Virginia Postrel

Who is Virginia Postrel?

Virginia I. Postrel is an American political and cultural writer of broadly libertarian, or classical liberal, views.

She is best known for her non-fiction books, The Future and Its Enemies and The Substance of Style. In the former she explains her philosophy, "dynamism", a forward-looking and change-seeking philosophy that generally favors unregulated organization through "spontaneous order". She contrasts it with "stasis", a philosophy that favors top-down control and regulation and is marked by desire to maintain the present state of affairs. In November 2013, she published a third book, The Power of Glamour, which defined glamour as "nonverbal rhetoric" that “leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.”