Today, IHS is beginning a new chapter.
For 65 years, we have focused on building the intellectual foundations of a freer society.
Now we are taking the next step: ensuring that the ideas cultivated within our community reach the world when they’re needed most. That means entering public discourse more directly. It means pairing academic credibility with cultural presence. And it means widening the coalition of people who understand what liberal principles offer, and why they matter now.
Does this curve look familiar? Like many of the scholars in our community, I’ve spent a career thinking—scratch that, obsessing—about it. For most of human history, life was defined by subsistence survival, disease, and tyranny. Then, around 1700, ideas about political freedom, market exchange, the rule of law, and open inquiry began to take root. The result was the sharpest and most sustained rise in human welfare the world has ever seen. Lives became longer, healthier, and more self-directed.
Our new logo takes the shape of that curve because it reflects a simple truth: the right ideas can unlock amazing achievements in human well-being. Sustaining those ideas matters. Making sure they shape the world beyond the academy matters just as much.
For six decades, IHS has worked upstream. We support and connect scholars who develop and refine the liberal tradition of political, economic, intellectual, and cultural freedom. We help fill research gaps and build intellectual fields that give that tradition rigor and durability. We strengthen networks that carry its lessons to new generations of curious minds.
That upstream work is not always visible, but it is essential. Policy change happens when people reach for the ideas that are available. Our role has been to ensure that serious ideas are ready when the moment calls for them.
That work remains vital, but it is not sufficient on its own, especially in this moment.
Despite the extraordinary abundance we now enjoy, too many people feel locked out. Homes out of reach. Healthcare too difficult to access. Public decisions made by faraway elites that often make ordinary life harder and more expensive than it needs to be.
People are more than frustrated. Trust in our governing institutions is plummeting. And that has many of our fellow citizens turning to strongmen and top-down fixes. And that turn is eroding the liberal freedoms we need to solve the problems we face today and drive the next wave of human achievement and well-being tomorrow.
If we are to reverse course, liberal voices must be at the forefront of public conversations; conversations that lift our gaze, allow us to see what’s possible when people have the freedom to innovate, build, try, fail, learn, and try again.
IHS is now leveraging its network—the world’s largest community of liberal scholars, policy experts, and thought leaders—to bring actionable insights into our most important public conversations.
The centerpiece of this effort is our online magazine Liberalism.org, IHS’s new public forum for the liberal tradition.
Liberalism.org is where the ideas developed within our community meet the broader public conversation. It publishes essays, hosts debates, and features interviews that bring serious liberal thinking to bear on practical questions: how to expand opportunity, how to reform institutions that are not working, how to sustain a free and pluralistic society. It is also a space for principled disagreement within a shared commitment to freedom and human dignity.
I encourage you to watch our launch video here and explore, share, and take part in the conversation at Liberalism.org.
We’re also excited to launch our redesigned website. Like Liberalism.org, it reflects a deliberate decision to lift up liberal voices, to invite more people into the conversation, and to build a broader liberal coalition of scholars and problem solvers in public policy and civil society.
The ideas that changed the trajectory of human history will not sustain themselves. Each generation must renew them, apply them to the fresh problems they face, and carry them into the institutions and debates that shape a society of free self-governing people.
IHS has long cultivated a vibrant intellectual community that has fortified that ground. We are now committed to ensuring that this work is more visible, more connected, and more engaged with the world it seeks to serve.
