I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

196 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
Crane Brinton. (Lenore Ealy and John Pocock, of Johns Hopkins, also participated each
week.)
My studies of U.S. foreign policy involved the domestic political influences of European
ethnic groups on decision-making, especially in World War I, World War II, and the Cold
War, which involved Lutheran, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox as well as Jewish Americans.
I held conferences and workshops for many faculty who wished to teach such courses, or
to conduct research for their courses. A German linguist came to me to help him find
Jewish old age homes where he could conduct research on Yiddish, a medieval form of
German. I worked with Fr. Tomaso Silvano, who headed the journal and center for Migration
Studies in Staten Island; he later became the secretary of the Vatican Council on Migrants,
and now heads the Vatican UN office in Geneva, Switzerland. The office of the Center for
Cultural Diversity was located on West Forty-second Street between the CUNY Graduate
Center (across from the New York Public Library) and the Rockefeller Foundation on the
Avenue of the Americas.
While I was directing the 1976 Liberty Fund summer seminar at the IHS in Menlo
Park, CA, I was invited by the Fund to join Ed McLean (Wabash College), Bill Dennis
(Denison University), and Charles King (Pomona College, California) to spend a week in
Santa Fe, New Mexico to observe the Socratic Seminar techniques at the Great Books curriculum
at St. John’s College in Santa Fe (affiliated with the historic Great Books college,
St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland) Ed, Bill, Charles, and I were to back up Ben
Rogge, who had been the sole Liberty Fund discussion leader, now that the Liberty Fund
had expanded its colloquia programs.
In the summer of 1977 I joined the new staff of the Cato Institute on Montgomery
Street in San Francisco, and became the editor of the Institute’s bibliographical quarterly
journal, Literature of Liberty. The first issue was January, 1978 with a picture of George
Mason (1726–1792) on the cover. The lead essays were Forrest McDonald’s “A Founding
Father’s Library” and Murray N. Rothbard’s “Modern Historians Confront the American
Revolution.” These essays were kindly provided by the Liberty Fund, which had assisted
in the planning of Literature of Liberty. Among the notable essays that would appear in the
journal were John Gray on Hayek, Norman Barry on “The Tradition of Spontaneous
Order,” and Robert Nisbet on “The Idea of Progress” (leading to his book: History of the
Idea of Progress [Basic Books, 1980]).
In late 1978, Kenneth S. Templeton left the IHS to be executive director under
President Neal McLeod at the Liberty Fund. I left the Cato Institute to replace him at
the IHS.
Leonard P. Liggio is executive vice president of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, distinguished
senior scholar at the Institute for Humane Studies, and research professor at the George
Mason University School of Law.