098: The Practice and Inner Life of Liberalism (w/ Jason Canon)

It’s been a hot minute since the last episode. So let me start by telling you what’s been going on, because it actually tees up today’s conversation. The short version is, I’ve been neck deep in getting a very cool new project ready for launch. It’s called Liberalism.org and is an online magazine of liberal ideas, which I’m leading in collaboration with my colleagues at the Institute for Humane Studies. It launched on March 12.

As part of this project, I’m hosting a new bi-weekly podcast called The Liberalism.org Show. It’ll be half hour interviews with contributors to the site, which means interviews with some of the most interesting minds in liberalism today. You can look for that wherever you get your podcasts.

All of this just swamped me, and I had to take a step back from ReImagining Liberty. I’m glad you stuck around through the hiatus.

And to bring us back, I’m actually joined today by one of those colleagues on Liberalism.org, Jason Canon. He’s Director of Public Scholarship at the Institute for Humane Studies, and for at least the last year, he and I have been talking non-stop about a shared intellectual project about what it means to think of liberalism as a practice. Or a set of practices. You’ve heard me discuss versions of this in quite a lot of prior episodes, but today I wanted to bring Jason on for a deep dive, and to establish a foundation for future conversations.

We talk about what it means to view something as a practice, how practice theory plugs holes in liberal theorizing, why this approach is largely overlooked by contemporary philosophers of liberalism, and what that oversight means missing out on. I loved this conversation with Jason.

Join the ReImagining Liberty Patreon to get episodes a week early, listen ad-free, and become part of the Discord community. Learn more here: https://www.patreon.com/AaronRossPowell

Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.