Hayek Program Podcast

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Emily Chamlee-Wright delivers a keynote lecture at the 2025 Markets & Society conference on the precarious state of liberalism and the cultural foundations necessary to sustain a free society. Drawing on the cultural economy framework she developed with Virgil Storr, Chamlee-Wright argues that liberalism faces not only overt constitutional threats but a deeper "soft tissue" problem: the erosion of the values, norms, and habits that make formal institutions work. Once degraded, she warns, no legislative remedy can restore them. She walks through four dimensions of this cultural ecosystem, shared mental models, generalized norms, cultural tools, and social networks, and shows how they can either reinforce liberal resilience or spiral into vicious cycles of decay. She closes with an urgent call to action: liberal intellectuals and scholars must boldly deploy the cultural tools at their disposal, the stories, symbols, and founding ideals of a free society to decis