Hayek Program Podcast

On the second episode of The Hayekian Triangle, Virgil Storr, Peter Boettke, and Chris Coyne examine James Buchanan’s views on human nature and self-government. They place Buchanan’s essays “Natural and Artifactual Man” and “Afraid to Be Free” in conversation, exploring the tension between human beings’ capacity for self-creation and their desire for protection from uncertainty and responsibility. The discussion considers education as a transformative process, the relationship between freedom and accountability, the dangers of state paternalism, the role of civil society, and the challenge classical liberals face in offering a compelling alternative to dependence on the state. The trio also reflect on Buchanan’s intellectual legacy, the importance of lifelong learning, and the conditions necessary for a self-governing society.
**This episode was recorded on July 31, 2026**
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CC Music: Twisterium

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Peter Boettke sits down with Brianne Wolf to explore Adam Smith’s enduring relevance for liberalism, political economy, and contemporary debates about markets and democracy. Wolf discusses her forthcoming book, Beyond Rights and Price: Liberalism with Taste, and explains how thinkers including Smith, Hume, Rousseau, and Tocqueville illuminate the role of taste, judgment, sympathy, and persuasion in sustaining a liberal society. Their conversation ranges from changing student attitudes toward inequality, expertise, and democracy to Smith’s concern for the least advantaged, the relationship between the Scottish Enlightenment and the American founding, and the challenge classical liberals face in responding to critiques of capitalism. Boettke and Wolf also consider cosmopolitanism, the importance of local ties and civil society, and what the renewed attention surrounding the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations can teach us about the liberal tradition.
Dr. Brianne Wolf is Associate Professor of Political Theory and Director of the Political Economy minor at James Madison College at Michigan State University. Her current project, Beyond Rights and Price: Liberalism with Taste, explores the role of taste as a supplement to market relations and the legal framework of rights, fostering the moral possibilities of commercial society and the emotional connections between citizens that are necessary for a robust liberal politics.
**This episode was recorded on July 28, 2026**
Show Notes:
Peter Boettke, The Struggle for a Better World (Mercatus Center, 2021)
Carl Menger, “The Social Theories of Classical Political Economy and Modern Economic Policy”
Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche (University of California Press, 2022)
Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018)
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Abridged Edition (Penguin Classics, 2001)
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal (Harvard University Press, 2021)
Glory M. Liu, Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2022)
James R. Otteson, Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!
Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram
Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus
CC Music: Twisterium

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Peter Boettke sits down with Kristen Collins for a wide-ranging conversation on Adam Smith's moral philosophy and its intersection with theories of justice, sympathy, and political power. The conversation moves through the relationship between sympathy, moral imagination, and the origins of our sense of justice, drawing on Michelle Schwarze's work on sympathetic resentment, before turning to why economists have historically misread Smith as indifferent to the poor and powerless — despite Smith's own repeated siding with the weak against the powerful. Boettke and Collins also explore Smith's "man of system" passages as a caution against imposing utopian visions by force, discuss Judith Shklar's "liberalism of fear" in relation to Hayek, and close with an extended look at Collins's research on Jeremy Bentham's little-known Sotomion — a proposed institution designed to protect unmarried pregnant women from social shame while preserving their social connections, offering a striking counterpoint to Bentham's more famous Panopticon.
Dr. Kristen Collins is a Senior Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She hosts the Virtual Sentiments podcast, which features conversations with scholars and practitioners reflecting on the ethics and politics of technology. She is currently working on a book, Seeing and Being Seen: Spectatorship and Surveillance in Liberal Democracies, under contract with Oxford University Press.
**This episode was recorded on June 2, 2026**
Show Notes:
Kristen Collins, “Observed without Sympathy: Adam Smith on Inequality and Spectatorship” (American Journal of Political Science, 2020)
Virtual Sentiments | Maria Pia Paganelli on 250 Years of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations
Virtual Sentiments | Eileen Hunt on Mary Shelley and the Ethics of AI
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal (Harvard University Press, 2021)
F.A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False”
Michelle Schwarze, Recognizing Resentment: Sympathy, Injustice, and Liberal Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Carl Menger, “The Social Theories of Classical Political Economy and Modern Economic Policy”
James R. Otteson, Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton University Press, 2013)
William Easterly, Violent Saviors: The West's Conquest of the Rest (Basic Books, 2025)
Joshua L. Cherniss, Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2021)
Jeremy Waldron, Political Political Theory: Essays on Institutions (Harvard University Press, 2016)
Jeremy Waldron, One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality (Harvard University Press, 2017)
Judith N. Shklar, The Liberalism of Fear (Harvard University Press, 2026)
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (Grove Press, 2021)
If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!
Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram
Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus
CC Music: Twisterium

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Peter Boettke sits down with Don Boudreaux to mark the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Boudreaux reflects on his many years teaching a graduate seminar on Smith at George Mason University, the layers of insight he continues to discover on each re-read, and why so few professional economists ever read the book cover to cover despite its enduring relevance to questions of monopoly power, trade, taxation, and public debt. The conversation traces the relationship between The Wealth of Nations and Smith's earlier The Theory of Moral Sentiments, dismantling the old "Adam Smith Problem" and explaining why markets need both bourgeois virtue and hard institutional discipline to function. Boudreaux and Boettke also celebrate George Mason's distinctive culture as a "books department" shaped by mentors such as Roger Garrison, Walter Williams, and James Buchanan.
Dr. Donald J. Boudreaux is a Senior Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a Professor of Economics and former economics-department chair at George Mason University. He is the author of many books, including The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), The Essential Hayek (Fraser Institute, 2015), Hypocrites and Half-Wits: A Daily Dose of Sanity from Cafe Hayek (Free to Choose Press, 2012), and Globalization (Greenwood Press, 2007).
**This episode was recorded on May 28, 2026**
Show Notes:
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Liberty Fund, 1982)
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Liberty Fund, 1982)
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Liberty Fund, 1896)
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory Of Employment, Interest, And Money (Harper Collins, 1965)
James M. Buchanan, What Should Economists Do? (Liberty Fund, 1979)
James M. Buchanan and Richard E. Wagner, Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes (Liberty Fund, 2000)
George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility (Grand Central Publishing, 2019)
Liberty Matters | “Deirdre McCloskey and Economists’ Ideas about Ideas”
If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!
Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram
Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus
CC Music: Twisterium

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Paul Dragos Aligica delivers a keynote lecture at the 2024 Markets & Society conference on resilience as a research frontier in mainline political economy. He traces how resilience has been largely absent from comparative economic systems scholarship, only to explode as a topic in the last decade, mostly imported from ecology and complexity theory rather than economics.
He maps how three traditions at the core of the Mercatus research program—Austrian economics, public choice, and Ostromian institutionalism—each shape our understanding of resilience. Aligica also addresses claims that resilience thinking is merely a proxy for neoliberalism, closing with reflections on the normative stakes of self-governing societies.
Dr. Paul Dragos Aligica is a Senior Research Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, KPMG Professor of Governance at the University of Bucharest, and a Senior Nonresident Scholar with the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh. His many publications include Governing Differences: Social Diversity, Polycentric Political Economy and Modus Vivendi (Edward Elgar, 2025) coauthored with Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Public Governance and the Classical Liberal Perspective: Political Economy Foundations (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Public Entrepreneurship, Citizenship, and Self-Governance (Cambridge University Press 2018).
**This episode was recorded on October 11, 2024**
If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!
Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram
Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus
CC Music: Twisterium