George Mason Economics

Kenneth Boulding as an enchanting, encouraging and engaging professor | The Review of Austrian Economics | Springer Nature Link … Please read Boulding link.springer.com/article/10…

When I had the honor of being selected President of MPS, it was during a particularly intense period of the scholarly critique of neoliberalism. In that critique, imho, there were serious misunderstandings about the purpose and history of MPS. I went back to the founding documents and read the history, and drew on my own experiences. The MPS in the neoliberal critique didn’t match any of this: not intent, not history, not practice. At the same time, my study gave me a deeper appreciation both of Lionel Robbins’s work, and the argument being made for true radical liberalism in the aftermath of WW2. I decided to write about this for the opportunities I was given … these talks were published in a variety of outlets and can be found in my Struggle for a Better World. Bottom line, the MPS vision was to create a community of accomplished scholars and intellectuals freely discussing the refinements and reconstruction of the case for cosmopolitan liberalism in the world of the 20th and now 21st century. Cosmopolitan liberalism NOT conservatism; scholarship and dialogue NOT activism was the purpose of MPS. Critics should always make sure to criticize in a way that those being criticize can actually recognize themselves in the narrative being constructed. If critics impose on those being criticized positions and intentions which those who are the subject of the study do not recognize as their position let alone their intentions the critic runs the risk of working with a confirmation bias that blocks understanding and thus cannot achieve what they think they can. We just preferred narratives, not intellectual history.