Spring at the Academy
Reflecting on CEPOS Akademi.
I went to CEPOS Akademi expecting libertarian dogma, but after four weekends the position is hard to defend. The worry maps poorly onto the texture of the academy, because what it actually attempts is broader and more useful: an audit of dannelse (bildung), truth and liberty along with numerous insightful lectures.
The biggest takeaway for me is the distinction between bourgeois and civis. The classical-liberal tradition has, since Cicero, insisted that the commercial citizen and the political citizen are not two people but one. The standard left critique is that the bourgeois has bought himself out of civis, and right critique is that the civis has forgotten he is also bourgeois. The academy’s argument is that they are the same person, with the Danish word borgerlig registering the same union etymologically.
Borgerlig: bourgeois and civis
The Latin civis is the political citizen, the bearer of rights and duties to the polis. The French bourgeois, borrowed in the nineteenth century by Marx, is the commercial citizen, the property-owner and merchant. Danish borgerlig and German bürgerlich preserve the union that English and French have split. Cicero, Smith, and the classical-liberal tradition treat the two senses as the same person under a single discipline; the Danish word still does. The claim of the academy is that this is not a linguistic accident but the correct anthropological map.
The historical case for the borgerlig disposition is the Danish reform sequence of 1846–1864. Bondevennernes Selskab (Society of the Friends of the Peasants) in 1846, Grundloven (the Constitution) in 1849, Næringsfrihedsloven (the Trade Freedom Act) in 1857, and free-trade alignment with Britain through the 1850s. The sequence built what the modern literature would call policy certainty: liberalization of institutions and trade on a horizon long enough that capital and effort price themselves correctly.
The Danish reform sequence, 1846–1864
1846: Bondevennernes Selskab (Society of the Friends of the Peasants) is founded, and Britain repeals the Corn Laws, liberalising the export market for Danish grain in the same year. 1849: Grundloven (the Constitution) abolishes absolutism and writes property rights, freedom of contract, and freedom of association into constitutional law. 1857 (effective 1862): Næringsfrihedsloven (the Trade Freedom Act) abolishes guild monopolies and the towns’ trade privileges. Free-trade alignment with Britain follows.
The same applies to externalities. If property rights are well-defined and transaction costs are low, parties internalize them without state intervention. This is the load-bearing claim of Coase†. Pigovian taxes† are one solution, but not the sole solution. The argument extends through Ostrom†’s work on commons, where repeated games with small numbers of players reach cooperative equilibria with no central enforcer at all. Pigou, Coase, and Ostrom together form three corners of the same problem, and the orthodox economics curriculum, which I have been taught in high school and university, tends to teach only one of them.
What Public Choice† gave me was a way to compare market failure and state failure on the same footing. The framework extends to voters, politicians, and bureaucrats the same incentive logic applied to firms and consumers. The welfare coalition appears as a structural feature; rational ignorance† as a predictable property of any large electorate; regulatory capture† as the medium-run tendency of any new agency. This is what a serious comparison of market failure to state failure looks like, against real states rather than idealised ones. The conclusion is rarely “abolish.” It is “design institutions assuming everyone is self-interested, including the regulators.”
The academy kept coming back to the French Revolution. On the liberal side: a people set free from the tyranny of a king. On the conservative side: a cautionary tale about replacing institutions wholesale. Burke† and Paine†, through the Reflections and the Rights of Man, are the two halves of that argument. Paine is right that institutions cannot be infinitely deferred to. Burke is correct that they cannot be cheaply replaced. The Popperian frame† made the distinction concrete: piecemeal social engineering, gradual and reversible, against utopian construction.
On the weekend of the Danish election I wrote an op-ed in Berlingske on Christiansborg’s technological illiteracy. The argument is adjacent to an essay I wrote previously about countries outside the AI frontier, but with stronger emphasis on Danish politicians seemingly not even being aware of it. The academy’s strongest claim is that prosperity rides on stable institutional frameworks. The boring rule-of-law plumbing that lets long horizons price themselves correctly. That plumbing is precisely what will likely be pressure-tested with the advent of superintelligence. A serious liberal in 2026 has to confront this.
My biggest gap is still political philosophy and Danish institutional history. Technology pulls hard at my attention, and Nietzsche, Kant, and Kierkegaard have not had the hours they deserve. The academy went deeper on them than I expected. I believe the summer module ahead, provides the chance to keep learning.
Best,
Alfred
Glossary
Ronald Coase’s 1960 argument: with well-defined property rights and low transaction costs, parties bargain externalities away without state intervention.
↩Arthur Pigou’s 1920 solution to externalities: tax the offending activity at a rate equal to the marginal social cost. Carbon taxes are the canonical modern example.
↩Elinor Ostrom’s 1990 Governing the Commons. Documented the conditions under which small communities sustain shared resources without state enforcement. Won the Nobel in 2009.
↩James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s 1962 The Calculus of Consent, and the school of political economy that followed. Treats voters, politicians, and bureaucrats as rational self-interested actors, the same way economics treats firms and consumers. Political failure is symmetric with market failure, not its remedy.
↩Anthony Downs’s 1957 observation: voters face high information costs and a vanishing probability of being decisive, so it’s individually rational to stay uninformed.
↩George Stigler’s 1971 argument: regulatory agencies, over time, come to serve the industry they were created to regulate.
↩Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France. Argued that institutions accumulate practical knowledge across generations; revolutions that discard them tend to produce tyranny.
↩Thomas Paine’s 1791 Rights of Man, written as a direct reply to Burke. Argued that institutions exist to serve the present generation; legitimacy comes from consent, not tradition.
↩Karl Popper’s distinction in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). “Piecemeal social engineering” addresses problems incrementally and reversibly; “utopian social engineering” redesigns society wholesale. The second mode tends to require powers it cannot keep accountable.
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