Liberty and Power Lecture Series

David Hart David Hart is the director of Liberty Fund, Inc.'s online Library of Economics and Liberty. Dr. Hart began teaching in the Department of History at the University of Adelaide, South Australia in 1986, received the university teaching prize in 1992, and was tenured in 1994. Subjects taught and areas of graduate research supervised include modern European history, nineteenth-century classical liberal thought, the Enlightenment, war and culture, film and history, history and the Internet - all of which went online from 1996 onwards. His philosophy of teaching can be summed up in two basic principles - the Maoist principle of "let a thousand flowers bloom" and the idea that teaching is fundamentally an intellectually subversive process.

Dr. Robert Higgs, an economic historian and a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, presents the lecture “The Catastrophic Impact of War on Liberty". The event is the second in the Liberty and Power Lecture Series at UA. Higgs is the editor of the Independent Institute’s quarterly journal, The Independent Review. He received his doctorate in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University and the University of Economics, Prague. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow for the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Gary Schlarbaum Award for Lifetime Defense of Liberty, the Thomas Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties, the Lysander Spooner Award for Advancing the Literature of Liberty, the Friedrich von Wieser Memorial Prize for Excellence in Economic Education and the Templeton Honor Rolls Award on Education in a Free Society. His publications include “Depression, War, and Cold War” and “Resurgence of the Warfare State.” The Liberty and Power Lecture Series, founded by Dr. David Beito, professor of history, offers speakers who look at the conflict between government power and individual liberty in recent history, particularly in the areas of art, media, technology, the knowledge economy and social history. Sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences and Creative Campus.

Jimmy Wales discusses how Wikipedia challenges age-old assumptions of expertise by allowing knowledge to be spontaneously generated from the ground up. The emergent rules and order which ensure the veracity of Wikipedia as an online reference could also be explored as models for self-generated governance and community-building. Wales also addresses Wikipedia in the context of emerging democracies. For example, does Wikipedia have the potential to foment a human rights revolution in China? Does a technology-driven potential for improving the human condition exist in the form of educational ventures like Wikipedia?