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The Center for the Study of Government and the Individual (CSGI) at the University of Colorado – Colorado Springs will be co-hosting a series of events entitled Free Societies in Crisis: Perspectives in Classical Liberal Political Economy, in collaboration with the Civitas Institute and Claremont McKenna College. The events will feature a wide range of ideologically, methodologically, and geographically diverse scholars in classical liberal thought and foundational political economy.
Our participants will be examining current-day crises in liberalism through the lenses of foundational thinkers for whom commerce was central to their understanding of liberalism, and whose ideas are most-closely tethered to the Anglo-American political tradition. (e.g. Locke, Trenchard and Gordon, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, Burke, Paine etc). In his classic commentary, The Passions and the Interests, Albert Hirschman shows how our sustained attention to these thinkers’ theoretical assessments of early capitalism will help illuminate its promising features, many of which have been eclipsed by the historical circumstances of the last three centuries. In recent years we have witnessed a renewed interest in the intellectual history of this period, as we now face a crisis not only of our liberal economic order but of the entire liberal philosophy that underlies it.
In exploring the various strands of foundational liberal thought, our project aims to replenish the vitality of a philosophical tradition that is most practically grounded in our current institutions and surprisingly encompasses a wide panorama of so-called progressive and so-called post-liberal perspectives in contemporary discourse. Our presenters will explore the tensions and harmonies between and within the different strands of foundational liberal thought (rights-based, interest-based, sentimental liberalism etc. We trust that a sustained inquiry into these issues and themes will reveal less strict conceptions of liberalism in contradistinction to the narrow constructs associated with the tradition today. Three separate events are scheduled to take place between Fall 2024 and Fall 2025, which will culminate in published articles/chapters for either a special issue in a top-tier journal (e.g. APT, Critical Review, PSR) or an edited book volume (e.g. Princeton University Press, ND Press, MU Press) series.
Click here to view and download the full conference schedule.
