Presentation of the Book
«What is Classical Liberal History?»

Yasmin Valdez  | 25 de julio de 2018  | Vistas: 74

Michael Douma is the director of the Georgetown Institute for the study of markets and ethics. He presents his book What is a Classical Liberal history?, and explains the production and description of the book. He describes his adventure on how books come together and the process that requires to achieve a good final product.

He is one of the editors of the book, and also collaborated with different writers to achieve the project. Michael discusses his experience of being a young writer and working with people that have more time working in the field. He exposes how the idea started, the goal of developing this project and expresses how he found some answers to his question about historians:

People that identify as classical liberals are always learning things from the free market economist… Why is there not a free market school of historians?"

Douma describes how the history of classical liberalism and the background of professional history writing, relates. Then he presents one of the main reasons that people often forget, on why David Hume is famous.

Michael discusses how other historians were also writing about freedom and the way they traced, the spirit of liberty, in European nations. He shares his opinion on why all of them are important.

Learn History, and you are still going to make a lot of mistakes."

Later, he mentions how historians today are still writing about freedom and liberty in developing society, but they don't call themselves liberal historians. He explains the key point for Mises on what is the fundamental thing in history and discusses which are the main topics classical liberal historians can write today.

Microhistory starting with the individual is where we should start, to figure out what happens and to understand the individual choice."

Douma arguments some tools that historians can use, he also describes what history can teach and presents his perspective on the matter. Michael discusses different philosophies and the texts of those who support them. He finally reveals about his process of co-writing his book and the experience he got as an editor.