Journalist and libertarian historian dies after fall near San Francisco Bay

Brian Doherty, a journalist, historian of the libertarian movement and longtime senior editor at Reason magazine, died after an apparent fall near the San Francisco Bay, colleagues said. He was 57.

Doherty was found dead Friday morning a Battery Yates, a historic military site in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area near Sausalito, according to Reason. 

The fall is believed to have occurred Thursday evening after he attended an art gathering atop the former coastal defense battery overlooking the bay, the magazine reported.

In recent years, Doherty had experienced health setbacks that required him to walk with a cane, which colleagues said may have contributed to the accident.

For more than three decades, Doherty built a reputation as one of the most prominent chroniclers of libertarian thought and its often colorful personalities.

“Brian was the historian of the libertarian movement,” David Nott, president of the Reason Foundation, said in the magazine’s obituary. “He lovingly and comprehensively portrayed the colorful characters in the libertarian world.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1968 and raised largely in Florida, Doherty studied journalism at the University of Florida before moving to California in the mid-1990s. He joined Reason in 1994 and went on to write six books, including “Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement,” widely considered a definitive account of the ideology’s modern development.

His work extended beyond political history into the counterculture that shaped much of the West Coast. Doherty chronicled underground comics in his 2022 book “Dirty Pictures,” which examined the network of artists who transformed comic art during the 1960s and ’70s. Earlier, he wrote “This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground,” documenting the origins of the Nevada desert arts festival that grew out of Bay Area counterculture circles.

Friends recalled his deep involvement in the Cacophony Society, a loose collective whose pranks and happenings helped inspire events such as SantaCon and influenced the early development of Burning Man.

“Brian’s contributions to the art scenes in L.A. and San Francisco were monumental,” artist and performer Chicken John Rinaldi, a close friend, said in the obituary. “His passing leaves so many people and so many systems impoverished.”

In his reporting and books, Doherty explored libertarian philosophy alongside fringe cultural movements, from early Bitcoin enthusiasts to experimental art collectives. Colleagues said that curiosity defined both his work and his life.

“Libertarians talk a lot about freedom and responsibility,” Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward said. “Brian embodied both.”