Hello.
I’m glad you stopped by.
Welcome to the LockeSmith blog, brought to you by the friendly folks at the LockeSmith Institute. I could take this opportunity to tell you about the Institute—our hopes, our dreams, that we like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain. But I’ll trust you to navigate to the Institute’s site to read all about that.
What I should tell you is that this is part of a re-launching of the LockeSmith Institute. We still have all of our original aims, encouraging undergraduate research in the classical liberal tradition and boldly casting the light of knowledge into the encroaching darkness. (If I don’t have at least one overblown and pretentious sentence, the union (Amalgamated Bricklayers and Dental Assistants Local 153) will yank my card.)
This, however, is something new. Truthfully, after the publication of the premier issue of The LockeSmith Review a decade-and-a-half ago, things sort of…petered out. New students did not come along to replace the trailblazers, and funding for publishing proved difficult to locate. (That overblown sentence was just for me.)
Technology, though, has given us a new lease on life. And we hope to parlay that lease into a nice fixed-rate mortgage. But in the meantime, we’re starting up our project again with this blog. Finally—publishing that classical liberals can afford! When academic institutions provide server space for them.
So our plan for the blog is this. Two of us, myself and Dr. Mark Schenkel, will make regular blog posts. I am a political scientist, and Mark is a professor of entrepreneurship. I’ll let him tell you in his posts what to expect from him. As for me, I plan to provide a classical liberal commentary on current events. Given my interests, I’ll probably focus on events in a few particular areas. One of these, regional integration and international organization, is a relatively rare—not to say odd—area of interest among classical liberals, at least so far as I can tell.
I also have interests (and training) in law, particularly constitutional and public international law. I’m not a professional in regard to either by any means, but I’m a fairly well-educated amateur. The area of constitutional law is, of course, well-populated with classical liberals, but apparently still not enough. Maybe one more voice in the chorus will get the goblet to crack.
So, please look for me to blog in this spot weekly, on topics of interest to me. I’m under no illusion that they will be of interest to anyone else. Nor do I deceive myself that I have things ground-breaking and revolutionary things to say. And I can’t pretend to provide the classical liberal view on anything—that such a thing would exist seems antithetical to the philosophy itself. I’ll just share my (smart-alecky and often warped) view of things, the view of one classical liberal, and hope that you might find something entertaining or enlightening in it. Should you find something thought-provoking enough to respond, I will consider my time well-spent. After all, as any teacher worth their salt will tell you, the fun part of teaching is learning.
In addition to us two amateurs, Dr. Jeff Cornwall—our un-indicted co-conspirator—will also contribute his wisdom to this site, though as he has tenure and is the closest thing we have to a sugar daddy, we will not presume to announce whatever schedule he may find suitable. More in keeping with our purpose, we will also look to add blogs from students to this site. More on that as our recruiting efforts bear fruit. Not that I’m calling them fruits. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
So, until next week…what’s that? Sorry, the marketing department is insisting that I leave you with a teaser of some sort. Let’s try this one on for size. I don’t know if I’ll get to it next week—it depends on what bright, shiny news story catches my obsessive/compulsive eye (rather than the agoraphobic one)—but one of the many oddities about me is that I am both a committed classical liberal and a devout Baptist. One day, I’ll get around to explaining how beautifully those two reconcile with each other, all without the benefit of pharmaceutical aid. Interested?
P.S. On a personal note, today was my late father’s birthday. I hope this will prove auspicious--he was among the first to purchase a copy of the first (and only) issue of the LockeSmith Review. It’s still on his bookshelf. I still miss him.
