Emile Durkheim said that when all of the members of a tribe or clan come together, they can sanctify the sacred and experience a spiritual “effervescence.” Friedrich Hayek suggested that certain genes and instincts still dispose us toward the ethos and mentality of the hunter-gatherer band,...

Gavin Kennedy has written a review of Daniel B. Klein, Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 2012; softback 2013), to appear in the Adam Smith Review (vol. 8). This is a reply that will be published alongside Kennedy's review. In the book, Klein elaborates...

With his book The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future, Charles C.W. Cooke aims is to get good policy – or, at least, better policy – to work as good politics. The vehicle of the good politics, for Cooke, is the constellation of...

Articulate knowledge entails the triad: information, interpretation, and judgment. Information is the reading of the facts through a working interpretation. Much of modern political economy has miscarried by discoursing as though interpretation were symmetric and final. This move has the effect...

This brief research memo collects quotations from David Hume's works about reason as a passion — specifically, a calm passion. The collection shows that after A Treatise of Human Nature, which Hume disavowed, the dichotomy between reason and passion pretty much falls away, and, instead, reason...