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...

This is the editors’ introduction to a special issue of Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization on Adam Smith, David Hume, liberalism, and esotericism, consisting altogether of 14 articles. Following the important work of Arthur Melzer, we offer a brief introduction to esotericism,...

On regular issues of policy reform—presupposing a stable integrated polity— Hume, Smith, and Burke were liberal in the original political meaning of “liberal.” Thus, on policy reform, although they accorded the status quo a certain presumption (as any reasonable person must), the more...

This piece shows conclusively that in the 1770s Adam Smith and others christened their political persuasion ‘liberal’ by affixing a political meaning to the word 'liberal'. Liberalism 1.0 was indeed Smithian liberalism. The bodies of evidence: (1) the non-occurrence in English prior to 1769...

Iain McGilchrist richly explains the right and left hemispheres of the brain, how each functions and what each tends to do. This paper serves, firstly, as a primer to McGilchrist’s fascinating exposition. Second, it offers a formulation that uses a spiral to structure the iterative and layered...