Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. Today is April 30, 2009 and my guest today is Alan Wolf, Professor

of Political Science and Director of the Boise Center for Religion and American Public Life

at Boston College. Alan, welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you. Our topic for today is liberalism

and how you describe and defend it in your latest book, The Future of Liberalism. The

books of fascinating intellectual tour through the last 225 years or so, really a Western

civilization, political philosophy, politics, economics, and it focuses on liberalism and

its opponents. Let's start with your definition and some of your focus is on the importance

of semantics. You talk about three aspects of liberalism, substantive, procedural and

temperamental. What are those and how does liberalism fit in there?

Yeah, liberalism has a substance that is it has a set of core principles. And as I define

the core principle of liberalism, it's this that liberals are committed to the substantive

proposition that as many people as possible should have as much control over their lives

as feasible. And we can talk about that and what that means because I think it's directly

related to questions that economists suggest also. But that's the substantive, you know,

part of it. And what I say there is essentially that a substance is liberalism is in competition

with other ideologies. So if you're substantive and you're substantively a liberal, you're

not a conservative or a socialist or any one of a number of other competing substantive

views of the world. But I also say that liberalism is about procedures. It's about commitment

...