Philosophical influences on Thomas Szasz

We would naturally expect Szasz, a libertarian conservative, to have been influenced by, for example, Rousseau, Burke, Hayek, von Mises, Thoreau, Socrates, Camus, Sartre, Mill, Mencken, Seneca, Nietzsche, Stirner, and individualism in general. But this is not entirely the case. As somewhat of a philosophical rogue, his influences were subterranean, selective, and so eclectic that we could almost accuse him of cherry-picking. He could not use many philosophers to his advantage since they mostly accepted the reality of mental illness. Yet in Szasz’s works we detect Popper’s rejection of historicism and social determinism, Russell’s linguistic analysis, Reichenbach’s logical empiricism, Bridgman’s operationalism, Langer’s and Cassirer’s systematic understanding of non-linguistic expressions such as symbols, Kierkegaard’s indirect communication, and Hobbes’s idea that government may not legitimately take away any individual’s rights unless the individual has first freely empowered the government to do so.