As I mentioned in my last post, I have a few exciting announcements to make about the blog. The first, of course, was that Steve Horwitz and Kevin Vallier have joined us as full-time contributors. I’ll have another announcement in the coming week.

For now, though, here’s another bit of terrific news. Pete Boettke will be guest blogging for us for the whole Spring Semester of 2012! Most of you probably already know Pete from his blogging at Coordination Problem and his ongoing work as one of the world’s leading authorities and public intellectuals on the subject of Austrian Economics. Hopefully some of you are more deeply acquainted with his far-reaching and important academic work. For more about Pete (there’s way too much to tell for a short blog post), see his full bio here.

As most of you know, Pete is a professor of economics at George Mason University, where he regularly teaches advanced graduate-level courses in Austrian economics and cognate subjects. This semester, Pete is involved in two activities that might be of special interest to our readers. The first is teaching a course on Constitutional Economics (syllabus here) with readings from Schmidtz, Gaus, Lomasky, Nozick, Buchanan, and lots of other people near and dear to the Bleeding Heart Libertarian project. As the semester goes along, Pete will drop in with comments and questions about the readings. So, for those of you who want to play along at home, download the syllabus, head on over to Amazon, and start reading! (And start early because there’s a lot on that reading list!)

The second thing Pete’s going to be doing is running the Workshop in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, which brings in visiting faculty members to present papers every week or so.  You can see the schedule here. Some of Pete’s contributions to the blog will be driven by reflection on these papers, which look like a stimulating bunch.

Steve’s post from last week suggests that Pete might not quite consider himself a bleeding heart libertarian. So perhaps I’m continuing my trend of inviting apostates to guest-blog here. If so, so be it! Pete is a fascinating thinker and a terrific guy, and I’m looking forward to learning a lot from his contributions. I hope you will too!