Luke Burgis

Luke Burgis is an author, entrepreneur, and business professor at The Catholic University of America, and the founder/director of The Cluny Institute. He writes about mimetic desire, identity, culture, technology, and human formation, and is the author of Wanting and The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion.

Healthy Communities Form People Through Tension, Not Conformity

Luke Burgis tells Russ Roberts that the central problem of identity is not choosing between individualism and belonging, but learning to remain in communities without being absorbed by them. In the EconTalk conversation, Burgis argues that families, schools, politics, religious groups, workplaces, and marriages form the self through tension — and that modern life too often promises escape from that tension through frictionless affinity. Roberts presses the implication: adulthood requires standing apart from one’s tribe without necessarily leaving it.

Hoover InstitutionJun 8, 202622 min read