Adam Smith was allegorical, knowingly and profoundly, but after him things went downhill, or even dropped off a cliff. From science anxieties many liberals spurned allegory, touting foundations, facts, science, etc. But we see in their discourse, notably on the economic system as cooperation,...

This text was the basis for a presentation of the book Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 2012). The lecture discusses the richness of knowledge, the distinction between concatenate and mutual coordination, and the relation of these to a liberal...

As many have argued, libertarianism as idea and movement contains strands that often conflict, beg questions, or try our sensibilities. There are in fact multiple libertarianisms. Two leading theorists of modern libertarianism are Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard. Both pupils of Ludwig von...

The present 77 page document is my set of notes used in a five-part reading group on Larry Siedentop's great book Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. The document contains a link to the set of videos online

On regular issues of policy reform—presupposing a stable integrated polity— Hume, Smith, and Burke were liberal in the original political meaning of “liberal.” Thus, on policy reform, although they accorded the status quo a certain presumption (as any reasonable person must), the more...

This piece shows conclusively that in the 1770s Adam Smith and others christened their political persuasion ‘liberal’ by affixing a political meaning to the word 'liberal'. Liberalism 1.0 was indeed Smithian liberalism. The bodies of evidence: (1) the non-occurrence in English prior to 1769...