The Liberal Roots of American Conservatism: Bastiat and the French Connection A paper given to the Philadelphia Society meeting March 27–29, 2015 on “The Roots of American Conservatism - and its Future”. Place: Sheraton Society Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Date: Saturday, March 28; 10:00–11:30 session on “The Liberal Roots of Conservatism”. Participants: Chairman, Phillip W. Magness (IHS); James Otteson (Wake Forest University) Steven D. Ealy (LF), and David M. Hart (LF). An online version of this paper is available: HTML <davidmhart.com/liberty/Papers/Bastiat/DMH_LiberalRoots.html> PDF <davidmhart.com/liberty/Papers/Bastiat/DMH_LiberalRoots.pdf> Draft: Jan. 22, 2015 Revised: March 25, 2015 Word Length: 12,065 w Author: Dr. David M. Hart. Director of the Online Library of Liberty Project at Liberty Fund <oll.libertyfund.org> Academic Editor of the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. Email: Work:
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[email protected] Websites: Liberty Fund: <oll.libertyfund.org> Personal: <davidmhart.com/liberty> 1 Bio David Hart was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. He did his undergraduate work in modern European history and wrote an honours thesis on the radical Belgian/French free market economist Gustave de Molinari, whose book Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street (1849) he is currently editing for Liberty Fund. This was followed by a year studying at the University of Mainz studying German Imperialism, the origins of the First World War, and German classical liberal thought. Postgraduate degrees were completed in Modern European history at Stanford University (M.A.) where he also worked for the Institute for Humane Studies (when it was located at Menlo Park, California) and was founding editor of the Humane Studies Review: A Research and Study Guide; and a Ph.D.