Lisa Helga Kinspergher joined Students For Liberty in 2020 as member of our Italian team in Milan, and quickly became one of the team’s most active members, working on local events including a John Galt School, and expanding the long-term successful partnership with the Milan-based think tank, Istituto Bruno Leoni.
While Lisa has since moved to North Carolina to continue her studies at the prestigious Duke University, she hasn’t stopped working on promoting classical liberalism in Europe as well.
Most recently, Lisa has been working on producing the 25 Pensatori Liberali podcast with the Istituto Bruno Leoni, where she interviews professors, historians and experts about the lives and works of 25 great advocates of a freer society and sound economics.
The podcast explores the political thought of early modern, modern, and contemporary liberal political thinkers from John Locke to Elinor Ostrom in weekly 10-15 minute episodes. The project started in the summer of 2021, initiated by another Senior Coordinator on the Italian team, Veronica Cancelliere, who also works as the content and programs manager at Istituto Bruno Leoni.
“The institute wanted to promote a new format addressed to young generations to provide the basics of the liberal tradition within politics, philosophy, and economics,” explains Lisa. “IBL had realized that there are high school and college students asking for reading suggestions in the history of political philosophy. I think that students would like to understand critically which are those ideas that could actually help in living in a freer, developed, and tolerant society, and where do these ideas come from.”
The experience has been illuminating both in learning more about the thinkers that were being discussed, and in learning to communicate complex content in a limited time frame to audiences with differing prior knowledge.
Reaching wider audiences is also what Lisa Kinspergher considers the most important objective for the pro-liberty movement: “It is not important whether all of them will agree with us, but we must get in the mainstream. In the US, we are close to it, but in Europe there is still a lot that we need to do. This is the most important goal for now, according to me. How to do this? Act on campus and with your peers. Since libertarians have the burden of proof currently – because they are not the mainstream – they should be nice individuals, friendly, and attract a lot of people. It should look super cool to be a libertarian! (And an SFL member, of course!)”
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This piece solely expresses the opinion of the author and not necessarily the organization as a whole. Students For Liberty is committed to facilitating a broad dialogue for liberty, representing a variety of opinions.
