Initially sponsored by the University of Chicago Chapter of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, the New Individualist Review was more than the usual "campus magazine." It declared itself "founded in a commitment to human liberty." Between 1961 and 1968, seventeen issues were published which attracted a national audience of readers. Its contributors spanned the libertarian-conservative spectrum, from F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to Richard M. Weaver and William F. Buckley, Jr.

In his introduction to this reprint edition, Milton Friedman--one of the magazine's faculty advisors--writes that the Review set "an intellectual standard that has not yet, I believe, been matched by any of the more recent publications in the same philosophical tradition.