Circle Bastiat

As a young man [Liggio] became close friends with Murray Rothbard, Ralph Raico, George Reisman, Ronald Hamowy, Robert Hessen, and others who comprised their Circle Bastiat. He literally was present at the creation of the [modern libertarian] movement and helped to make it what it would become.

Ralph attended the Bronx High School of Science, earned a B.A. at the City College of New York, and joined the New York libertarian underground during the 1950s. His friends included Ronald Hamowy, Leonard Liggio, George Reisman, Robert Hessen, and other eager students of liberty. For a while, Ralph and his group, calling themselves the "Circle Bastiat," met for discussions with Ayn Rand's group, "the Collective." Ludwig von Mises invited Ralph to attend his graduate seminars at New York University. Ralph became a close friend of Murray and Joey Rothbard.

In addition to writing and scholarship, [Rothbard] regarded building an activist movement as particularly important to the spread of libertarianism, and in the mid-1950s he was the key member of a libertarian social group in New York City known as the Circle Bastiat, which also included such later libertarian writers, historians, and scholars as Ralph Raico, Leonard Liggio, Robert Hessen, George Reisman, and Ronald Hamowy.