Isabel Paterson

Isabel Paterson
BornIsabel Mary Bowler
(1886-01-22)January 22, 1886
Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada
DiedJanuary 10, 1961(1961-01-10) (aged 74)
Montclair, New Jersey, U.S.
OccupationNovelist, journalist, philosopher, literary critic
NationalityCanadian/American
Period20th century
Subjectjournalism, philosophy, literary criticism

Isabel Paterson (January 22, 1886 – January 10, 1961) was a Canadian-American libertarian writer and literary critic. Historian Jim Powell has called Paterson one of the three founding mothers of American libertarianism, along with Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand, who both acknowledged an intellectual debt to Paterson. Paterson's best-known work, The God of the Machine (1943), a treatise on political philosophy, economics, and history, reached conclusions and espoused beliefs that many libertarians credit as a foundation of their philosophy. Her biographer Stephen D. Cox (2004) believes Paterson was the "earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today." In a letter of 1943, Rand wrote that "The God of the Machine is a document that could literally save the world ... The God of the Machine does for capitalism what Das Kapital does for the Reds and what the Bible did for Christianity."[1]

  1. ^ Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner (New York: Dutton, 1995), 102.