I was up at Bryn Mawr University this weekend for a conference on “Globalization, Community, and Culture” (where I gave an introductory lecture on the issue of globalization and one on “What Are Human Rights?”). My second talk followed an excellent introduction to the issue of different kinds of orders given by Dr. Adam Tebble of Brown University. His presentation was extraordinarily lucid and elegant and introduced to the students the idea of kinds of order that are, in the old phrase, the products of human action, but not of human design. It led me to rewrite my own talk during his lecture so that I could build on some of his insights and relate Hayek’s idea of “an order of action” to the rights and rules necessary for such orders to emerge.
Adam is involved with the Political Theory Project at Brown University, along with my old friend John Tomasi. Good things are happening at Brown, as evidenced by the good students I meet from Brown who have been encouraged and inspired by John and Adam.
As a recent alumna, I can affirm that classical liberalism is very much alive and well at Brown. Although rightly heralded as one of the most liberal (in the American sense) universities in the country, there is a small but strong contingent of talented students and professors there who are dedicated to the rigorous intellectual exploration of classical liberal philosophy. Perhaps then Brown *is* a liberal school, but not in the pejorative sense that the Ann Coulters of the world so often invoke.