John Tomasi leads Heterodox Academy, a network of professors devoted to open inquiry on more than a thousand American campuses.
Every morning that summer, John Tomasi rode his motorcycle—a beat-up Kawasaki KZ750—to a Tucson bakery and worked an eight-hour shift waiting tables through breakfast and lunch, keeping the afternoons and evenings for philosophy. He was a first-year PhD student with no summer funding, and he was having second thoughts about whether to spend the $500 he had saved on a trip he could not reallyafford.
The destination was a seminar in California. That spring, a postcard had turned up in his mailbox from a group he briefly mistook for a Catholic organization: it was IHS, announcing the Liberty and Society Summer Seminars. Tomasi wasn't a political philosopher; he worked on the theory of knowledge. "Are you really going to spend this hard-earned money on some seminar about political philosophy?" he remembers thinking.
Something in him wanted to go anyway. Tomasi had grown up in a small New Hampshire town, watching his father build and run a pharmacy in a state whose license plate reads "Live Free or Die." He filled out the card and mailed it back, and word came that he got in. Only later would he learn that the postcard had never been aimed at him at all: David Schmidtz, a departing graduate student and future IHS faculty partner, had simply blanketed every mailbox in the department.
Tomasi bought the plane ticket. "I almost didn't,” he said. “But that decision changed my life."
At the time, it looked more like a bad fit. The speakers that week were Leonard Liggio and Walter Grinder, longtime leaders of IHS, and a young Randy Barnett, who would go on to become one of the country's most influential libertarian legal scholars. They talked about the free society in ways Tomasi found radical, even shocking. When Barnett argued that because people make bad choices—and government is made up of the same people—we shouldn't have government at all, Tomasi raised his hand to say the argument was only half done. Tomasi pointed out that people's choices are only as good as the options in front of them, so the case for freedom has to show, not assume, that a free society produces good options on its own. The example he remembers reaching for was that you can't eat well in a town where the only restaurant is McDonald's.
As Tomasi remembers it, Barnett passed over the question. Stung, he spent the afternoon break in his room, writing and rewriting his question for the seminar's nightly ritual: participants submitted questions, and the organizers chose the best ones to set that evening's discussion. He could hear his new friends swimming and laughing at the pool outside. He submitted the question, certain it would be picked. The organizers chose simpler ones instead. "That really surprised and disappointed me," he says. "They're not going to take my question seriously."
He spent the rest of the week as, by his own admission, "quite the difficult person." He is generous about it now. "Maybe I asked my question badly. Who knows?" he says. "But as a professor, I also know you sometimes get good questions from students that you don't want to deal with at that moment."
At the end of the week, the organizers announced a contest: write an essay on any idea from the seminar, and the best one wins a prize. Back in Arizona, Tomasi spent around 48 hours turning his twice-rejected question into a careful essay. "When I pressed the send button, I said: I'm never going to hear from these people again. But at least someone there is going to know that argument is only half the argument they need."
A month later, a letter arrived: he had won first prize in the essay contest. There was a cash prize, and an invitation to spend the next summer in residence with IHS at George Mason University, doing philosophy full-time instead of waiting tables, and turning the essay into a real article. What the letter amounted to, as Tomasi puts it now, was this: "We see you. We want to invest in you and see what happens." The essay became his first publication, “The Power Principle,” in Criminal Justice Ethics—the same journal where Barnett had made his argument—and it launched his career.
"These people are so serious about the free society that they actually want to hear hard criticisms of it."
It also told him something about the organization that had just bet on its own critic. "What it showed me, as a young idealistic person, was that these people are so serious about the free society that they actually want to hear hard criticisms of it," he says.
Walter Grinder, then a leader at IHS, told him that "classical liberalism is a mansion with many rooms," a phrase that became the central idea of his intellectual life. "IHS wasn't in the business of helping us memorize a set of inherited ideologies,” Tomasi said. “IHS was inviting us to join in a great adventure, to explore new rooms in that mansion, to discover our own rooms, perhaps."
The bets kept coming, each a little larger: three consecutive summers in residence at George Mason, a fellowship administered through IHS that took him to Oxford for his BPhil and DPhil, and funding support during his postdoc at Princeton. Then he went to Stanford, and then to Brown, where he spent most of his career.
IHS also brought in a coach for a terrified young public speaker. When IHS paid Tomasi's way to his first academic conference and he came home glowing, they called with a correction: we heard you didn't say a thing. Raise your hand. Introduce yourself. Wear your name tag high on your coat. "It was only later, when I became a professor myself, that I realized how savvy IHS had been with me every step of the way," Tomasi says. "They'd been making small bets on me. When I performed well, they would invest a little bit more, and keep with me."
The question he asked at that first seminar grew into Free Market Fairness, a defense of free markets grounded in a concern for justice and the least well-off. Reading the early classical liberals at Oxford, Tomasi was struck that Malthus had criticized Adam Smith for talking about the poor too much, while the tradition's modern heirs scarcely talked about the poor at all. "If you care about everyone, including the least well-off, we shouldn't concede that to the far left," Tomasi says. "That's our territory. That's classical liberal territory, originally. Let's reclaim it."
"I wanted them to think about the free society. But really, I wanted them to think freely."
Caring about the free society meant, Tomasi realized, "that I have an obligation to do anything in my power to promote it." At Brown, he built the Political Theory Project from nothing into a lasting institution, teaching students Hayek and Friedman alongside Marx. "I don't mind if they become Marxists when they leave, so long as they read and understood Hayek," he says. "I wanted them to think about the free society. But really, I wanted them to think freely." Then, at the invitation of his friend Jonathan Haidt, he left his endowed chair to lead Heterodox Academy, an organization of professors devoted to freedom of thought on more than a thousand US campuses.
The relationship ran the other way almost from the start. In May 1989, while he was still a graduate student and a few months before the IHS scholarship took him to Oxford, Tomasi mailed the organization a donation of ten dollars. Small alumni gifts have continued across the decades since.
Once Tomasi had tenure, IHS asked him to come back, and he did, returning for some fifteen years as a speaker at its graduate workshops and career seminars. He taught select cohorts of IHS graduate students with a talk he called "How to Live, How to Love, and How to Die": a frank warning that the first decade of an academic career means punishing work and being, in his words, "an awful person to be in a relationship with." But the talk also shares a promise that tenure buys the space to make amends: to be generous to students and colleagues, and to be good to the people you love.
Years ago, when Tomasi was complaining to David Schmidtz about the brutal philosophy job market, Schmidtz gave him a line he has kept ever since. "He said: John, remember, you're a volunteer."
"Which is the essence of the free society," Tomasi says now. "I had the opportunity to choose a path. Success wasn't guaranteed. God knows, it was extremely unlikely. But without IHS, I never would have succeeded in this profession."
Asked why a place like IHS is worth sustaining, Tomasi points back to Walter Grinder: "The people at IHS are entrepreneurs in the world of ideas." Entrepreneurs take risks, make bets, accept being wrong, and try again. Tomasi was one of the bets.
"The free society only lasts so long as we have new generations of people coming up to explore it, to wonder about it, to be impatient with it not being as good as it could be, and to want to find new ways to defend it afresh," he says. "Who's going to defend the classical liberal ideas, not in a dogmatic, narrow way, but with humility, and intensity, and commitment, and integrity? If IHS doesn't do this work, who's going to? I don't know who else would."
"I remind myself how lucky I am to have the opportunity to do what I can to help the free society stay alive, and to pass it on to the next generation."
Nearly forty years after a postcard meant for everyone found its way to him, the idea that stirred a first-year graduate student in his early twenties still stirs him. "When I wake up and have another tough day at the office," he says, "I remind myself I'm a volunteer. And I remind myself how lucky I am to have the opportunity to do what I can to help the free society stay alive, and to pass it on to the next generation."