A convention should be judged first by what it accomplished, and the body that met in Grand Rapids accomplished more than its sharpest critics will credit. The case for the convention, stated as charitably as the record permits, is substantial.

The episode separates the libertarian idea — the lowercase-l, a tradition reaching back roughly twenty-five centuries — from the Libertarian Party — the capital-L, a coalition organized in a Westminster, Colorado, living room on December 11, 1971. It walks through the foundational commitments of the libertarian tradition, sketches its intellectual lineage from Cicero through the present, surveys five live conversations within the tradition, narrates the founding of the party

This three-part feature exists to ask what should happen there, what is likely to happen there, and what either outcome would mean. The first piece cannot begin at the convention. It has to begin at a distance from the convention, with the most basic question: what is being claimed, and by whom, when someone uses the word libertarian?