Month: November 2022

When we launched the Niskanen Center in January 2015, we happily identified ourselves as libertarians. Sure, we were heterodox libertarians, but there are many schools of libertarianism beyond those promoted by Charles Koch’s political operations. The school we identified with was a left-libertarianism concerned with social justice (a libertarian perspective that I’ve defended in debates with more orthodox libertarians here and here). That worldview lacked an institutional voice …

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Nowadays, many along the political spectrum seem to agree that America increasingly has become a polarized society. Ideological and public policy discourse has been gravitating more toward the extremes: progressives and the Democratic Party with a more explicitly socialist rhetoric and proposed government agenda, and conservatives and Republicans who increasingly appear to be moving in …

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Are these good or bad times for liberalism? On the domestic front, after eight years of the Reagan administration and a presidential campaign in which liberalism became the ‘L-word,’ they seem to be bad times indeed. The same can be said of Margaret Thatcher of Britain. But elsewhere, especially in the communist world, events and …

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Liberalism is a term much misunderstood. Political philosophers and political parties have played fast and loose with the concept. Does liberalism refer to the political thought of John Locke, Herbert Spencer, and Friedrich Hayek, who believed individual liberty was the ultimate political ideal? Or does it refer to the ‘modern liberalism’ of Franklin D. Roosevelt …

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There has been a major revival of interest in contract theory since the early 1970s that shows no immediate sign of abating. New, sophisticated innovation of the idea of social contract are accompanied by some highly technical and, in many cases, very elegant developments of contract argument, some of which are presented by Marxists, once …

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Recognition has both a normative and a psychological dimension. Arguably, if you recognize another person with regard to a certain feature, as an autonomous agent, for example, you do not only admit that she has this feature but you embrace a positive attitude towards her for having this feature. Such recognition implies that you bear …

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A number of strands in contemporary politics turn on the need, sometimes the demand, for recognition. The need, it can be argued, is one of the driving forces behind nationalist movements in politics. And the demand comes to the forth in a number of ways in today’s politics, on behalf of minority or “subaltern” groups, …

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I am never quite sure what people mean when they talk about ‘identity politics.’ Usually, though, they bring it up to complain about someone else. One’s own political preoccupations are just, well, politics. Identity politics are what other people do. Read more

On paper, we’re supposed to realize that identity categories aren’t that big a deal, that all those boundaries that supposedly divide us are in fact rather porous: Race is more or less a constructed fiction, male and female brains overlap a great deal, the very concept of the nation-state, and therefore nationalism itself, is a …

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Is there any such thing as the Cusan view of the relationship between faith and reason? That is, does Nicholas present us with clear concepts of fides and ratio and with a unique and consistent doctrine regarding their interconnection? If he does not, then the task before us is surely an impossible one: viz., the …

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