The Niskanen Center has been busy adding to its Advisory Board and enlisting new Adjunct Fellows to provide strategic and intellectual guidance as we continue to grow. I’m delighted to introduce our newest affiliates.
Virginia Postrel is one of America’s most consistently surprising and illuminating thinkers about politics and culture. Author of The Future and Its Enemies, The Substance of Style, and The Power of Glamour, Virginia pairs a refined sense of the aesthetic and symbolic aspects of market culture with a commanding capacity for incisive economic and political analysis, which she displays in regular columns at Bloomberg View. She writes:
Expanding freedom means respecting the power and constraints of psychology, culture, history, and institutions, not redesigning society on a blank sheet of paper. It also requires thinking creatively about where and how incremental policy improvements are possible. By combining practical incrementalism with deep thinking about the meaning and purpose of liberty, the Niskanen Center promises to reinvigorate libertarian policy and enrich the broader political debate.
We’re honored that Virginia has joined the Niskanen Center Advisory Board.
Jacob T. Levy is the Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University in Montreal. An authority on liberalism, federalism, and the thorny politics of multicultural and religious pluralism, Jacob is among his generation’s leading political theorists. He is the author of The Multiculturalism of Fear and, most recently, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom. Jacob writes:
Hayek famously insisted he was not a conservative. Neither am I; and neither are the thinkers of the Niskanen Center. I am excited to see such a strong push toward reclaiming libertarianism’s potential as a truly liberal and truly progressive set of ideas. In the face of ugly racism and populism in politics, we need a tolerant, cosmopolitan libertarian alternative. And confronted with the threat of climate change, we need to think carefully and creatively about market-friendly solutions that take seriously the magnitude of the problem. I welcome the addition of the Niskanen Center’s voice.
We welcome Jacob as both an Adjunct Fellow a member of our Advisory Board.
Matt Zwolinski is Associate Professor of Philosophy at San Diego University, author of Arguing about Political Philosophy, a popular textbook, and co-author (with John Tomasi) of the forthcoming Libertarianism: A Progressive Intellectual History, which maintains that libertarianism is, at its core, a progressive force for the liberation of the oppressed and vulnerable. The impresario behind the Bleeding Hearts Libertarian blog, Zwolinski is a leading authority on the nature of economic exploitation and a lucid expositor of the neglected progressive dimensions of classical liberal thought. In recent work, he has made a libertarian case for replacing America’s unwieldy patchwork of welfare transfer programs with a universal basic income. Of Niskanen, Zwolinski says,
With its important work on refugees and immigration policy, climate change, and social welfare policy, the Niskanen Center is helping to bury the false idea that libertarianism is merely a fringe version of conservatism, and to put forward an intellectually serious and relevant libertarian alternative to the ideological status quo.
Matt also joins us as an Adjunct Fellow and member of the Niskanen Center Advisory Board.
Kevin Vallier is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University. Kevin’s book, Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation is a pathbreaking exploration of religious liberty and liberal toleration. His next book, Must Politics Be War: In Defense of Public Reason Liberalism, argues that we ought to aspire to a politics of peaceful public negotiation and mutual accommodation and seek political institutions that can be justified to all reasonable people, despite disagreements about fundamental questions. Vallier says:
The Niskanen Center promises to help liberty-lovers figure out how to arrive at more libertarian policies in our present, non-ideal, and extremely complicated policy environment, fulfilling a pressing, practical need for realpolitik within a movement that is frequently hampered by its insistence on ideological purity.
We’re thrilled to welcome Kevin as an Adjunct Fellow.
Scott Winship is the Walter B. Wriston Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a widely published and cited expert on economic mobility, inequality, and anti-poverty policy. Scott has been a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a senior policy advisor at Third Way, and research manager of the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Winship says:
I am excited to help the Niskanen Center as it seeks to develop a philosophically grounded antipoverty policy and to formulate ways to increase upward mobility that leverage markets. I look forward to it being a unique and vital voice in these policy debates.
The Niskanen Center is grateful to have Scott as a member of our Advisory Board as we set forth on our new initiatives in poverty alleviation and economic mobility.