I'm joining a fellowship at the Mercatus Centre.

I'll be living in the USA for two years.

We’ve packed our bags, got rid of a thousand books, freecycled a dozen items of furniture, and stored a truck full of lego, (more damned) books, and a George III tall-boy at my in-laws. We are housesitting for some kind friends while we wait for the paperwork to arrive. And when the visa is here, (fingers crossed, don’t let this jinx it!), we will be going to America for two years.

I am joining the Emerging Scholars Programme at the Mercatus Centre. The Mercatus Centre works on classical liberal politics and economics, finding ways to turn academic ideas into real world projects.

How do I fit in? In a sentence, I am interested in how great literature cultivates the liberal values of human flourishing. I will be looking at liberal ideas in literary narratives.

Regular readers will know that I am immersed in the liberal tradition of Adam Smith and J.S. Mill. And I am very interested in how literature and liberalism overlap, both in the sense that I am interested in Mill’s literary qualities (and Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric) and in the sense that I am interested in how Smith’s ideas inform Austen’s novels.

It is this sort of work that I will be pursuing at Mercatus. I am interested in how the pluralism of philosophers like Isaiah Berlin is related to canonical literature, and the ways in which expansion of the English language is part of a widening liberal consciousness. I want to think about Shakespeare as an individualist and a pragmatist, and about the personal roots of On Liberty.

I have written several times, here and in the New Statesman, that we are living through the start of a humanities revival. If that is going to happen, really happen, we have to work for it. I can’t just keep saying that literary people ought to stop moaning and do something useful—I ought to do something useful myself. Mercatus gives me a great opportunity to meet people, learn new ideas, share my work, evangelise for Swift and Dickens, write up some of my more deeply researched ideas, host reading groups, and generally do as much as I can.

We need the elite to read the great works. We need to think as deeply as possible about human society. How can we do that without Gulliver’s Travels or the Henriad? The interaction of technology and art, the cultivation of good taste, and the intellectual benefit of reading great literature are all rising in importance today. I want to be part of that, and Mercatus is the place where I can contribute the most and learn the most. And I’ll get to work with great people like

Rebecca Lowe

and

Tyler Cowen

and many others.

Mill was not shy about advocating for the higher pleasures, nor about the fact that his liberalism was founded on the idea that human nature is “a tree which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides”—we should not be shy of it either. An interest in material progress is fully compatible with an interest in the greatest works of human art. We can reclaim great literature as a vital counter-narrative to today’s culture wars.

Above all, liberalism is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. My work at Mercatus will be about literature and the pursuit of happiness, which is the thread that runs through Dante and Chaucer to Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virignia Woolf.

Everything will continue here as usual. I’ll be writing regularly, continuing the Shakespeare and Austen book clubs in the autumn, and sometimes telling you about my work at Mercatus. (I may have to pause paid subscriptions while I transfer over to the US… I’ll let you know about that! Regardless, zoom calls for the book clubs will continue.)

It’s going to be a great adventure and I can’t wait to begin.