Hi all,
This is my first time posting in the forums, although I have a long-term interest in Austrian economics. I want to start a small Man, Economy & State reading group in London this year, and I’m interested in hearing your experiences and advice with this sort of thing.
Background: I attended Mises U in the summer and found it excellent. I’ve read quite a bit of Mises’s economics, some of Rothbard’s philosophy and a lot of Hayek’s work in all fields, but I’m new to Rothbard’s economics. I’d like to introduce like-minded people to the Austrian school and I’m under the impression that MES is the best way to do this. I’d also like to read MES myself and I think doing so in a small group would be a good approach for this. I’m a postgraduate history student at a University of London college, and I believe I can email student at the major University of London colleges: UCL, King’s College, Queen Mary, SOAS and the LSE.
My questions are: have you ever run a similar group? If so, were you able to do so as a student group, or did you have an academic running things? (And was the academic integral to the group’s success?) How would you advertise this group in a short paragraph or less, making it attractive to people who would be broadly interested in libertarian thought? I’d be happy to have people with no sympathies towards libertarianism, but the point, I think, would be to develop the reading group into a more active group of people who can meet and discuss libertarian issues, so I’d like to attract at least some libertarian- or classically liberal-minded people. I’m caught between advertising this as a libertarian or an Austrian economics reading group.
Bear in mind that this is the UK, where classical liberal thought is relatively strong, but anarcho-capitalist thought is effectively non-existent – this is why I’m not really interested in pushing the philosophical side of things right now. Thank you in advance for your comments!