Some Thoughts on Why It is So Hard to Persuade Non-Liberals, and What We Might Do About It.
The Freedom Center and Spring 2022 FC Talks series presents Deirdre McCloskey (University of Illinois, Chicago).
Deirdre is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, adjunct in classics and philosophy, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard in the 1960s as an economist, she has written twenty-four books and some four hundred academic and popular articles on economic history, rhetoric, philosophy, statistical theory, economic theory, feminism, queer studies, liberalism, ethics, and law. She is well-known, among many works, for her 2019 Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All, and her massive economic, historical, and literary trilogy, The Bourgeois Era (2006, 2010, 2016).
Abstract
Liberalism is so obviously the philosophy of non-enslavement, or “adultism,” he right as David once put it to Say No, that it is hard for liberals to understand how anyone would prefer toi live under enslavement to a husband or church or experts in Washington and be a perpetual child who must say, uh, yes I said yes I will Yes. Yet many, even most, do. Why is that? We can discuss various hypotheses, and better if we are to persuade our statist friends. Liberty is “conservative,,” and is actually authoritarian. Liberalism is social Darwinism, and hates the poor. States are usually very nice, such as in Sweden. It’s scary to be an adult. The state has all these goodies and I want mine. The state has experts who must know what they are doing. King and country are lovely. It’s wonderful to be a slave. Et cetera. Yes, such stances are incredible. But if we just sneer we’re not going to change anyone’s mind.
Event Contacts
Kaveh Pourvand
kpourvand@email.arizona.edu
