliant of the twentieth century” (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12–16). The overstatement here wasn’t necessarily puffery. Rothbard, writing on the day he had finished reading the novel (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12), probably believed much of what he wrote. Countless others, after all, would experience similar exhilaration upon completion of Atlas Shrugged and also regard it as a profound accomplishment.
Rothbard again returned to Rand’s orbit, but for a much longer period than his previous forays. This time, he became not so much a visitor but a member of sorts of the Collective, the small but growing coterie surrounding the Russian immigrant. His letters to Meyer reflect enthusiasm, hesitation, and seeds of the issues that would eventually sunder him from the group.
“We’ve seen Ayn a few times, a couple of times ourselves and once with the whole group,” he wrote Meyer on December 4, 1957. “When Joey [Rothbard’s wife] and I were up there alone, everything went fine, since I asked her questions and she answered them, which is about the only relationship the Randians enjoy having with others: as lecturers. You know I am a 98% Randian: I like their atheist-rationalist-libertarian-Aristotelianism. However, when the group got to Ayn’s a bit of strain set in: in fact, despite her nice words at the end, I could see that fanatical hatred in her eye” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Rothbard had unwisely submitted to a course of what he described to Meyer as “Brandian psychoanalysis” for his “phobia,” identified elsewhere as a fear of travel (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; Heller 2009, 297). Rand lieutenant Nathaniel Branden lacked proper credentials at this point to conduct such treatment (Heller 2009, 297–98), and the information he collected, in providing him potential leverage against jaded or jilted members of the group, made such sessions a conflict of interest. Much of this did not occur to Rothbard at the time, as he described the psychoanalysis to Meyer as “pleasant.” He noted that Circle Bastiat members Ralph Raico and George Reisman also visited Branden to cure their illnesses, and that Reisman’s problem remained unknown to him (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
If Rothbard did not yet grasp the imprudence of turning over personal secrets to a man more interested in collecting and keeping followers for Ayn Rand than in helping his patients overcome various mental health ailments, he at least understood his own place in the Objectivist orbit as tenuous. Part of this involved his wife JoAnn, whose Christianity clashed with Objectivism’s zeal for atheism. “Joey says that she would like to see the day when George, Ralph and I are all cured,” her husband continued in that December 4 letter to Meyer, “and then spit in Nathan’s face and walk out; this would be swell but I’m afraid things will come to a head long before that” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
Rothbard went on to enumerate various points of disagreement between himself and the emerging guru. While Rand had once socialized among peers, to include Isabel Paterson, Ludwig von Mises, and Henry Hazlitt, she increasingly operated in a curated world inhabited by vetted admirers (Burns 2009, 114, 125–32, 141; Heller 2009, 245–51). Despite the subservient tone of his October letter to Rand, Rothbard, though two decades her junior, constitutionally did not fit for long in any such sycophantic environment. The fact that he dared to disagree with and even ridicule her demonstrated this. He wrote to Meyer that while Rand’s belief in natural rights appealed to him, he regarded her extension of them to animals as crazy—and confessed to joking about the natural rights of cockroaches with his clique. Rothbard pointed out his belief, contra Rand, in natural instincts and disbelief, contra Rand, that “everyone on the same intelligence level could do anything in any field on the comparable intelligence plane.” He noted a split on the seemingly uncontroversial idea of making support of children compulsory for parents, which, despite Atlas Shrugged’s reputation as a kid-free zone, Rand endorsed. The group’s harsh rejection of his idea of private courts similarly alienated him, he wrote (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). He claimed in the letter that the Randians joined him in support of private police forces, though Nathaniel Branden later cited that as an idea held by Rothbard that Rand rejected as a recipe for civil war, so it is possible that Rothbard misunderstood (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; N. Branden 1999, 230). He opined to Meyer that “to the Randians no differences are minor, and all are crucial,” and that emotion rather than reason governed many of the leader’s pronouncements (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
To illustrate this controversial point, he juxtaposed Rand’s embrace of her Random House editor, who had rejected her ideas but not her book, with her rejection of a classical liberal whose love of God seemed more powerful than his love for Atlas Shrugged. “Bennett Cerf is ‘really’ and metaphysically a great libertarian because he liked Atlas, even though ‘he doesn’t agree to specific issues,’” Rothbard reported to Meyer as the chief Objectivist’s subjective outlook, “while Leonard Liggio is a son of a bitch because he didn’t like Atlas, and also not really a libertarian” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). This intolerance extended, perhaps especially, to the small but growing group of admirers who imitated Rand: Rothbard further told Meyer in that December 4, 1957, letter that his younger associates, Raico and Bruce Goldberg, drove the Collective “wild with fury” by embracing a “logical positivism” that they integrated with Randian ethics (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). This disagreement set off an explosive conflict.
As Rothbard described it to Meyer, Nathaniel Branden and others at the meeting declared Ayn Rand not only the greatest mind since at least Aristotle, but the greatest person as well. Those who did not share this view, Rothbard noted, they labeled as evil. They further acknowledged that Randians were obligated to collectively spurn any person holding such an evil opinion. Both Raico and Goldberg dissented. They conceded that Rand ranked as one of the greatest minds of the century. They just regarded Ludwig von Mises as her intellectual superior. This set Branden and others off. While this blowup involved Randians and not Rand herself, and Rothbard received the story distilled telephonically from Raico and Goldberg, the tale likely evoked in their older friend a déjà vu of sorts concerning the unease he had felt at Rand’s dressing down of Reisman more than three years earlier (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.; Rothbard 1989, 28–29).
By the late 1980s, Rothbard recalled the Goldberg excommunication slightly differently from what he had communicated to Meyer in the December 4, 1957, letter. In Rothbard’s 1989 Liberty article, the question did not pertain to the greatest mind in history. Instead, Branden asks, “Who has been the most intellectually important person in my life?” And to this perfunctory question presupposing rote answers of “Ayn Rand,” Goldberg answers not “Ludwig von Mises,” as Rothbard had told Meyer contemporaneously with the excommunication, but “Ralph Raico,” who followed Goldberg out of the Collective just as a grateful Goldberg had earlier followed Raico into libertarianism (Rothbard 1989, 28–29). Possibly time played mischief with memories of the event. Possibly time allowed for the accumulation of more detail that provided greater accuracy. Possibly what Rothbard wrote to Meyer in 1957 and what he wrote in Liberty in 1989 both happened. What is definite is that in certain details, the depiction of this event in 1957 differed from the depiction of it thirty-two years later.
The December 1957 experience so jarred Raico and Goldberg—the latter of whom four years later would pen a brutal review of Rand’s For the New Intellectual (Goldberg 1961)—that they called Rothbard at two in the morning with their concerns. Rothbard confessed to Meyer in that December 4, 1957, letter an impulse to immediately share this information with him through a morning-part-of-the-night call, of the type regularly dialed and received on Meyer’s farmhouse’s line, but that his financially “embarrassed” situation restrained him (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). “Do you know the Randians are a grim lot?” he continued. “Even at their most friendliest, which we had seen till recently, they are at best genial, never wildly dramatic and humorous in the Grand Tradition. Ayn’s doctrine is that a sense of humor is permissible: provided one [laughs] at one’s enemies” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
Circling the Wagons
A few weeks later, Rothbard, writing in longhand atop a carbon copy of a typed December 28 letter sent to William F. Buckley Jr., asked Meyer to disregard his negative depiction of Rand and her followers from his previous letter. It was, he had since discovered, a misrepresentation. He now knew what they had really meant. And what was that? He did not say. He did fixate on attacks on Atlas Shrugged in the letter to Buckley, so possibly a circle-the-wagons effect hastened the reorientation of Rothbard’s epistolary depictions of the Collective and its leader (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
In the October 3, 1957, letter, Rothbard had offered to Rand to write letters to the editor on behalf of Atlas Shrugged, which he noted he had already done in response to a negative article on the book by former Communist Granville Hicks in the New Leader (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 15–16). He had continued this crusade in the late fall by writing a letter objecting to a review in Commonweal (Raimondo 2000, 120–21).
He had lamented in an October 8 letter to Meyer the critique of Atlas Shrugged by Helen Beal Woodward in the Saturday Review (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Therein, Woodward (1957, 25) had praised Rand’s talent while describing the book as “the equivalent of a fifteenth-century morality play” with “stylized vice-and-virtue characters” that “serve as dummies on which to drape the author’s ideas.” Atlas Shrugged, Woodward wrote, “sets up one of the finest assortments of straw men ever demolished in print.” Rothbard had noted to Meyer, National Review’s “Books, Arts, and Manners” editor, that the “idiot” who wrote that piece also wrote “stupid” reviews for his magazine. The fact that Woodward conceded Rand’s abilities, and fixated less on her ideology than on the notion that her ideology overpowered aesthetics and story and all else, made for a more damaging review than a politicized review in which the prejudices of the critic, rather than the faults of the author, became apparent. He wrote Meyer, “I think I would have preferred an outright leftist attack than this moronic nonsense that makes the book out to be some sort of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.).
Now, in late December, Rothbard’s ire turned toward the section of National Review that libertarianish Frank Meyer oversaw. Months earlier, Meyer had taken over the “Books, Arts, and Manners” section from Willi Schlamm, after the tempestuous Austrian clashed with his National Review cofounder, William F. Buckley Jr., and fellow senior editor James Burnham. The departure elevated Meyer to editor of the reviews section and facilitated the arrival of Whittaker Chambers, a fellow senior editor who had likely viewed Schlamm’s involvement in the magazine as one reason to rebuff its editor’s repeated invitations to him to join the staff (Tanenhaus 1998, 491–500; Flynn 2025, 218–19). Early in his short National Review tenure, Chambers wrote an infamous, or famous (depending upon one’s perspective), review of Atlas Shrugged that was published in the December 28, 1957, issue. Technically, Meyer oversaw the section that printed the review. However, his newness in the position and the magazine’s desire to hold on to a figure of Chambers’s stature made any potential question of tempering the review moot. An intervention seemed unlikely for another reason: laissez-faire governed Meyer’s editing as well as his economics.
Chambers had already submitted a review of imprisoned Yugoslavian dissident Communist Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, which he demanded the magazine suppress, which it did, until he delivered part two of the review, which he never did. Based on the false supposition of a forthcoming completed Chambers review, Meyer rebuffed, as correspondence from September 1957 shows, attempts by the better-suited Slobodan Draskovich, a Yugoslavian who had witnessed his father’s murder by the Communists and who had spent several years in a Nazi concentration camp, to review his countryman’s book (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Rothbard had noted to Rand in his October 3 letter to her that John Chamberlain, a figure within National Review’s orbit who was far more amenable to Atlas Shrugged’s outlook, might instead review her book for the magazine if Chambers did not produce a review—information likely gleaned from conversations with Meyer (Mises and Rothbard 2007, 12–16).
The idea of a Chamberlain rather than a Chambers review necessarily unleashes what-might-have-been, counterfactual histories of the American Right. But, in contrast to his handling of the Djilas volume, Chambers did submit a full review of Atlas Shrugged, one that forever alienated Rand from Buckley, Chambers, National Review, and much of the burgeoning conservative movement. The backup Chamberlain review, which ultimately appeared in The Freeman, prophetically described the book as “so deftly plotted, so excitingly paced, and so universal in its hero-villain intensity, that it will carry its message to thousands who would never be caught dead reading a textbook—or even a difficult article—on economics” (Chamberlain 1957, 56). While Chamberlain mentioned the author’s “dogmatic ethical hardness” (55), his article mainly consisted of elongated quotations from the novel—hardly the stuff to inspire visceral hatred of the type engendered by the Chambers piece.
From labeling Atlas Shrugged “a remarkably silly book” in the second paragraph to judging in the penultimate paragraph that it commands, “To a gas chamber—go,” the Chambers (1957, 594, 596) review struck as less criticism than condescension. For Chambers, Rand owed a debt not to Aristotle but to a less fashionable thinker: Friedrich Nietzsche. Chambers objected in a philosophical sense to what he dubbed materialism informing the work and in a literary sense to caricatures instead of characters populating its pages. He judged, “Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world” (595).
The review had the opposite effect on Rothbard of what Chambers had intended—at least initially. Rothbard’s early December letter to Meyer sounded in places like Chambers’s late December review for Meyer’s section in National Review. In that December 4, 1957, letter, Rothbard had described Objectivism to Meyer as “a little cult, whose ‘mass base’ consists of a corporals’ guard of stupid young Jewish girls,” that appeared “perilously close to outright insanity, if not over the brink” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Yet after reading Chambers’s harsh review, Rothbard rallied around the Randians. “I am surprised and chagrined to find that the only right-wing best-seller of the decade—Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged—has received its most unsympathetic and unfair review in the pages of National Review (Dec. 28),” Rothbard wrote Buckley on the same date in a missive that he shared with Meyer. “It is no wonder that our intellectual and cultural life is dominated by the Liberals” (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). The three-page letter to Buckley resembled a three-page April 8, 1956, letter published by Commentary in June of that year in which Rothbard objected to Dwight Macdonald’s snobbish piece in the publication’s pages about the birth of a new magazine, National Review (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). Eventually, however, Rothbard adopted a position that, though substantively different, was tonally the same as the one expressed by Chambers so controversially in the pages of National Review.
The Moulding of “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult”
In his December 28, 1957, letter to Buckley, Rothbard cited Chambers’s comparisons of Rand with Adolf Hitler as the “most outlandish error” of his review (Frank S. Meyer Papers, n.d.). He came around, judging that “the Rand line was totalitarian,” comparing the movement that coalesced around her to the ones that ultimately surrounded “Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao,” describing Nathaniel Branden as “the Führer,” and labeling Objectivism “a totalitarian Cult” (Rothbard [1972] 2025, 1989, 27–28). This conclusion did not seem a far cry from “To a gas chamber—go.”
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Murray Rothbard’s Lost Letters on Ayn Rand - LewRockwell
Abstract Relying on live-ink letters discovered in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022, this article provides a fresh look at an old controversy: Murray Rothbard’s bitter parting from the inner orbit of Ayn Rand. The correspondence from Rothbard to National Review senior editor Frank S...
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