The Wealth of Nations at 250: The Enduring Relevance of Free Market Economics and Moral Sentiments
Additional details forthcoming. Please contact Charissa Reul for more information.
The themes we will cover in this meeting are timely and important. Throughout the 20th Century, in America and around the world, the Left sought to improve society – indeed, even to build socialist and national socialist utopias – by abandoning free markets and free market principles. The Left failed, and its prescriptions conspicuously failed to achieve paradise. In angry reaction, the Left has shifted its vision from economic Marxism to cultural Marxism, now contending that the problem with humanity is humans, and that each human must be not just re-educated but re-made and re-wired, right down to the basics of family, racial, and sexual identity.
Some on the Right, seeing that failure has caused peoples in democracies to dispense, at least for a time, with the services of Leftist politicians and policies, imagine that they can seize the powers of the state and, by applying them to aims they perceive as “conservative”, similarly use the tools of the state, including dirigisme, to guide humans toward personal reformation and social paradise.
Both Left and this New Right seem to have lost sight of what constitutions and the rule of law (to be addressed on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of American independence in 2026) and faith, families, and free markets can accomplish (to be addressed in this meeting celebrating the 250th anniversary of the publication by Adam Smith, author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, of his seminal work in economics, The Wealth of Nations).
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- General Fellowship Application [Forthcoming in June 2025]
Meeting Program
Friday, September 19
4:00–6:00 Registration
5:30–6:00 Fellowship Orientation
5:30–6:50 General Reception
7:00–9:00 Dinner & Program - Giants on Whose Shoulders We Stand: What We Owe to Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayak, Ludwig Mises
Chair: Joseph A. Morris, President, The Philadelphia Society
TBA
Saturday, September 20
8:30–10:00 Session - Does the Left Know Something that Conservatives Just Don’t Get?
Communism, National Socialism, and “Democratic Socialism” were all projects to remake the world, first at the economic level and more lately at cultural levels. Conservatives have preferred to let individuals, families, and enterprises pursue happiness without state commands, and, subject to the rule of law, work their wills as they please. Conservatively governed societies have tended to produce wealth and peace; Left-governed societies have tended to produce poverty, discord, and on occasion ruin. Yet the Left persists. Why?
Speakers TBA
10:00 - 10:30 am Coffee Break
10:30–12:00pm Session 2 - Does the “New Right” Know Something that Conservatives Just Don’t Get?
“National Conservatives”, “Common Good Conservatives”, and others of the “New Right” imagine that if only the levers of the state were in their hands, they could succeed in remaking society where the Left has failed. Why?
Speakers TBA
12:00–1:30 Luncheon Program - Free Markets & American Greatness
Is America “great”? Is America “exceptional”? If so, what is the role of the free market and free market principles in defining and shaping America?
Keynote Address: David L. Bahnsen, The Bahnsen Group
2:00–3:30 Session 3 - What Do Moral Sentiments Have to Do With It?
Economics is sometimes dismissed as “the dismal science” and the Left often contends that capitalism has no moral component. Adam Smith came to the study of economics as a moral philosopher. Are principles of ethics and justice compatible with free market systems, let alone inherent in them?
Speakers TBA
3:30–4:00 Coffee Break
4:00–5:30 Session 4 - What Is the Role of Economics in Building a Society that Is Free, Ordered, Virtuous, and Humane?
Can recurrence to free market principles help both developed and developing nations achieve prosperity while building polities that are free and ordered and societies that are humane and virtuous?
Speakers TBA
5:30 - 6:30 Closing Reception
Please contact Charissa Reul with questions or for more information.