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More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.comFore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.comA NEW CREDO OF FREEDOM 73with ambitious spending programs that would stimulate the economy.Unlike older economists Keynes was unconcerned about deficit spending,which he saw as a temporary measure to prevent small recessionsfrom spiraling into deeper depressions. His timing could not have beenbetter. Professors and politicians alike were casting about for explanationsof and solutions to the economic malaise that gripped the globe. By1940 Keynes’s ideas had triumphed in both academia and government,making supporters of laissez-faire seem like relics from a bygone era. 12Indeed, to counter Keynesian economics, many of Rand’s Willkiegroup reached for arguments popular during America’s Gilded Age inthe late nineteenth century. The British economist Herbert Spencerand his great American disciple, William Graham Sumner, were particularfavorites. Most contemporary social scientists considered boththinkers hopelessly out of date. “Spencer is dead,” the Harvard sociologistTalcott Parsons declared in his seminal 1937 work, The Structure ofSocial Action. 13 But Spencer was very much alive for Nock, who identifiedas a “Spencerian Individualist” and modeled Our Enemy, the Stateon Spencer’s 1884 book, The Man versus the State. In 1940 Nock helpedrepublish Spencer’s volume, claiming in the introduction, “This pieceof British political history has great value for American readers.” It wasthis copy of Spencer that Rand had in her personal library, the pagesthoroughly marked up. 14That this older tradition should persist, to be encountered anewby Rand during her political awakening, is not surprising. As RichardHofstadter and other historians have detailed, arguments for laissezfairesaturated American society in the late nineteenth century, permeatingboth the intellectual climate of small-town America andcommanding respect at the nation’s most prominent universities.Sumner was among Yale’s most popular (if controversial) teachers, andSpencer “was to most of his educated American contemporaries a greatman, a grand intellect, a giant figure of thought.” 15 Educated or wellreadAmericans in the 1930s and 1940s would have had at least a passingfamiliarity with the ideas of Sumner, Spencer, and other laissez-fairetheorists, for they constituted a significant part of the American intellectualtradition.Moreover, there seemed to be an almost natural structure to procapitalistthought. The writings of Spencer and Sumner, launched as