Announcing Civitas Outlook

The essential conditions of human dignity and freedom are constantly menaced by the political class. Individuals and private organizations increasingly contend with arbitrary, unelected powers. Even the most precious possession of Western civilization, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spread of ideologies which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own.

The foregoing paragraph is not original. It is a lightly paraphrased but mostly verbatim extrapolation of the opening of the 1947 Mont Pelerin Society’s Statement of Aims. Founded in the wake of the devastating Second World War, the Mont Pelerin Society regarded totalitarian collectivism as the existential threat of the 20^th century. The Society’s subsequent positive influence on economics, policy, and social thought is well-known.

Today, the totalitarian impulse expresses itself not primarily as a political philosophy such as communism or socialism but through a kind of cooperative anti-liberalism in which centers of cultural, political, and economic power pursue common ideological objectives at the expense of individual liberty and local self-determination. Large foundations and nonprofits, universities, government agencies, the media, and elite corporatists cooperate officially and unofficially on common aims regarding topics such as climate change, public health, social justice, labor policy, and a host of regulatory issues, usually in the name of health and safety.

Cooperative anti-liberalism is often met with oppositional illiberalism, which we see on the reactionary right in various forms across Western democracies. In America, the failures of progressive elites have been resoundingly rejected recently in electoral terms but have also given rise to support for illiberal ideas and policies among factions on the right, from cultural traditionalists to economic nationalists.

The bedrock of a small-L liberal society is liberty and vitality at the most local and individual level. Liberty is an abstraction without human agency, and vitality is meaningless if aspirations cannot be realized. Both are key to the pursuit of happiness, and both lose their meaning when the game is rigged, when human agency is restrained by narrow ideologies, when power is concentrated in too few hands, and when it becomes a cultural maxim that agency and self-improvement are an illusion.  

We are launching Civitas Outlook at a time when anti-liberal views have become increasingly fashionable across the political spectrum, and the failures of elites have sparked widespread cynicism about the achievements of democratic capitalism. Even as confidence in our constitutional form of government has waned, our public square is ironically filled with people who expect too much of politics and too little of civil society. And yet, as a historical and empirical matter, the engines of prosperity and opportunity are far from exhausted in America. We stand upon the shoulders of marvelous innovations, and our country's prospects for upward mobility and self-betterment are still the world's envy.  

Civitas Outlook exists to blend the best of our received traditions and institutions with an optimism about what creators, entrepreneurs, and technology can do for the future of freedom and prosperity. We are a community of scholars and writers who take free inquiry seriously. We prioritize a blend of history, empirical research, and philosophical reasoning over the intellectual fads and motivated reasoning that are too common in our public debates.  

If you bookmark us and sign up to receive newsletters – which I hope you will – you will notice some common elements uniting an otherwise diverse array of authors.  

One is a concern with stagnation in all its forms and how to generate more dynamism in our society. We would do better to have more people in more places creating and building more good things, which is essential to creating more good jobs and rising incomes for workers in all stations of life. This requires a culture that rewards effort, creativity, and exploration. It requires an economy that does not stifle innovation or favor entrenched incumbents. And it requires political leadership with the courage to knock down barriers that keep aspirational workers from moving up.

Civitas Outlook is also committed to shoring up individual liberty and the self-determination of diverse communities everywhere. When the lived experience of liberty is atrophied – as it is when people cannot speak their mind on university campuses, take a job because they cannot afford to move, or create something new because of oppressive rules and regulations – something needs to change. A feature of our polarized politics is a widespread fear that political opponents will use their power to restrict the basic freedoms of others. We are committed to exploring the fundamentals of free societies, how and why illiberal ideas and impulses continue to emerge in our public life – and what to do about them.

As such, Civitas Outlook is defensive of the institutional preconditions of freedom and progress: the rule of law, constitutionalism, limited regulatory interference, well-functioning legislatures, and a healthy civil society. There is room for healthy debate about our institutions, and our authors will disagree on important topics related to them. But they will also share a deep respect for the great achievements of our liberal democratic order, which predate the founding of America itself and are the product of great struggles in the past. We benefit from a kind of freedom and prosperity that our forebears gave their lives for and never lived to see fulfilled. Gratitude for all the good in our received heritage is a common sentiment at Civitas Outlook, even as we grapple with all the bad that is still all around.  

Civitas Outlook is also rooted in a healthy skepticism of elite monocultures that dominate our public life. A proper contrarianism will regularly leap off our pages. The “commanding heights” of media, academia, entertainment, philanthropy, government, and C-suites have a lot of power, and when they begin to delve into cooperative anti-liberalism or pursue narrowly ideological aims at the expense of the liberties of everyday people, we will call it out for what it is. Despite reactionary abuses that have flowed from anti-elitism, there is a reason so many ordinary people have a hard time trusting the experts anymore. By calling out their excesses, we hope we will ultimately play a role in restoring appropriate trust for these important institutions.

Civitas Outlook is published on a university campus, and we take our role as a disseminator of academics’ ideas seriously. Higher education in America has gotten itself in trouble, as any clear-eyed observer can see. It is ground zero of cooperative anti-liberalism, and the free exchange of ideas has not been what it should be in too many universities. As part of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, we are part of a new effort to promote the rigorous exchange of ideas about what a free society requires. We believe that Civitas Outlook plays an important role for academics who want to participate in that exchange.  

Finally, we are proudly based in Austin, Texas, one of America’s most dynamic cities. More than that, it has become home to a growing ecosystem of thought leaders in commercial, academic, and public life who are committed to classical liberal ideals, optimism about the future, and a healthy contrarianism about groupthink. Civitas Outlook is an academic channel for those sentiments and ideas, so even though our scope is national, even global, the spirit of Austin is very much at the heart of who we are. 

In conclusion, returning to where I started, the end of the Mont Pelerin Society’s Statement of Aims is also a fitting end: “[Civitas Outlook] does not aspire to conduct propaganda. It seeks to establish no meticulous and hampering orthodoxy. It aligns itself with no particular party. Its object is solely, by facilitating the exchange of views among minds inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common, to contribute to the preservation and improvement of the free society.”

Let us know what you think about our work, and please come back regularly.

‍Ryan Streeter is the Executive Director of the Civitas Institute.