Louis Andrew Rollins received his B.A. degree in philosophy from California State College at Los Angeles in 1970. Throughout the glorious decade that followed he edited and published a sporadic fringe-libertarian newsletter called Invictus: A Journal of Individualist Thought. As a freelance writer he contributed to a number of publications, including some respectable magazines like Playboy, Reason, and Grump, as well as some not-so-respectable (but far more fun) marginal outlets like Samuel Konkin’s New Libertarian, Bob Banner’s Critique, and The Journal of Historical Review.
L.A. Rollins will be best remembered as the author of two books, both of which were originally published by Loompanics Unlimited (where Lou worked as a copyeditor) in the 1980s.
The first of these, which would probably be better described as a tract or monograph, was The Myth of Natural Rights. Still notorious in certain circles, The Myth was a sharply honed attack on the moral and political concept of “natural law,” especially targeting such rebranded iterations of the concept that figured in the writings of libertarian luminaries like Tibor Machan, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard. It’s an underground classic.
Rollins’ second book, Lucifer’s Lexicon, took up the project of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary (albeit in a less universal key) to showcase Lou’s satirical nous, aphoristic flair, and so much wicked wordplay. It was in Lucifer’s Lexicon that Lou memorably defined “Libertarian Movement” as “A herd of individualists stampeding toward freedom.”
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