2024/12/12 by Andrew W.M. Smith · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Political Economy and Marxism
paper · doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwae058
openalex publication_date 2024/12/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Vapourware is a term often used in the tech world to describe much-anticipated trinkets, puffed up with promise, which ultimately end up beset by real-world problems: supply-chain issues, unresolvable bugs, or the collapse of finance. As the tech magazines of the 1980s remind us, ‘vapourware begets vapourtalk’.1 There is a whiff of vapourware—and certainly of vapour talk—about the schemes analysed in Raymond Craib’s swashbuckling story of libertarian political experiments from the 1960s to the present day. The vapourware in question was Galt’s Gulch, an imagined town from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and a model scheme for enthusiastic ideological fellow-travellers, Cold Warriors, and contemporary tech moguls. Craib describes these grand plans as a search for ‘libertarian exit’—in which radically individualist politics met with extreme wealth to turn an intoxicating disregard for the fundamentals of the social contract into a mooted escape from the nation-state. It introduces us to the sometimes-unbelievable bravoes of the anti-communist mercenary and intelligence world, Craib invites us to their dinner tables alongside radical political theorists and frustrated moneymen. Their wild claims of influence, espionage, and brutality were matched only by the schemes they hashed out in atmospheric restaurant booths and the shooting ranges of right-wing ranches.