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...

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

This paper explores concepts under a rubric termed “jural,” the meaning of which is differentiated from “legal.” Within the conceptualization of the modern nation-state, there are two categories of jural relationships. In the first, both parties have equal jural standing (equal-equal),...

The policing of “information” is the stuff of Naziism, Stalinism, Maoism, and similar anti-liberal regimes. To repress criticism of their dicta and diktats, anti-liberals label criticism “misinformation” or “disinformation.” Those labels are instruments to crush dissent. This paper...

The name Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847) is little known outside of Sweden, but the volume Freedom in Sweden: Selected Works of Erik Gustaf Geijer (Timbro, 2017) translates choice works and presents Geijer to modern readers. In this essay we provide an introduction to Geijer (pronounced...

Ostension is the act or process of showing, as in showing a child a fossil while saying “fossil.” Here collected are 59 quotations about language, discourse, ostension, and semantics. A theme is the “facts are theory-laden” spiral between language and discourse, between explananda and...

The appeal of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) has moved with openness to non-foundationalism. This paper is devoted to providing evidence of that bivariate relationship. The paper stems from a 2018 article, “Dissing The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” I have pared down the quotations and...

Scholars distinguish between gratitude, which involves not only appreciation of benefit but a positive feeling directed to the benefactor, from gratefulness, which does not necessarily involve any benefactor, much less a feeling toward one (‘I am grateful for the warm sunshine.’). I suggest...