Great Antidote Extra: Daniel Rothschild on Liberalism and Think Tanks

Janet Bufton for AdamSmithWorks

Bufton ponders one of the challenges that faces liberalism: the institutions it needs to work can also work against it.

In a Great Antidote podcast throwback, host Juliette Sellgren interviews Daniel Rothschild, executive director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, about think tanks and liberal institutions.

Rothschild defines institutions broadly as, “the habits, the behaviours, the entities that instantiate [liberal] ideas and behaviours across society.” (25:50 in the podcast) He differentiates between institutions that underlie the liberal order (such as family and civil society) and those that promote the liberal order (such as universities and think tanks).

The reason that a liberal order needs non-political, non-epistemic institutions is that liberalism is a political rather than a personal philosophy.

Liberalism provides us with the best way to organize a civil society, to have workplaces where we can do work that is meaningful and well remunerated, where we can build families, where we can find our tribes…but it doesn't provide us those things in and of themselves. (13:30)

A liberal society is neutral about finding meaning and the pursuit of a good life, so these things have to come from somewhere other than liberal political institutions. As Rothschild points out, authoritarians often attack the institutions where we privately build meaning, such as families, religion, and community groups, with an eye on replacing them with politics and government as “the one thing we do together”.

While a liberal society needs civil society institutions, it struck me that these institutions are not necessarily a force for liberalism or progress. It’s easy to imagine how institutions like religion and the family can be forces for conformity and conservatism rather than openness and pluralism, and how this could undermine liberal norms and behaviours. There is a challenge for liberalism in needing institutions that could work against it.

The other sorts of liberal institutions highlighted by Rothschild are those that are dedicated to “the liberal project”, for example, universities (at least until recently), and liberal think tanks. Universities are, after a millennium of dedication to liberalism, reconsidering their purpose. Universities have bundled many functions in the past, and the bundling of these services is also being reconsidered. What universities will look like once this transition is complete, and whether or not their commitment to liberalism will remain a defining purpose for most or all universities is something we’ll have to wait to see.

The ability of institutions to evolve and adapt, as universities are, gives Rothschild hope. He believes that the Mercatus Center (a think tank) is stepping in to fill some of the gaps that he and his colleagues believe are being left by universities. The family, at its liberal best, has evolved and continues to evolve to accommodate more and more ways of pursuing goals as a household and raising children. And as technology evolves, so do ways to govern ourselves and push back against authority.

All of this got me thinking about a famous Adam Smith quotation,

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.

I’m not sure Smith’s claim jibes completely with the discussion in this episode. There might be more of a role for institutions than Smith allowed. On the other hand, maybe Smith is restricting his consideration to the role of the government, and leaving the rest—as Rothschild says we should—to free people.

There’s much more that could be said about this episode—a great reason to go back and give it a listen.

More by Janet Bufton:
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: Maybe We Can Tweet That!
Why Teach "The Theory of Moral Sentiments?"
A Sense of How to Respond
Great Antidote Extras: Peter Boettke on Don Lavoie and Central Planning
Great Antidote Archive: Ed Glaeser on the Unseen Beauty of Cities

Great Antidote Extra: Daniel Rothschild on Liberalism and Think Tanks

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