From 1920 to 1924, Albert Jay Nock, a libertarian author and social critic, edited a weekly magazine called The Freeman.

Beard, William Henry Chamberlin, John Dos Passos, Thomas Mann, Lewis Mumford, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sandburg, Lincoln Steffens, Louis Untermeyer, and Thorstein Veblen.

[9] The new magazine to be called The Freeman was founded in 1950 through the efforts of John Chamberlain, Henry Hazlitt, and Isaac Don Levine.

All three were dissatisfied with the negative approach of opposing communism and wanted a project that would spread a more positive message.

Levine dropped out before publication began, so Chamberlain and Hazlitt brought in La Follette, who had worked on Nock's Freeman and also at Plain Talk.

The board of the new publication included advertising executive Lawrence Fertig, legal scholar Roscoe Pound, and economists Ludwig von Mises and Leo Wolman.

[11] Chodorov focused the magazine more on economic issues, taking more explicit libertarian stances than the previous editors.

The Freeman is widely considered to be an important forerunner to the conservative publication National Review magazine, which was founded in 1955, and which from its inception included many of the same contributing editors.

[19] During its more than half century of publication, The Freeman featured articles by economists, businessmen, professors, teachers, statesmen (domestic and foreign), students, housewives, free-lance writers, and budding libertarian intellectuals.

[citation needed] The editors of The Freeman have included Hazlitt, Chamberlain, La Follette, Chodorov, Paul L. Poirot, Brian Summers, Charles Hamilton, and John Robbins.

Other contributors in the 1950s included: Barbara Branden, James Burnham, John Dos Passos, Max Eastman, John T. Flynn, F. A. Hayek, Frank Meyer, Raymond Moley, Roscoe Pound, Wilhelm Röpke, Murray Rothbard, Morrie Ryskind and George Sokolsky.

[20] Writers whose work appeared in The Freeman in its final decades included such libertarians as Charles W. Baird, Donald J. Boudreaux, Clarence Carson,[21] Stephen Davies, Richard Epstein, Burton Folsom, Jr., David R. Henderson, Robert Higgs, David Kelley, Tibor Machan, Wendy McElroy, Lawrence W. Reed, George Reisman, Hans Sennholz, Bernard Siegan, John Stossel, George Leef, Thomas Szasz and Walter E. Williams.