Dr. Nigel Ashford on Schools of Classical Liberal Thought

I am very excited to see this short series of videos from the Institute for Humane Studies (with whom I am very excited to work this summer) on the various schools of classical liberal thought. I think an overview like this is very important to the budding classical liberal who is confused about where to look in a movement with a vast and broad intellectual history that spans several schools. As Dr. Ashford, who works with IHS, states, “I know some of the things I believe in are wrong, I just don’t know which ones,” and we discover which ones by “listening to people’s disagreements on where they think I’m wrong.” By watching these videos and following these schools back to their intellectual forefathers, people can get an idea of what exactly they believe.

I know that this type of “intellectual humility” was, and still is, very important to my own intellectual development, much of which took place simply by reading wikipedia articles on free markets, liberty, various economic schools, and so forth. Regardless of your political philosophy, I highly recommend checking out these videos.

As Dr. Ashford points out, there are three important questions to answer while thinking about the role of government:

How do we decide what the role of government should be?
Why should government be limited?
What is the legitimate role of government?

All classical liberals agree that government should be limited, but they disagree in how you execute that. How you answer those questions determines which school of thought you fall into. Dr. Ashford’s series covers five primary schools: