LeFevre, Robert (1911–1986)

Robert LeFevre was a libertarian polemicist and an educator. LeFevre founded and operated the first modern school dedicated to libertarian education, called the Freedom School, later renamed Rampart College.

LeFevre, while an anarchist who did not believe in the morality or necessity of any government, rejected the term anarchy because he thought it embraced active attempts to eliminate government, which he thought was as immoral as government itself. He called his antistate philosophy autarchism after the Greek for “self-rule.”

LeFevre worked as an actor, radio broadcaster, door-to-door salesman, real estate speculator and manager, TV newsman, and assistant to a pair of charismatic American cult leaders in a religious movement known as the Mighty “I AM.” He then turned to political activism, originally aligning himself with anticommunist and ...