We do not argue that traditional libertarianism is wrong. Instead we claim that, from a broader historical perspective, traditional libertarianism is really not so traditional after all. Neoclassical liberalism, as novel (heretical?) as it may seem to some, has a better claim to that title. The postwar libertarianism of Mises, Rand, and Rothbard crystallized many of the insights of the libertarian intellectual tradition into a coherent body of doctrine for perhaps the first time. But in that process of crystallization not only impurities, but genuine insights were expunged. The result was a philosophic system that brilliantly exhibited some of the key elements of libertarian thought, but that simultaneously severed those elements from their original historical and economic context, and therefore presented them in a way that would have been largely unrecognizable to their intellectual forbears
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