Books

Paterson, along with Ayn Rand ("The Fountainhead") and Rose Wilder Lane ("The Discovery of Freedom"), is known as one of the three founding mothers of modern American Libertarianism, each for a masterpiece published in 1943. Laid in to this (jacketless) first printing (the "copyright edition") is a five-page typed letter, on stationery of the "Books" section of the New York Herald Tribune, to aviator, author and journalist Wolfgang Langewiesche, signed in pencil by author Paterson. She had sent the aviator a review copy, hoping his practical knowledge of aviation would allow him to comment on her comparison of human liberty and the human use of power in practical matters of aviation; she here responds to his reply. Langewiesche had written "I think that there is still hope for personal liberty in America; whereas you think that there is not." She replies "I am perfectly convinced that there is no hope what ever now of averting and enormous internal convulsion - in two words, civil war - in the near future. . . . Furthermore, the democratic process can do nothing else but produce a tyranny of that type. It always did, does, and will; it must, by physical laws which are unalterable." 292 pp.