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Samuel Gregg, Director of Research at the Acton Institute, returns to Liberty Law Talk to discuss the prospects for globalization in the wake of populist uprisings in many western democracies.
This Liberty Law Talk is a discussion with Samuel Gregg about his most recent book, Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future. Recent events in Cyprus, to say nothing of the economic stasis that envelopes much of Europe, highlight America's need to think deeply about the current trajectory of our fiscal and entitlements policies, among other weighty matters. Gregg's book, however, is not merely a rehashing of dire spending problems and bankrupting entitlements and the predictably poorer future this promises, but is a discussion of the social and cultural commitments that are required to…
This edition of Liberty Law Talk is a conversation with Samuel Gregg, Research Director of the Acton Institution, on his latest book, Wilhelm Röpke's Political Economy. Röpke's name is not frequently mentioned in the parade of great free market economists of the twentieth century. This is unfortunate, for those who know Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises may not be aware of this German economist who was as fluent in history, philosophy, and classical languages as he was in economics. One of the leading postwar German thinkers whose ideas guided Germany's free market economic revival, Röpke approached business cycle theory, international…
The number of contradictory positions associated with the words “liberal” and “liberalism” have led some to conclude that such expressions are now so unstable in their meaning that they lack sufficient descriptive power of any lasting significance. Of course, the same could be said of terms used to describe most modern political positions, including “conservatism” and “socialism.” Liberalism, however, seems particularly amorphous inasmuch as the phrase is associated with figures as apparently different in their starting points and conclusions such as Friedrich Hayek and John Rawls, but also David Hume and Immanuel Kant.
Or is it? In his new book Free Market Fairness, the political philosopher John Tomasi challenges and seeks to overcome some of the internal divisions among those who ascribe to the liberal nomenclature. Rather than attempting a synthesis of competing schools of liberal thought, Tomasi outlines what he is very careful to specify as a “hybrid” (87) political theory that draws upon classical liberalism and libertarianism on the one hand, and what he calls high or left liberalism on the other. Tomasi does not seek to somehow ground classical liberal institutions on the basis of left liberal moral imperatives, or vice-versa. Instead he argues for what he calls market democracy as a “justificatory hybrid . . . which combines insights from the classical and liberal traditions at the level of moral foundations” (95).
