Via Egnatia

“Getting and spending, we lay waste to our powers.”    This  line of Wordsworth’s  sums up how many people think about economics.    It is a mean, selfish,  illiberal  discipline.    Perhaps compromise with its teachings is necessary, but it is never desirable.    Economics can never be a peer to disciplines like history, literature, philosophy, or theology.    In other words, economics cannot be humane. Nonsense!   Economics is not a science of wealth, or rather, not primarily a science of wealth.   Economics does have something to say about the production and distribution of commodities, of course.   But this is a consequence of its central teaching, not the teaching itself.   Economics is a science of purposive human action .   It provides a universal logic for interpreting human history .   Because of this, it is an essential component of a liberal worldview.   Economics is indee...

I recently argued economics was a liberal discipline because of the rationality postulate.  Finding rational explanations for human behavior, no matter how bizarre, is an important commitment of a liberal worldview.  A liberal mind is one that is willing to understand, and even sympathize, with practices and cultures radically different from one’s own.  The liberality of rationality lies in its charity.  It keeps the social scientist humble, and the people under investigation human.  This “charitable projection” is a necessary, though not sufficient, component of liberal studies. Committing to rationality places a great burden on the social scientist.  But it is a joy to carry.  Because rationality means taking agents’ plans, expectations, and beliefs seriously, it requires us to get inside their heads.  Not only works of history, but philosophy and theology, are relevant to understand the minds of others.  We need to reconstruct the world...

The phrase “liberal arts” or “liberal education” calls to mind various undergraduate curricula, all centered around the “Great Books” or the “Western canon.”  Institutions such as St. John’s College and educators such as Eva Brann are well-known examples, and deservedly so.  These programs and the books they include have a very specific goal in mind, which differs significantly from most undergraduate courses of study. This goal is concisely expressed in the editor’s introduction to the Harvard Classics library .  Its 50 volumes, first published in 1909, were compiled and edited by Charles Eliot, then-president of Harvard University.  Eliot writes, “My purpose in selecting The Harvard Classics was to provide the literary materials from which a careful and persistent reader might gain a fair view of the progress of man observing, recording, inventing, and imagining from the earliest historical times to the close of the nineteenth century…I was to provide the mean...