A Special Edition of Acton Vault featuring Acton Line

This week, we’re bringing you one of the plenary lectures from this year’s Acton University, featuring Bishop Robert Barron speaking on “The Philosophical Roots of Wokeism.”

"Wokeism” is arguably the most influential public philosophy in our country today. It has worked its way into the minds and hearts of our young people, into the world of entertainment, and into the boardrooms of powerful corporations. But what is it precisely, and where did it come from? I will argue in my presentation that “wokeism” is a popularization of critical theory, a farrago of ideas coming out of the French and German academies in the mid-twentieth century. Until we understand its origins in the thinking of Adorno, Horkheimer, Derrida, Marcuse, and Foucault, we will not know how critically to engage this dangerous philosophy.

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One of America’s success stories is its economy. For over a century, it has been the envy of the world. The opportunity it generates has inspired millions of people to want to become American.

Today, however, America’s economy is at a crossroads. Many have lost confidence in the country’s commitment to economic liberty. Across the political spectrum, many want the government to play an even greater role in the economy via protectionism, industrial policy, stakeholder capitalism, or even quasi-socialist policies. Numerous American political and business leaders are embracing these ideas, and traditional defenders of markets have struggled to respond to these challenges in fresh ways. Then there is a resurgent China bent on eclipsing the United States’s place in the world. At stake is not only the future of the world’s biggest economy, but the economic liberty that remains central to America’s identity as a nation.

But managed decline and creeping statism do not have to be America’s only choices, let alone its destiny. In his new book The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World (2022), Samuel Gregg insists that there is an alternative. And that is a vibrant market economy grounded on entrepreneurship, competition, and trade openness, but embedded in what America’s founding generation envisaged as the United States’s future: a dynamic Commercial Republic that takes freedom, commerce, and the common good of all Americans seriously, and allows America as a sovereign-nation to pursue and defend its interests in a dangerous world without compromising its belief in the power of economic freedom.

Samuel Gregg is Distinguished Fellow in Political Economy at the American Institute for Economic Research, and an Affiliate Scholar at the Acton Institute. The author of 17 books—including the prize-winning The Commercial Society (Rowman &Littlefield), Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy (Edward Elgar), Becoming Europe (Encounter), the prize-winning Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (Regnery), and most recently, The Next American Economy: Nation, State, and Markets in an Uncertain World (Encounter), as well as over 400 articles and opinion-pieces—he writes regularly on political economy, finance, American conservatism, Western civilization, and natural law theory. He is a Contributing Editor at Law & Liberty and a Visiting Scholar in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation. He can be followed on Twitter @drsamuelgregg

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In this episode, we’re bringing you a talk from our Acton Lecture Series from 2019.

To be economically literate requires neither formal training nor advanced study. For those with the inclination, the most valuable economic principles can be understood with just a little nurturing of the so-called “economic way of thinking.” In this talk, Dr. Sarah Estelle shares how she sees the economic way of thinking as instructive in some of the ways we can love, too. What does economics have to say about our love for mankind? our neighbors around the globe? the least of these among us? our local communities and families? Integrating a Christian perspective and sound economics, Estelle considers in what cases market exchange can communicate love and in which situations market approaches would only crush it.

Dr. Sarah Estelle is an associate professor of economics at Hope College. Most recently she has undertaken work bridging the principles of traditional Christian teaching and classical liberal economics and especially applying the lessons of economics to the Christian virtue of love, thickly construed. She is the director of Religious Liberty in the States, a brand-new statistical index that measures the legal safeguards for the free exercise of religion in the United States. Dr. Estelle is the founding director of Hope’s Markets & Morality student organization, which explores economic issues through a Christian lens and brings speakers and film screenings to campus to enrich the Hope community’s understanding of markets. Markets & Morality celebrates its 10th year in 2022–23.

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Few technologies are as simultaneously disruptive and controversial as cryptocurrency. Attitudes among businesspeople range from viewing it as way to revolutionize the entire monetary system to seeing cryptocurrency as an inherently valueless asset destined for embarrassing collapse. The recent downfall of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried have fueled this debate further. Dr. Guido Hulsmann provides his perspective on this topic as one of the world's top Austrian economists and experts on the history of money. Michelle Abbs provides her perspective as one of the world's top women in NFTs. This session was a part of our Business Matters 2023 conference.

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The year is 1837. Imagine that you live in Calcutta and a man with a thick Boston accent offers you some ice cream. There is no such device as a refrigerator, much less a freezer, and yet here is a man offering you a cold (and delicious) treat. How did it get there? In this lecture from the 2019 Acton Lecture Series, Dave Hebert explains how ice harvesters in 19th century Boston were able to create their own system of property rights that allowed each person living around a local pond to thicken ice as needed. The result? These entrepreneurs shipped blocks of ice to destinations as far flung as India, opening up a new market to places where ice (and all its benefits) did not exist.

David Hebert graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics from Hillsdale College in 2009, and then attended George Mason University, where he earned a master's in 2011 and a doctorate in 2014. During graduate school, he was an F.A. Hayek fellow with the Mercatus Center and a fellow with the Department of Health Administration and Policy. He also worked with the Joint Economic Committee in the U.S. Congress. Since graduating, he has worked as an assistant professor at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, and Troy University in Troy, Alabama. He was also a fellow with the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, where he authored a comprehensive report on federal budget process reform.

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In this episode, we’re bringing you a talk from our Acton Lecture Series from January 2023, that was co-sponsored by the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

In their own time, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Russell Kirk occupied different ends of the political spectrum. Their philosophies inspired the two most powerful movements of the age: the Nonviolent Movement (which led the larger Civil Rights Movement) and the modern Conservative Movement. Without King and Kirk modern American Social Justice liberalism and modern American conservatism as we know them would not exist. And yet, for all of their differences, our modern politics suffer because contemporary liberalism and conservatism lack the grounding in virtues, communitarian values and faith in an ordered universe that both Kingian Nonviolence and Kirkian Conservatism held fast to. Is it possible that by reacquainting ourselves with these lost traditions we could summon the better angels of left and right and restore a politics of virtue for the modern age?

John Wood Jr. is a writer, podcaster, and noted public speaker nationally recognized as a leading voice on issues of political and racial reconciliation. He is national ambassador for Braver Angels, America’s largest grassroots, bipartisan organization dedicated to political depolarization.

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Today’s episode is a brief one, and takes us back in time to 2000 and the remarks from Sir John Templeton at the Acton Institute’s Annual Dinner. It was at this dinner that Templeton was award the inaugural Acton Institute Faith & Freedom Award for his contributions to civil society as “a pioneering philanthropist with wisdom to understand the tremendous role of faith in the course of human history.”

Beginning a Wall Street career in 1937, he created some of the world’s largest and most successful international investment funds. Templeton, a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA), was known for starting mutual funds’ annual meetings with a prayer. Templeton was knighted Sir John by Queen Elizabeth II in 1987 for his many accomplishments. One of these was creating the world’s richest award, the $1 million-plus Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities presented annually in London since 1972. Because of his vision, the John Templeton Foundation continues to give away about $40 million a year – especially to projects, college courses, books, and essays on the benefits of cooperation between science and religion.

In 2003, The Templeton Foundation committed to a generous pledge to launch the Templeton Freedom Awards program with Atlas Network. Since that time, Atlas has presented these awards and grants to outstanding think tanks working to improve the public understanding of freedom. The Acton Institute has won two Templeton Freedom Prizes.

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There is no shortage of headlines pointing to another powerful corporation run amok or the consumer base being manipulated. These types of issues have cast a significant shadow on the legitimacy and purpose of business, even the possibility of a good or moral business. This lecture from James Otteson aims to present how a renewed vision of the interconnectedness of morality and prosperity is key to building and sustaining a properly functioning society. Honorable and life-giving business may actually be integral to creating social institutions that produce meaningful value.

James Otteson earned his bachelor of arts degree from the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 1990. After completing his undergraduate degree, he attended the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, earning an M.A. in philosophy in 1992. He then joined the philosophy department at the University of Chicago, receiving a Ph.D. in 1997.

He has held visiting scholar positions at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, then located at Bowling Green State University; at the Centre for the Study of Scottish Philosophy, then located at the University of Aberdeen; at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities at the University of Edinburgh; in the economics and philosophy departments at the University of Missouri-St. Louis; and in the government department at Georgetown University. He has also taught in the economics department at New York University.

Otteson lectures widely on Adam Smith, classical liberalism, political economy, business ethics, and related issues, including for The Fund for American Studies, the Adam Smith Society, the Acton Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Tikvah Fund.

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Russell Kirk has long been known as perhaps the most important founding father of the American Conservative movement in the second half of the 20th century. In the early 1950s, America was emerging from two decades of the Great Depression and the New Deal and facing the rise of radical ideologies abroad; the American Right seemed beaten, broken, and adrift. Then in 1953, Russell Kirk released his masterpiece, The Conservative Mind. More than any other published work of the time, this book became the intellectual touchstone for a reinvigorated movement and began a sea change in Americans’ attitudes toward traditionalism.

Brad Birzer’s biography recounts the story of Kirk’s life and work, with attention paid not only to his writings on politics and economics, but also on literature and culture, both subjects dear to Kirk’s heart and central to his thinking.

Dr. Bradley J. Birzer holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in History at Hillsdale College, and also serves as an Associate Professor of History. 

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Dr. Matson's lecture explored how in the British tradition, political economy, which partly emerged out of discourses in natural theology, ethics and jurisprudence, casts some light on the content of our moral obligations. Drawing on Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, he desicussed how commerce in the eighteenth century came to be depicted as a mode of cooperation—either literally with God or metaphorically with our fellow human beings—through which we serve the common good. That depiction energized the emerging authorization of commercial enterprise, helping to illustrate the virtue of what Deirdre McCloskey calls the “bourgeois virtues,” an understanding which contributed to the Great Enrichment. The depiction continues to edify business as a calling and elaborate how freedom serves the good of humankind.

Erik W. Matson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center and the Deputy Director of the Adam Smith Program in George Mason University’s Department of Economics. He serves as an Online Course Lecturer at The King’s College, New York. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University. He earned a Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University in 2017.

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In this episode, we’re bringing you a panel from our recent Poverty Cure Summit.

The Poverty Cure Summit provides an opportunity for participants to listen to scholars, human service providers, and community leaders address the most critical issues we face today that can either exacerbate or alleviate poverty. These speakers will join panel discussions to discuss the legal, economic, social, and technological issues pertaining to both domestic (U.S.) and global poverty. Rooted in foundational principles of anthropology, politics, natural law, and economics, participants gained a deeper understanding of the root causes of poverty and identified practical means to reduce it and promote human flourishing.

This panel examines charity in the Muslim tradition.

The featured panelists are:

• Ali Salman, founding member & CEO, Islam and Liberty Network. 
• Mahmoud El-Gamal, Professor of Economics and Statistics, Baker Institute Rice Faculty Scholar, Chair in Islamic Economics, Finance, and Management, Rice University
• Moderator: Abdullah bin Hamid Ali, Founding Director of the Lamppost Education Initiative

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