Episode Details

Liberals have ceded the family to social conservatives for decades — and Lauren K. Hall thinks it's a mistake liberalism can't afford. In this episode, host Aaron Ross Powell talks with Hall, professor of political science and associate dean of academic affairs at the Rochester Institute of Technology, about her Liberalism.org essay "Why Liberalism Needs the Family." They discuss why classical liberals have under-theorized this pre-political institution, how siblings, trust, and the wider "village" cultivate the citizens that markets and self-government require, the false binary between total family autonomy and state intervention, and why over-scheduled, over-supervised childhoods may be quietly producing adults more comfortable with authoritarianism.

Further Reading:

• Why Liberalism Needs the Family — Lauren K. Hall, Liberalism.org
• Family and the Politics of Moderation: Private Life, Public Goods, and the Rebirth of Social Individualism — Lauren K. Hall, Baylor University Press
• The Radical Moderate's Guide to Life — Lauren K. Hall's Substack
• Let Grow — Lenore Skenazy's nonprofit, with the tiered intervention guide Hall recommends

More from Liberalism.org:

• Yours, Mine, or Ours? Liberals Need a Theory of the State — Michael C. Munger