Libertarianism first emerged as a right-wing movement.

1. Origins: radical and anti‑authoritarian, not primarily right‑wing

The earliest organized statements that scholars point to as proto‑libertarian — for example the Levellers' An Agreement of the People — were radical republican documents demanding self‑ownership, legal equality, and limits on government, traditions more commonly associated with the political left than with modern right‑wing movements ^[1]. Historians and encyclopedias also trace a strong 19th‑century anti‑authoritarian current—social anarchists and libertarian socialists—who used the label "libertarian" to describe left‑wing, anti‑state politics ^{[2] [5]}.

2. Classical liberal antecedents complicate left/right labels

At the same time, classical liberal figures such as John Locke, Adam Smith and other Enlightenment thinkers supplied philosophical foundations—individual rights, property, spontaneous order—that later became central to many strands of libertarian thought, making its genealogy crosscut both contemporary left and right categories ^{[3] [4]}. The Stanford Encyclopedia and other academic accounts stress that libertarianism inherits from the classical liberal tradition and therefore cannot be cleanly pigeonholed into a single spot on the modern left–right axis ^[4].

3. The 20th‑century American shift toward market‑oriented, right‑leaning libertarianism

The political identity of "libertarian" shifted notably in mid‑20th‑century America, when journalists and intellectuals hostile to New Deal expansion and to centralized planning popularized free‑market and limited‑government versions of liberty; figures and institutions such as Leonard Read’s Foundation for Economic Education, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and the rise of modern libertarian publications and networks helped cohere a market‑oriented, often right‑leaning movement ^{[6] [7] [8]}. By the 1950s and later, what Americans called libertarianism became commonly associated with free markets and minimal state—positions that aligned it with right‑of‑center politics in the U.S. context ^{[6] [2]}.

4. Organizational politics: parties, projects and the Tea Party absorption

Institutional developments reinforced the rightward tilt in the United States: the Libertarian Party formed as an organized political force in 1971, and by the early 21st century libertarian ideas had merged with some conservative and populist currents—most visibly elements of the Tea Party—so that a public image of libertarianism as right‑leaning took hold in U.S. partisan politics ^{[9] [2]}. Nevertheless, the movement remains internally diverse: Free State Project activism and other groups show a spectrum of tactical and ideological aims within libertarianism ^[10].

5. A plural tradition: left‑libertarianism persists and matters

Scholars emphasize that left‑libertarian and socialist‑libertarian currents have continued across centuries and regions, often dominant in European contexts and in labor and ecological movements, and contemporary academic debates distinguish left‑ from right‑libertarianism on questions of property, capital and redistribution ^{[5] [4]}. Therefore, while a significant and influential strand of modern libertarianism is right‑of‑center—especially in the U.S.—the label itself historically encompasses left, classical liberal, and right variants rather than originating strictly as a right‑wing movement ^{[2] [5]}.

Conclusion: nuance over a binary claim

The simplest answer is that libertarianism did not "first" emerge as a right‑wing movement; its origins are plural—rooted in radical anti‑state left currents, classical liberalism, and later 20th‑century free‑market intellectual networks that pushed a right‑leaning variant into prominence in the U.S.—so blanket claims that it began as right‑wing misstate both its early history and its continuing internal diversity ^{[1] [3] [6]}.