The Liberty Exchange

Jonathan Fortier talks with Brad Birzer about his recent book, “The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty”.

About the author:

Bradley J. Birzer holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College, where he has taught for over two decades. A graduate of Notre Dame and Indiana University, he specializes in American history, Catholic intellectual tradition, and conservative thought. He is the author of acclaimed biographies of Russell Kirk, J.R.R. Tolkien and Christopher Dawson, and The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty  published by the American Institute of Economic Research in 2026. Birzer co-founded The Imaginative Conservative in 2010 and is widely regarded as one of the leading voices connecting humanism, Catholic thought, and the American conservative and classical liberal tradition. 

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Jonathan Fortier and Mark Pennington discuss whether Michel Foucault’s work shares commonalities with the liberal tradition. In a conversation that covers theories of knowledge, human identity, and social and political thought, Pennington argues that Foucault’s concerns about abusive power and its effects on individual liberty open his work to productive consideration for classical liberals and libertarians. While the young Foucault was hostile to liberal understandings of liberty, his later work can be understood as increasingly sympathetic to the principles and methodologies of the classical liberal tradition.

You can buy his new book Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom available now on Amazon.

About our guest:

Mark Pennington is a British political economist and professor of political economy and public policy at King’s College London. His research focuses on classical liberalism, public choice theory, institutional economics, and the role of markets in addressing social and environmental challenges. Pennington is known for exploring how decentralized decision-​making and spontaneous order can outperform centralized planning in complex societies.

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In this episode, Jonathan Fortier talks with David Beito about FDR's rise to the American presidency, and the negative consequences for civil, political and economic liberty. The conversation explores the ways in which Roosevelt was influenced by Wilson, who had promulgated a new formulation of freedom, and Teddy Roosevelt, whose nationalism, coupled with the ideas imported from Bismarck's German thinkers, encouraged a strong movement toward centralization and an increase in federal power. 

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In this episode, Jonathan Fortier talks with Tim Sandefur about his recent book, You Don’t Own Me, published by Libertarianism.org in 2025. The conversation explores themes of liberty, individualism and personal autonomy as they find expression in novels, films, blues music and architecture, to name just a few of the genres up for discussion.

Important note: 

Tim notes that it was Bernard Taupin, not Tim Rice, that wrote the lyrics for “Nikita”

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In this episode Jonathan Fortier talks with Johan Norberg about his new book Peak Human, which explores seven golden ages to reveal the common thread that makes societies thrive. Their conversation explores not only what went wrong when these civilizations collapsed, but the lessons to be learnt about what was done right. Openness, Norberg argues, has historically triumphed over withdrawal from the rest of the world. 

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