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A NEW CREDO OF FREEDOM 73
with ambitious spending programs that would stimulate the economy.
Unlike older economists Keynes was unconcerned about defi cit spending,
which he saw as a temporary measure to prevent small recessions
from spiraling into deeper depressions. His timing could not have been
better. Professors and politicians alike were casting about for explanations
of and solutions to the economic malaise that gripped the globe. By
1940 Keynes’s ideas had triumphed in both academia and government,
making supporters of laissez-faire seem like relics from a bygone era. 12
Indeed, to counter Keynesian economics, many of Rand’s Willkie
group reached for arguments popular during America’s Gilded Age in
the late nineteenth century. The British economist Herbert Spencer
and his great American disciple, William Graham Sumner, were particular
favorites. Most contemporary social scientists considered both
thinkers hopelessly out of date. “Spencer is dead,” the Harvard sociologist
Talcott Parsons declared in his seminal 1937 work, The Structure of
Social Action. 13 But Spencer was very much alive for Nock, who identifi
ed as a “Spencerian Individualist” and modeled Our Enemy, the State
on Spencer’s 1884 book, The Man versus the State. In 1940 Nock helped
republish Spencer’s volume, claiming in the introduction, “This piece
of British political history has great value for American readers.” It was
this copy of Spencer that Rand had in her personal library, the pages
thoroughly marked up. 14
That this older tradition should persist, to be encountered anew
by Rand during her political awakening, is not surprising. As Richard
Hofstadter and other historians have detailed, arguments for laissezfaire
saturated American society in the late nineteenth century, permeating
both the intellectual climate of small-town America and
commanding respect at the nation’s most prominent universities.
Sumner was among Yale’s most popular (if controversial) teachers, and
Spencer “was to most of his educated American contemporaries a great
man, a grand intellect, a giant fi gure of thought.” 15 Educated or wellread
Americans in the 1930s and 1940s would have had at least a passing
familiarity with the ideas of Sumner, Spencer, and other laissez-faire
theorists, for they constituted a signifi cant part of the American intellectual
tradition.
Moreover, there seemed to be an almost natural structure to procapitalist
thought. The writings of Spencer and Sumner, launched as
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