Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders

Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders


fsso2The Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders recognizes and supports the work of scholars who apply the perspective of Austrian methodological individualism, which has greatly increased our understanding of free markets, to areas outside the realm of traditional economic study.

The Fund has given a series of Hayek Prizes for scholars doing significant work in areas of interest to the Fund.  In addition, the Fund gives occasional Lifetime Achievement Awards to distinguished senior scholars whose work exemplifies the ideals of the Fund.  From time to time, the Fund also supports academic conferences, studies, and publications.

Atlas Senior Fellow William C. Dennis is administering the work of the Fund.  Professor Peter J. Boettke of the Department of Economics at George Mason University and Dr. John W. Sommer join Dr. Dennis, and Professor Leonard P. Liggio (Atlas Executive Vice President) as advisers on the award of the prizes.

Please contact William Dennis with inquiries about how to help the Fund achieve its mission by bringing more financial resources to this work, or by recommending scholars of interest.  There is no formal application process for consideration for a prize from the Fund.

Awards and Activities

2010

  • On September 9, 2010, the Fund will present at a public reception its fifth Lifetime Achievement Award to James M. Buchanan, Professor Emeritus of Economics at George Mason University. The presentation will be at the new George Mason Inn on the Fairfax Campus of GMU. A panel discussion of Buchanan’s work led by Henry Manne, Dean Emeritus of the GMU Law School precedes the presentation. Panel discussants are Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom, and Buchanan himself. The event is from 4 to 7 pm; the panel discussion will take place from 4 - 5:30 pm, followed by the award presentation and reception. Please rsvp to Megan Gandee at mmahan@gmu.edu.

2009

  • In December, The Fund held its third conference directed by Gus diZerega, this one entitled “Organization and Emergence: Tensions and Symbiosis.”  Lenore T. Ealy led the discussion of twelve original papers. Richard Cornuelle and Leonard Liggio represented the Fund and Atlas respectively. Besides the United States, participants came from Argentina, Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Taiwan. The papers will appear eventually on www.studiesinemergentorder.com.
  • In October, Elinor Ostrom, a winner in 2003 of the Fund’s Lifetime Achievement Award won the Nobel Prize in Economics.  Read more http://su.pr/1Yccz3
  • In September, the Fund presented its Lifetime Achievement Award to Peter L. Berger, Professor Emeritus of Religion, Sociology, and Theology and Senior Research Fellow, Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University. The Fund held a gala public reception in Berger’s honor at George Mason University Law School presided over by F. H. Buckley, Executive Director of the world famous Law and Economics Center. Professor Steven Horwitz of the Department of Economics at St. Lawrence University gave remarks for the occasion; and Michael Novak, of the American Enterprise Institute, spoke of his long friendship with Berger and presented Berger with a plaque and a check for $50,000. A multi-disciplinary conference followed with nine papers based on Berger’s important work in economic development, the sociology of religion, the sociology of knowledge, and civil society. Revised conference papers will be published in a future issue of Society.
  • Conference-On February 5-8, 2009, the Fund held a conference, directed by Dr. John W. Sommer, at Hilton Head, South Carolina to discuss twelve invited papers on “Manifestations of Spontaneous Orders in Politics and Society.” Todd Breyfogle of the Aspen Institute served as discussion leader. Participants and paper writers came from Australia, Canada, and ten of the United States. Professional disciplines represented included anthropology, ecology, economics, geography, history, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and political science.

2008

  • Emily Chamlee-Wright- In April, the Fund awarded its fourteenth Hayek Prize to Professor Emily Chamlee-Wright, the Elbert H. Neese Professor of Economics at Beloit College and Affiliated Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. The Fund cited in particular her work at the intersection of studies of entrepreneurship, philanthropy, the civil society and market activities through her studies on female entrepreneurs in local markets in Zimbabwe and Ghana. In addition to research on voluntary disaster relief and reconstruction efforts after the devastation of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This latter project comes out of her work as principal investigator at the Katrina Project of The Mercatus Center.
  • Conference -In November, the Fund returned to Portsmouth, New Hampshire for a second academic conference directed by Gus DiZerega to discuss newly written papers on the theme “Orders and Borders”.  Nineteen invited authors and discussants attended, coming from the United States, Canada, Belgium, Taiwan, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Conference papers will be posted on a special FSSO website, Studies in Emergent Order.
  • Conference- In April 2008, the Fund also participated in the  Atlas conference, “Why Academic Centers Matter in Promoting Economic and Political Liberties.”

2007

  • Christopher J. Coyne - The Fund awarded its thirteenth Hayek Prize to Professor Christopher J. Coyne, now a professor of economics at the West Virginia University, for a series of related articles on the influence of institutional arrangements on entrepreneurship and international development; and on weak and failed states and the problem of nation building. In these articles Coyne applies an Austrian economics perspective to argue that just as successful economies and polities can not be built from whole cloth according to rational constructivist principles, there are limits to what even well-intentioned governments can do to build free markets and free political orders elsewhere. Some of this work appears in his Stanford University Press book, After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy,
  • Peter T. Leeson - The Fund’s twelfth Hayek Prize went to Peter J. Lesson, now The BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Leeson, a prolific young scholar with over three dozen published journal articles on a number of topics, has been using a combination of historical studies and economic tools to analyze real world examples of private property anarchism and related problems of social organization. Leeson has concentrated on the study of the problem of order where no formal law exists, showing how in such diverse situations as trade among strangers, banditry in colonial West Central Africa and modern Somalia, and life in pirate societies over the ages often informal rules emerge that allow order to be preserved without heavy handed government control.
  • Conference - In March 2007, the Fund hosted a gala reception at the George Mason University Law School for over 80 guests to honor Gordon Tullock for his years of scholarship (often critical) on spontaneous orders. At the reception the Fund presented Tullock with its third Lifetime Achievement Prize, and followed the presentation with a two day academic conference on Tullock’s work. Papers from this conference may be found in Public Choice, 135 (1-2), April 2008.
  • Conference - In May 2007, the Fund held a second conference on the Austrian Theory of the Firm.  Building on previous work in this area, the conference participants, through a series of new papers, offered ways to explain business practices of the modern firm by emphasizing the role of entrepreneurship, shared knowledge, and institutional theory.
  • Conference - In October 2007, the Fund held a multi-disciplinary conference in Portsmouth New Hampshire, directed by Dr. Gus DiZerega on “New Directions in the Study of Emergent and Spontaneous Social Orders.” Dr. Lenore T.  Ealy of the Program for New Philanthropic Studies served as discussion leader for two days of discussion on the original papers prepared for this conference.

2006

  • Mark Pennington - In Fall 2006, the Fund awarded its Eleventh Hayek Prize to Dr. Mark Pennington, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy, Department of Politics, Queen Mary College, University of London. In a series of thoughtful and carefully argued articles and books, Dr. Pennington has applied the insights of F. A. Hayek to the closely related contemporary problems of land use planning, sustainable development, and deliberative democracy.
  • Adam Tebble - In Spring 2006, the Fund awarded its tenth Hayek Prize to Adam Tebble from the London School of Economics. Tebble, a recent Visiting Fellow at the Political Theory Project at Brown University, received the prize especially for his work defending Hayekian civil society against theories of communitarianism and group representation, and for his critical study of Robert Nozick’s argument about the necessity of rectification for long past injustices.
  • Conference - From January 18-20, 2006, the Fund hosted an academic conference at the George Mason University Law School on “A Reconsideration of the Firm.” The conference began with a discussion of the history of the emergence of the corporate firm as a dominant form of economic organization. It then explored the paradox that the firm, created through individual initiative and market enterprise, is itself organized according to centralized and hierarchical plans.

2005

  • Edward Stringham - Our ninth Hayek Prize, awarded in late 2005, went to the economist Edward Stringham, of San Jose State University for his cutting edge work on resolving enforcement problems among non governmental, competing legal systems, and on the historical development of complicated financial transactions and self-policing mechanisms in market exchanges. These articles are available on Stringham’s website and combine economic theory with extensive work in the history of law and the development of markets.

  • James Otteson – In the summer of 2005, the Fund presented James R. Otteson, a student of the philosophy of the 18th Century Scottish Enlightenment, particularly the work of David Hume and Adam Smith, with it’s eighth Hayek Prize. In Adam Smith’s Market Place of Life, he shows Smith to be an important moral philosopher, and demonstrates how Smith’s “market place of morality” ties together in a coherent whole Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments with his more famous, The Wealth of Nations.
  • Virgil Henry Storr - Virgil Storr recieved the seventh Hayek Prize in Summer 2005 for his work combining cultural anthropology and economics, especially in his study of Caribbean cultures, most notably in his work Enterprising Slaves & Master Pirates: Understanding Economic Life in the Bahamas, Peter Lang, 2004.
  • David Ciepley – Dr. David Ciepley, currently Lecturer in Political Philosophy, Policy, and Law, at the University of Virginia, is the sixth winner of the Hayek Prize. Ciepley has wide-ranging, cross disciplinary academic interests including work on the Scottish Enlightenment, the commercial society, the nature of the firm, democratic theory, urban planning, and “The New World Order” and American foreign policy.
  • David Prychitko – In Spring 2005, David Prychitko recieved the fifth Hayek Prize for his application of Austrian epistemology to extend our understanding of human action beyond economics. Much of Prychitko’s scholarship is rooted in the work of the 18th century moral philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment. He visualizes a radical reform of social thought, away from neoclassical marginality theory and mathematical modeling in economics, towards a broader, philosophically based understanding of all human action.
  • Conference - From January 12-14, 2005, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation brought together twenty experts from a wide range of academic disciplines to explore different social and economic topics in relation to the economic phenomenon of “spontaneous orders.” Atlas’s Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders organized this conference and encouraged each participant to submit an extant work or a work in progress, which then defined the structure of the discussion. Thus there was a creative mix of social theory and empirical studies, of history and contemporary issues, and of philosophy, political theory, and economics.

2004

  • Paul Dragos Aligica – FSSO named Paul Dragos Aligica the fourth winner of its Hayek Prize in Fall 2004. Aligica, a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center (Virginia) and Associate Professor at the National School of Political Sciences and Public Administration (Romania), received the award for his application of F. A. Hayek’s insights on the limits of centralized systems to such diverse fields as the fall of communism in central Europe, the problem of prediction and of the epistemological foundations of “Future Studies” courses at universities, and the usefulness of “scenarios” in spontaneous order studies.
  • Daniel B. Klein - In June 2004, the Fund awarded its third Hayek Prize to Professor Daniel B. Klein, for his work bringing a Hayekian approach to such interesting aspects of human action as reputation; the personality of the regulator; liberty and the psychology of our “deepselves”; the intersection of liberty, dignity, and responsibility; and trust and quality assurance.
  • Gus DiZerega - After previously giving support to his work at Whitman College for a project entitled “Liberalism, Emergence, and Complexity,” the FSSO in August 2004 awarded DiZerega with its second Hayek Prize for his research into the spontaneous creation of democratic political orders.

2003

  • Pierre Desrochers - In April 2003, the Fund awarded its first Hayek Prize to Pierre Desrochers of the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto and director of research at the Institut Économique de Montréal.
  • Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University - In June 2003, the Fund announced its first Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of the Ostroms’ pioneering applications of methodological individualism to the study of social organization outside the realm of market exchange. In connection with the presentation of the award, which occured on November 7, 2003, at the George Mason University Law School in Arlington, Virginia, the Fund held an academic seminar for invited participants on the work of the Ostroms. Papers from this conference were published in Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organization, Volume 57, June 2005.
  • Conference -  The Fund gave an award grant to provide partial support of an academic conference on “The Law Merchant,” organized by Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School.
  • The Chicago Journal of International Law published the papers from this conference as, “The Empirical and Theoretical Underpinnings of the Law Merchant,” Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2004, pp.1-179.