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Isabel Paterson
Author and editor (1886-1961) · Canada · On the map · Writers · Died at 74
Isabel Paterson was a Canadian-American libertarian writer and literary critic. Historian Jim Powell has called Paterson one of the three founding mothers of American libertarianism, along with Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand, who both acknowledged an intellectual debt to Paterson.
Isabel Paterson is read about 45 times a day, in 14 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 24 September 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 60 days, one point a day.
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Paterson's best-known work, The God of the Machine (1943), a treatise on political philosophy, economics, and history, reached conclusions and espoused beliefs that many libertarians credit as a foundation of their philosophy. Her biographer Stephen D. Cox (2004) believes Paterson was the "earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today." In a letter of 1943, Rand wrote that "The God of the Machine is a document that could literally save the world ... The God of the Machine does for capitalism what Das Kapital does for the Reds and what the Bible did for Christianity."
