Category Archives: Talks and Papers

Images of Liberty and Power: State Propaganda and its Subversion

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IHS Advanced Studies Summer Seminar, “Liberty & Scholarship: Challenges and Critiques” Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, PA.

Date: 13-19 June, 2015

Lectures on:

  1. “The Classical Liberal Tradition – A History of Ideas and Movements over 400 Years” – two lectures
  2. “Images of Liberty and Power: State Propaganda and its Subversion”
  3. “Competing Visions of the Future: Socialist and Classical Liberal”

Lecture 2. “Images of Liberty and Power: State Propaganda and its Subversion”

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(Arthur Hiller, “The Americanization of Emily” (1964))

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Competing Visions of the Future: Socialist and Classical Liberal

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IHS Advanced Studies Summer Seminar, “Liberty & Scholarship: Challenges and Critiques” Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, PA.

Date: 13-19 June, 2015

Lectures on:

  1. “The Classical Liberal Tradition – A History of Ideas and Movements over 400 Years” – two lectures
  2. “Images of Liberty and Power: State Propaganda and its Subversion”
  3. “Competing Visions of the Future: Socialist and Classical Liberal”

Lecture 3. “Competing Visions of the Future: Socialist and Classical Liberal” – PDF 6MB and HTML

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Bastiat’s use of Literature in Defense of Free Markets

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Date: 14 April, 2015

“Literature IN Economics, and Economics AS Literature I: Bastiat’s use of Literature in Defense of Free Markets and his Rhetoric of Economic Liberty.”

A paper given at the Association of Private Enterprise Education International Conference (April 12-14, 2015), Cancún, Mexico. HTML and PDF.

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The fountain dedicated to Molière on the rue de Richelieu, Paris where the publishing firm Guillaumin was located. They published all of Bastiat’s books.

Abstract: In this paper I will show how one economist used literature in creative and amusing ways to assist him in defending free trade and free markets from their intellectual and political opponents in France during the 1840s. The economic journalism which Frédéric Bastiat produced at this time is some of the best ever written and is still a model for economists today. His knowledge of both high and low French culture and literature was extensive, drawing upon the plays of Molière and the fables of La Fontaine at one end of the spectrum, as well as the political drinking songs and poems of Béranger at the other. These are all examples of Bastiat’s use of “literature in economics”.

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The Economics of Robinson Crusoe from Defoe to Rothbard

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Date: 14 April, 2015

“Literature IN Economics, and Economics AS Literature II: The Economics of Robinson Crusoe from Defoe to Rothbard by way of Bastiat.”

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A paper given at the Association of Private Enterprise Education International Conference (April 12-14, 2015), Cancún, Mexico. HTML and PDF. An earlier working title was “Robinson Crusoe and Praxeology: A History”.

Abstract: Daniel Dafoe’s novel The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Marriner (1719) has provided economists and social theorists with a rich and seemingly infinitely broad canvas on which they can paint whatever picture they like of the nature of economic activity. In addition to Dafoe’s own economically informed, English Protestant original story, there have been Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, neo-classical, as well as Austrian accounts of the activities of the man ship-wrecked on the Island of Despair. These have been termed “Robinsonades” or “Crusoe economics.”

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