While fear itself is not always the product of irrationality, once experienced it tends to lead away from reason, especially if the experience is extreme in duration or intensity. When people are fearful they tend to be willing to irrationally surrender their rights.

Thus, fear is a threat to rational liberty. The psychology of fear is an essential component of those who would have us believe we must increasingly rely on the elite who manage the apparatus of the central government.

The statement “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin. It is clear, people seek out safety and security when they are in a state of fear, and it is the result of this psychological state that often leads to the surrender of liberty.

The elaboration of a systematic theory of liberty has been rare enough, but exposition of a theory of strategy for liberty has been virtually nonexistent.

Indeed, not only for liberty, strategy toward reaching any sort of desired social goal has been generally held to be catch-as-catch-can, a matter of hit-or-miss experimentation, of trial and error.

Yet, if philosophy can set down any theoretical guidelines for a strategy for liberty it is certainly its responsibility to search for them. But the reader should be warned that we are setting out on an uncharted sea.

The responsibility of philosophy to deal with strategy — with the problem of how to move from the present (any present) mixed state of affairs to the goal of consistent liberty — is particularly important for a libertarianism grounded in natural law. For as the libertarian historian Lord Acton realized, natural law and natural-rights theory provide an iron benchmark with which to judge — and to find wanting — any existing brand of statism.

Étienne de La Boétie[1] has been best remembered as the great and close friend of the eminent essayist Michel de Montaigne, in one of history's most notable friendships. But he would be better remembered, as some historians have come to recognize, as one of the seminal political philosophers, not only as a founder of modern political philosophy in France but also for the timeless relevance of many of his theoretical insights.

Étienne de la Boétie was born in Sarlat, in the Périgord region of southwest France, in 1530, to an aristocratic family. His father was a royal official of the Périgord region and his mother was the sister of the president of the Bordeaux Parlement (assembly of lawyers). Orphaned at an early age, he was brought up by his uncle and namesake, the curate of Bouilbonnas, and received his law degree from the University of Orléans in 1553. His great and precocious ability earned La Boétie a royal appointment to the Bordeaux Parlement the following year, despite his being under the minimum age. There he pursued a distinguished career as judge and diplomatic negotiator until his untimely death in 1563, at the age of thirty-two. La Boétie was also a distinguished poet and humanist, translating Xenophon and Plutarch, and being closely connected with the leading young Pleiade group of poets, including Pierre Ronsard, Jean Dorat, and Jean-Antoine de Baif.

In the spring of 1979, a fateful – and fatal – shift took place in the direction and strategic vision of our leading libertarian institutions: foundations, youth movements, journals, etc. The shift was a classic leap into opportunist betrayal of our fundamental principles.

The early, pre-1976 days of the modern libertarian movement suffered from having no strategic vision at all. For that reason, it scarcely deserved the name of movement; the guiding concept was what I call "educationism": that libertarians write, lecture, teach, and spread the word, and that somehow the victory of liberty would one day magically be achieved. From 1976 on, in contrast, the movement began to flourish under a movement-building, or cadre-building, perspective; the idea was to concentrate on building a movement of knowledgeable libertarians, of men and women who would be deeply committed to hard-core libertarian principle.