Via Egnatia

 In my previous post , I provided some thoughts about the ability of the institutional university to supply the holistic educational experience necessary for what it provides to be called a liberal education. That post was an attempt to think institutionally about the points made by Alex regarding liberal education. I am going to continue that form of inquiry by looking at an institutional equivalent of economics: the economist. While it is possible for economics to be liberal, what does it mean for economists to be liberal? Let us return briefly to Cardinal John Henry Newman’s conception of liberal education. For education to be liberal, it must be holistic. The student must gain insight into the interconnectedness and necessity of all the disciplines and not just the major object of their studies. While a liberal education does not guarantee a virtuous person, it does provide the opportunity for a mature person: one that has (some) grasp on the world and society. Therefore, the...

Because economists spend so much time analyzing markets, prices, and related phenomena, it is easy to get the impression that economics is a science of wealth.  That is, economics is defined by its subject matter: the production and distribution of commodities.  But as I previously argued , this conception of economics is needlessly limited.  Economics has many valuable things to say about markets and market-supporting institutions.  But it is not confined to these topics.  Rather, economics is the way of thinking that generates those insights. It is the science not of action in markets, but action as such. The universalization of economics is the theme of Professor Israel Kirzner’s sagacious essay on the history of economic thought, The Economic Point of View .  Kirzner acknowledges that the activities of merchants “are of specific interest for the economic perspective on social phenomena” but economists have often disagreed about why mercantile activit...

“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...

Recently, Alex defined his understanding of liberaleducation and a rgued for the place of economics among the liberal arts . I want to continue this focus by considering the idea of the university and its role in defining and continuing the liberal arts. To borrow a phrase, I want to talk about education and the institutions in which education takes place. If a liberal education served as the universal system of higher education, then the role of the university was the transmission of the knowledge necessary for such an education. In his defense of liberal education, Cardinal John Henry Newman adopts this fact as the motivating characteristic of the university and notes that the object of its deliberation is the student and not the advancement of the sciences. Alex’s previous posts bring to our consideration a type of higher education system focused on knowledge for its own sake which leads by happy coincidence to the growth of the student. Cardinal Newman agrees : “Certainly ...

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...

What makes economics a liberal discipline?   It is time to tackle this question head-on.   As it turns out, what many detractors of economics point to as evidencing its illiberality is actually the key to its liberality.   I am speaking about the rationality postulate : the fundamental assumption economics makes with respect to human behavior, and how it can be made intelligible. First, we need to make clear what rationality is not .   Rationality does not mean that people never make mistakes.   And it does not mean they are “lightning calculators of pleasure and pain.”   These careless accusations are strawmen.   Admittedly, economists bear some of the blame for this misunderstanding.   Graduate textbooks of microeconomic theory present a set of conditions for rationality that are as unlikely to obtain as they are irrelevant to human decision-making. Rationality is actually very simple.   When economics assumes people are rational, it i...

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...