Roger J. Williams and the Science of Individuality

Roger J. Williams and the Science of Individuality

It seems to have been in the 1950s that Roger J. Williams began turning up here and there in the libertarian world. This would make a kind of sense, because it was in the ’50s that Williams began publishing the books that one would think might make him and his ideas interesting to libertarians. First there was Free & Unequal: The Biological Basis of Individual Liberty, which came out in 1953, when Williams was 60 years old. Three years later, in 1956, there came Biochemical Individuality.

It seems to have been these two books that won Williams an invitation to address a “Symposium on Individuality and Personality” sponsored in Princeton, New Jersey in September of 1956 by the Foundation for American Studies, which was concerned about what it described as “the problem of man’s freedom in the face of modern society’s seemingly irresistible urge to socialize and regiment the thought and action of the individual.” Other participants in the conference included Felix Morley and Milton Friedman.

Then, more than a decade later, Williams published what is probably his best known book, the only one of his 26 books to be brought out under the imprint of a major New York trade publisher, You Are Extraordinary, which appeared in 1967, when he was 74 years old. In 1973, Murray Rothbard cited all three of these books