George H. Smith, the brilliant libertarian philosopher and historian, died April 8 in Bloomington, Illinois, where he had lived for many years. He was 73.
George was probably best known for his book Atheism: The Case against God, published in 1974 and still in print, but he spent more time over the past 50 years on his libertarian scholarship. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a frequent lecturer at seminars of the Cato Institute and the Institute for Humane Studies and at other libertarian conferences.
George’s early writings and lectures were on philosophical topics, but around 1982, when we needed a lecturer on American history for the Summer Seminar in Political Economy, we asked George if he could do the lectures. And then he delivered three brilliant lectures on liberty in American history. After hearing his lectures on a topic we had not known him to be an expert on, Ed Crane said, “Why don’t we just have George do all the lectures?”
One attendee at the seminar in those years, Nashville entrepreneur Crom Carmichael, told us, “These lectures are great, but you’re only reaching 75 people. You need to scale up.” Not long afterward he created Knowledge Products and hired George to conceive, write, and edit what ended up being dozens of professionally produced audio lectures on philosophy, history, economics, and current affairs. Some of the tapes were read by professional readers, but the narrators also included Charlton Heston, George C. Scott, Louis Rukeyser, Lynn Redgrave, and Walter Cronkite.
George was well known as a philosophical anarchist. See his introduction to a collection of work by Lysander Spooner and this essay on “rational anarchism.” But he was deeply knowledgeable about the whole of classical liberal thought, as he demonstrated in his 2013 book from Cambridge University Press, The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism. From 2010 to 2020 he wrote some 300 essays on liberal thought — from Aristotle and Aquinas to Adam Smith and the American Revolution to abolitionism and Ayn Rand (and hmmm, that’s just the A’s) — for Libertarianism.org.
George wrote for libertarian and freethought magazines but rarely for the popular press. He did write an op-ed for the New York Times in 1992, defending the right of the Boy Scouts of America to refuse membership to atheists. He could also be quite a wit. I remember a Cato Summer Seminar in 1990, when the Hubble Telescope had just launched and had been discovered to have a faulty mirror. George remarked, “This is a Randian nightmare: it’s a telescope that can’t focus.”
George Hamilton Smith was born February 10, 1949, to parents Frank and Juanita Smith. He grew up mostly in Tucson, Arizona, and attended the University of Arizona, where he organized a Students of Objectivism club before leaving without a degree. In his book Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies, George says he became an atheist by the time he was 16. When he saw Rand on the Tonight Show around that time, and she casually said that of course she was an atheist, he was impressed and sought out her books. And that’s what led him first to Objectivism and then to libertarianism. In 1971 he moved to Los Angeles, where he became fast friends with Roy A. Childs, Jr., another young libertarian autodidact also born in 1949. As he explained in his introduction to a posthumous collection of Roy’s writings on anarchism, when he prepared to return to Arizona, Roy wanted him to stay:
He asked if I would stay if he could get a contract for me to write a book on atheism. I replied: “Sure, Roy, I have no academic credentials, and I’m leaving in five days. Sure, get me a book contract, and I’ll stay.”
Roy got him the contract. George was 22. He spent a couple of years writing, and Atheism: The Case against God was published in 1974.
George Smith lived the difficult life of an independent scholar for 50 years, with hardly ever a salary for the work at which he was so brilliant. In March 1990 he wrote for Liberty magazine a denunciation of libertarian academics at state universities as “libertarians on welfare.” Maybe there were times during those 50 years that he wished he had pursued a more conventional intellectual career. But he remained true to his own values throughout his life.
Find lots more George H. Smith content at Libertarianism.org, and there’s a broader bibliography here.
