Our First Anniversary

"This issue marks the beginning of the second year of the publishing of LEFT AND RIGHT. If the Nation can celebrate its centennial and National Review its tenth year of existence, we may be permitted a modest celebration of our own first anniversary. In a sense, our own longevity is already more remarkable than theirs. We began as an act of faith, a leap in the dark, unblessed then or now by the largesse of Boston Brahmins, oil millionaires, advertising by the military-industrial complex, or indeed by any donations whatever. So far we have been able to bear this condition without com- plaint, and without sending periodic pleas and exhortations for funds to our subscribers. But not only have we always existed on a shoestring; we did not begin, as did the other publications, as full-blown representatives of a flourishing popular and intellectual movement. We began with no eager army of laissez-faire liberal readers, as did the Nation, or of embattled Conservatives, as did National Review.  In fact the main reason for our birth was a conviction by our editors and a tiny handful of colleagues that it was not possible that we could be the only people in the country with our particular political and ideological position. Hence our launching as a leap in the dark, as an almost desperate search for people who agree or might come to agree, in whole or in significant part, with our ideological outlook.  LEFT AND RIGHT began, not in answer to the clamor of an eagerly receptive market of readers, but in a fervent search for a market that should be there, but which seemed to be non-existent. In particular, we hoped to be able to detach individualist libertarians from their thralldom to a Conservative Movement that had become the major enemy of their own ideals and principles; and, furthermore, to try to infuse into the often instinctively libertarian New Left an increased knowledge of economics and an appreciation of a truly free-market economy."