Abstract

At the beginning of the 1990 American libertarian intellectual such as Murray N. Rothbard, Llewellyn Rockwell Jr., and Hans-Hermann Hoppe gave rise to the paleolibertarian movement. Paleolibertarians, who favour laissez-faire in the economic realm but oppose moral relativism, were seeking an alliance with the so-called “paleoconservatives” like Sam Francis, Tom Fleming, Paul Gottfried or Pat Buchanan. The word “paleolibertarian”, first used by Rockwell, had the purpose to recapture the radicalism and the political and intellectual rigor of the pre-war libertarian “Old right”. Rothbard’s death in 1995 was a blow, but paleolibertarians still continued their twofold battle for the defence of the unfettered free-market, developing the methodology of the Austrian School of Economics; and for the defence of the traditional Christian values of the Western Civilization, threatened by the post-modern “liberal” culture, now leading in the political and intellectual elite. Today the paleolibertarians, facilitated by the Internet, have become a rapidly growing intellectual movement. The main centres of diffusion of their ideas are the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn and the website LewRockwell.com, that ranks among the most widely read news website