Godkin’s Law

The Nation turns 150 this year. (Specifically in July, but they’re celebrating it this week; see also Jesse Walker’s piece on the topic.)

In the 19th century, The Nation was, broadly, a classical liberal magazine, and a successor to anarchist William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist paper The Liberator. Its founder and editor, E. L. Godkin, was a mixed bag; here he is in Jekyll mode and here he is in Hyde mode.

Godkin’s hysterical condemnation of anarchists in the second piece is rather ironic, given both his magazine’s anarchist origins and his praise, in the first piece, for France’s “select group of orthodox economists that still reverence the principles of Turgot and Say” – a group whose leader at that time was Molinari.