Come and be my intern (to talk about J.S. Mill)

The Mercatus summer internship is open for applications

The Mercatus Center, where I am a Research Fellow, is hiring for the summer internship program on classical liberalism — the economics and philosophy of what Mercatus calls the “mainline political economy” tradition, which began with Adam Smith and continued through Ostrom, Hayek, and Buchanan. (As well as people like McCloskey and Mokyr.)

Whoever works most closely with me will be doing that, with a slightly different focus. They will also be reading literature.

There is no liberal tradition without great literature. Mill was an important poetry critic. Isaiah Berlin’s work is reliant on his reading of poetry and fiction. Jane Austen was every bit a part of the liberal Enlightenment as Adam Smith.

We will also be reading a lot of J.S. Mill. (Like, don’t apply if you don’t want to talk to me about J.S. Mill’s minor essays on a regular basis.) If you want to debate whether Mill was a “real liberal” you will enjoy this internship.¹

So if you happen to be one of those people who wants to read Shakespeare as well as Hayek, or if you simply believe, as I do, that the study of literature is in itself an instantiation of the liberal idea of human flourishing,—an essential means by which we come to know what the co-operation of free individuals is like, the only real manner we have of approaching some forms of tacit knowledge (we’ll read Polanyi too),—then this is the internship for you.

And if you have your own ideas about the sort of literature you want to read, or a project you want to work on—all the better. I will happily keep you busy, but if you want to work on Frederick Douglass, Gulliver’s Travels, the liberal impulse in Henry James, the inherent conflict between pluralism and aesthetics, African American poetry, Gone with the Wind, the poets and novelists Smith and Mill admired, or whatever else it might be—well, make your case. Liberals love it when people take the initiative.

If you are an undergraduate, recent graduate, or early-stage graduate student, you can apply for the internship here.

1. Yes, I know Mill is not always considered to be part of the mainline tradition. Liberals have the privilege of living by their pluralist values!