Submission Guidelines

Thank you for your interest in writing for Liberalism.org, a project of the Institute for Humane Studies. Liberalism.org is a home for liberal reasoning—a public scholarship publication that brings work within liberal intellectual tradition to a broad educated audience. Here are the rules and guidelines we ask you to follow when sending submissions.

Submission Process Basics

We welcome submissions from scholars, researchers, and subject-matter experts writing about ideas, findings, or frameworks from their area of expertise—connected to contemporary questions readers care about, but where the scholarship is the center of gravity. The contemporary issue is the on-ramp. The scholarship is the destination.

Please keep essays to approximately 1,500–3,000 words. Charts, graphs, and other illustrations are welcomed as appropriate. Hyperlinks are the preferred way to document sources. We kindly request that all contributors disclose any financial or other relationships that may cause the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Contact Information

Please direct all correspondence to [email protected].

Word Processing

All written contributions must be submitted via Google Docs. Please share them with [email protected]. Make sure that privileges are set to “Editor,” and that they’re enabled for “Anyone with the link.” Edits will be returned as a Google Doc with changes tracked.

Some submissions may require media capabilities beyond Google Docs; for these, we prefer that contributors use Google Workspace; these applications ensure style compatibility with the rest of our corpus.

Style Guide

We follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition (2024). Please refer to it as needed. Questions that fall outside the manual will be resolved at the editor’s discretion and in a way compatible with the publication’s overall style and tone. Occasional exceptions may also be made.

Review

All submissions will receive a response in a timely manner. We will contract to publish those we deem potentially suitable, and edits will be returned promptly to allow author and editor to reach agreement. Authors of published work will receive an honorarium during the month of publication or the month following. The editor reserves the right to consult confidentially with IHS personnel and others about all matters of editorial judgment.

Nonprofit Political Speech

As a nonprofit, IHS is forbidden from endorsing candidates, parties, or pending legislation. Please refrain from such endorsements as you write. Content that violates this guideline will be edited to fit IHS’s legal situation. If an endorsement is found integral to a piece’s argument, that piece may be rejected.

Guidelines on Voice and Tone

New writers may do best to read some of our work before writing, but the following guidelines should give some idea of what we’re looking for.

• We publish work grounded in the Four Corners of liberalism. Liberalism.org advances a vision of liberalism built on political, economic, cultural, and epistemic freedom—with each corner taken seriously and none treated with hostility. We welcome a wide range of voices within that vision, including disagreement about how best to advance these freedoms. But pieces that advance one corner of liberalism by dismissing or working against another are not a fit for us.

• We welcome the experience of the new and the other. Our openness is an advantage. We look on the world with hope and wonder. We are curious and open-minded.

• We emphasize agency expressed from below rather than decisions imposed from above. Though we recognize the importance of formal institutions, we believe that the world needs more and better stories of polycentric coordination and individual empowerment.

• We illuminate, not just diagnose. Articles that just diagnose a problem are easy to write and easy to ignore. Our pieces bring scholarly depth to contemporary questions—the kind of depth that gives readers a new lens for understanding what they’re seeing, not just another opinion about what to do.

• The scholarship is the contribution. Our pieces don't just cite research to support a claim—they bring ideas, findings, and frameworks from the liberal intellectual tradition to life for readers who wouldn’t otherwise encounter them.

• We avoid language that dehumanizes our opponents or other groups of people. Political disagreements often involve matters of consequence and raise questions whose resolution will affect many people who don’t participate in the debate. That fact argues for care, not heat. We serve the wider public badly when we proceed by invective. We likewise serve the public badly when we presume that groups of people, particularly those with unchosen characteristics, are questions in need of a political answer.