From the Etymology section of the wiki entry on Libertarianism:
QuoteThe word stems from the French word libertaire. The use of the word "libertarian" to describe a set of political positions can be tracked to the French cognate, libertaire, which was coined in 1857 by French anarchist Joseph Déjacque who used the term to distinguish his libertarian communist approach from the mutualism advocated by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.[11] Hence libertarian has been used by some as a synonym for left anarchism since the 1890s.[12] The term libertarianism is commonly considered to be a synonym of anarchism in countries other than the US.[9] Albert Jay Nock and H.L. Mencken were the first prominent conservatives in the US to call themselves "libertarians," which they used to signify their allegiance to individualism and limited government, feeling that Franklin D. Roosevelt had co-opted the word "liberal" for his New Deal policies, which they opposed.[13]
Not the best source I know, but I'm feeling to lazy at the moment to walk over to the book shelf and type up a better history of the term.
I lean more towards Stirnerism and European-style individualist anarchism, though I don't like to describe myself in those terms, or any reified role generally. I read Reason (though I don't really like John Stossel) and there are many American style Libertarians that I have enjoyed reading, and often absorbed much of into my own weltanschauung/analysis, such as the aforementioned Mencken, Szasz, Karl Hess, Gerry Reith, Robert Anton Wilson, L.A. Rollins, etc. etc. etc. I don't know, I could go on and on, but probably shouldn't.
Robert Anton Wilson once said "I would call myself a Libertarian, but I just can't bring myself to hate the poor." and I can definitely understand where he was coming from. Curiously, towards the end of his life, he advocated a system of worker controlled, anarcho-syndicalist factories/industries trading with each other in an anarcho-capitalist free-market system. Murray Rothbard used to go on and on that no left-anarchist he had ever met could answer the "Auban question" put forth in John Henry Mackay's novel
The Anarchists, which in essence asked the left-anarchists: in their proposed free society, would people who wanted to own private property and engage in free market transactions be permitted to do so, and if they weren't to be permitted, how could you call them free? Robert Anton Wilson, probably drawing on Rothbard's repeated use of the Auban question to dismiss non-capitalist anarchists as authoritarian, seems to have answered it quite nicely, but nobody seemed to notice.
But yeah, I've drawn inspiration from the works of anti-authoritarian thinkers of all stripes, especially if they espouse an unorthodox or heterodox version of anti-authoritarianism. I've taken inspiration from many authoritarian theorists as well, I just usually find much less of the totality of their works useful to my thinking.
