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Past Lectures |
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The 2023 annual Adam Smith Lecture in Jurisprudence was given at Glasgow University by Phillippe Van Parijs on 1st June 2023 on the topic of ‘Solidarity Against Freedom?’.
Abstract: That there is a clash between freedom and equality is illusory: justice can be viewed as requiring the equalization of (real) freedom. The clash between freedom and fraternity or with its modern version, solidarity, seems more serious — typically, but very far from only, when discussing the legitimacy of a lockdown. Reconciling the centrality of freedom with the great importance many of us attach to solidarity — in our sentiments, our engagements and our institutions — is not self-evident. Is it possible? GLT were delighted to host this event as part of a week of Adam Smith tricentennial celebrations that took place at the University of Glasgow. The lecture was followed by a workshop where themes of Professor van Parijs’ broader work on real freedom, unconditional basic income and linguistic justice were discussed in depth. |
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The 2022 Adam Smith lecture was given by Debra Satz (Stanford) on the topic 'When Cash is Not Enough: The Role of In-kind Goods'.
Abstract: Egalitarian economists and philosophers have argued that in kind provision of certain goods is inferior to cash provision on both efficiency based and anti-paternalist grounds. If we care about the poor we should transfer cash to them and allow them to use that cash for the purposes they must prefer. Drawing on an older tradition of economic and egalitarian theory, I present a new justification for certain forms of in-kind provision by the state. I argue that the distribution of certain in-kind goods help individuals to be able to regard one another as participants in a common project, and as having a basic set of shared interests and concerns which the state must equally attend to, despite differences in individual talents, value orientations, levels of income and wealth, social positions, and preferences. You can watch a recording of the lecture here. |
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The 2021 lecture was given by Professor Kathleen Thelen at 3pm on Friday 21 May. The title of the lecture was: Employer Organization in the United States: Historical Legacies and the Long Shadow of the American Courts.
Kathleen Thelen is Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work focuses on the origins and evolution of political-economic institutions in the rich democracies. She is the author of Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity (2014) and How Institutions Evolve (2004), and co-editor of Advances in Comparative Historical Analysis (with James Mahoney, 2015), and Beyond Continuity (with Wolfgang Streeck, 2005). Her awards include the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Prize (2019); the Michael Endres Research Prize (2019), the Barrington Moore Book Prize (2015), the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the APSR (2005), the Mattei Dogan Award for Comparative Research (2006), and the Max Planck Research Award (2003). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in 2009. She was awarded honorary degrees at the Free University of Amsterdam (2013), the London School of Economics (2017), the European University Institute in Florence (2018), and the University of Copenhagen (2018). |
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The 2019 Adam Smith Lecture was delivered by Professor Christine Desan (Harvard University) on the topic of "The Monetary Structure of Economic Activity".
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2018's Adam Smith Lecture was given on Wednesday 30 May by Wolfgang Streeck. Professor Streeck is one of the leading sociologists in Europe, emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, and a prominent public intellectual. He presented at the University of Glasgow on the highly topical question of 'The Size of Nations and the Politics of Political Scale'.
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The 2017 Adam Smith Lecture in Jurisprudence took place on 26 May. A J Julius (UCLA) presented on 'Free production through and against property'.
Abstract This lecture arranges for Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Kant, and Fichte to agree about property by arranging for them to agree with Karl Marx. The project of using what's mine to make what's mine is an attempt at producing freely. It fails: the general interdependence of individual production activity as it's organized by private property is a mutual subjection. The attempt will succeed only when propertyless workers free themselves to work together on purpose. |
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The inaugural Adam Smith Lecture in Jurisprudence took place on 5 May 2016.
Professor Scott Veitch, Paul K C Chung Professor of Jurisprudence from the University of Hong Kong was the guest speaker, who delivered a lecture on the topic of "The Sense of Obligation". An Obligations Workshop, exploring related issues to Professor Veitch's lecture, was held on the same day. |
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The 2024 Adam Smith lecture: Professor Martin Krygier (University of New South Wales)
Professor Krygier’s lecture, Well-Tempered Power: ‘A Cultural Achievement of Universal Significance, elaborated a conception of the rule of law which centres the notion and realisation of a state of affairs in which power is reliably tempered, with the aid of law, so as not to be available for arbitrary abuse. The lecture challenged an understanding of the rule of law which purports that the installation of familiar institutions that some associate with ‘the rule of law’ is the same as achieving the ideal itself. In support of this, Professor Krygier highlighted examples of authoritarian states falsely asserting a commitment to the rule of law ideal by a conformity to its legal forms while abusing and subverting its true value. The lecture was followed by the Adam Smith seminar ‘A Sociology of the Rule of Law’. Lindsay Farmer, Ruth Dukes, Eleanor Kirk, Scott Veitch and Emilios Christodoulidis provided responses to the lecture. This discussion addressed the necessity of recognising the plurality of rule-makers with the authority to issue commands and to apply sanctions, and the requirement to take account of the complexities that this plurality can create when it comes to analysing the function of particular rules and their fidelity to the rule of law. |
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