Hi everyone, and welcome to The Liberal Project by TaraElla. In this project, we look at the ideas and contributions of great liberal thinkers from various times, and also examine how their ideas are similar, different, or otherwise interact with, the core Moral Libertarian ideal of Equal and Maximum Moral Agency for every individual.
I believe such a project is needed because we need to revive the intellectual and academic side of liberalism. As I have often said, liberalism, being an ideology that has a large footprint in mainstream Western politics, has in recent times overly focused on practical policy, and has neglected developing philosophy, theory and new ideas. Compare liberalism to socialism, which had been marginalized in Western politics until recently, but has an outsized influence in academia and intellectual circles, and you will see what I mean.
Most importantly, liberalism is the thought system that underlies many assumptions of the Western liberal democratic system, so a healthy appreciation of liberalism is needed to keep the system functional.
There needs to be a culture of debating liberal ideas, formulating liberal philosophy and theory, and so on, because that's what will keep liberalism alive in the long term. My Moral Libertarian ideas and theories were developed with this aim, and I hope that, with a revival of intellectual liberalism, there will be others who would do similarly, so that, in the not too distant future, liberalism will be an intellectually engaging, philosophically deep, and overall vibrant ideological scene again. My hope is that, by looking at great liberal thinkers and their ideas, appreciating their profoundness and grandeur, it will inspire us to take on this challenge.
These are the thinkers we want to cover, eventually:
John Rawls
John Locke
Adam Smith
Edmund Burke
John Stuart Mill
Robert Nozick
Milton Friedman
Ludwig von Mises
Ayn Rand
Karl Popper
Friedrich Hayek
Herbert Spencer
Adam Smith
Isaiah Berlin
Amartya Sen
Ronald Dworkin
Joseph Raz
James Buchanan
Bruce Ackerman
Raymond Aron
Ken Galbraith
Wilhelm Ropke
