Contemporary liberals often praise values such as cohesion and stability. Though commonplace, embracing such values marks the abandonment of a major strand in 20th century liberal thought, a strand which eschews cohesion and stability in favor of diversity and dynamism.

Many earlier liberals, following John Stuart Mill, saw dynamism as the hallmark of a liberal society. Thinkers such as John Dewey, Karl Popper, and F.A. Hayek embraced the open society due to its capacity to adapt, develop, and progress. For such thinkers, liberalism is a process, not an outcome. Crucially, this process is not confined to the economic or political sphere, but also involves the revision of our moral beliefs and practices.

This talk attempts to resurrect the dynamic tradition in liberal theory. Despite the recent prevalence of static analysis within Rawlsian liberalism, there are powerful reasons, internal to the philosophical doctrines and institutional proposals of liberalism, to reject static theory and to rediscover dynamic liberalism.

Meet our speaker and chair

Alexander Schaefer is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Buffalo. His research is in the area of philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) and focuses on social complexity, institutional evolution, and the social contract.

J. McKenzie Alexander is Professor in Phi­los­o­phy at the Department of Phi­los­o­phy, Logic and Scientific Method at LSE. Professor Alexander's original field of research concerned evolutionary game theory as applied to the evolution of morality and social norms, though more recently his work explores problems in decision theory, more broadly construed, including topics in formal epistemology.