Isabel Paterson | |
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| Born | Isabel Mary Bowler January 22, 1886 Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada |
| Died | January 10, 1961 (aged 74) Montclair, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, journalist, philosopher, literary critic |
| Nationality | Canadian/American |
| Period | 20th century |
| Subject | journalism, philosophy, literary criticism |
| Part of a series on |
| Libertarianism |
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| This article is part of a series on |
| Libertarianism in the United States |
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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]
- ^ Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner (New York: Dutton, 1995), 102.