|Peter Boettke|
A year ago this upcoming August, we moved into our new dedicated space in Mason Hall on the George Mason University campus in Fairfax. The space enabled us to effectively pursue our programs in research and graduate education. The entire team worked fantastic to realize the synergies that this opportunity presented and I am appreciative for that effort throughout our group and for the support for the administration at the university and the leadership at Mercatus for supporting our vision of the continuous effort to build world-class research and educational programs in the fields of political economy and social philosophy. In a typical week besides the normal teaching and research duties that faculty and graduate students are expected to engage in, our group engages in reading groups, workshops, seminars, and a host of other formal and informal activities designed to exemplify a life of the mind at its finest. Research in our particular group is grounded in the Austrian School of Economics as our name certainly signals (just as the name of our founding research group -- Center for the Study of Market Processes -- signaled that commitment). But make no mistake about it, and the images and quotes that grace our walls surely attest to this commitment to the continuing development in the field of political economy from the classical political economists of the Scottish Enlightenment and the French Liberals to the Austrian economists, the Virginia School of Political Economy and the Bloomington School of the Institutional Analysis of Development. There is a methodological and analytical common-ground that unites these various thinkers, and there are fundamental questions they all asked about the coordination of economic activities through time, the institutional arrangements conducive to social cooperation, and the conditions required for self-governing democratic society, which excite the minds of the researchers and students involved in our programs. We certainly value the intellectual history of this project and support on going activities that support and encourage such research, e.g., the Buchanan House archives project. But we are not primarily an intellectual history shop, we are instead focused on the continuing development and refinement of what I have called "mainline" economics, and to viewing this project as a living research and educational project. The search for truth in political economy and social philosophy, as Mises put it in his treatise Human Action, "is necessarily affected by the insufficiency inherent in every human effort. But to acknowledge these facts does not mean that present-day economics is backward. It merely means that economics is a living thing—and to live implies both imperfection and change." (emphasis added) We are, as a group, deeply rooted in the intellectual tradition, but we are also constantly evolving.
Hopefully, this joy we collectively find in the 'pleasure of finding things out' in the field of political economy is easily on display to visitors, students and faculty. That is the environment we hoped to create in the new space, and what I believe we try to renew daily with our individual work in the classroom, doing our research, in our informal dialogues, in our formal presentations, and in the care with which we write up the results of our inquiry whether in journal articles, books, or more popular presentations such as blog posts, op-eds, and other forms of essays in persuasion (to use a phrase of Keynes's).
So my reporting on our activities the first academic year we shared our new space with each other is just that -- a listing -- and it doesn't actually capture the invitation to inquiry that we hope is the defining characteristic of the work being done in our physical plant. I am not listing the books published this year, nor the journal articles published, let alone the journals and book series edited -- they are numerous and with many more on the way, to get that go to the individual scholars webpages. I am also not listing our regular activities such as the Graduate Student Paper Workshop that meets each week, or the Scholar Days (Hutt and Hayek this year) we hold each semester, or the formal and informal reading groups (a group of us did one on the Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons debate), or the informal luncheon discussions about ongoing research, or the weekly Workshop in Philosophy, Politics and Economics that has met continuously throughout the academic year at GMU since 1998 under my direction (though the special book panels that are part of this series will be listed). However, imperfectly my list captures our year of activities, I think it reflects our dedication to providing a thriving intellectual environment here at GMU for the students and faculty concerned with the advancement of knowledge in the fields of political economy and social philosophy.
2015-2016 Academic Year
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Erwin Dekker, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Aris Trantidis, King’s College London
F.A. Hayek Distinguished Visiting Professor
Dr. Robert Higgs
Visitors
Dr. Arjo Klamer, Erasmus University, Rotterdam
Dr. Samuel DeCanio, Yale University
Dr. Claudia Williamson, Mississippi State University
Dr. Paul Lewis, King’s College London
Book Panels
Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life
Edward Stringham, Economics, Trinity College
Peter Boettke, Economics, George Mason University
Jason Brennan, Philosophy, Georgetown University
Bruce Benson, Economics, Florida State University
Justice at a Distance
Loren Lomasky, Philosophy, University of Virginia
Michael Clemens, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development
Jesse Kirkpatrick, Assistant Director, Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy, George Mason University
Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom
Jacob Levy, Political Science, McGill University
Peter Boettke, Economics, George Mason University
Alan Levine, Political Science, American University
Richard Boyd, Philosophy, Georgetown University
Conversation with Deirdre McCloskey on Bourgeois Equality
Deirdre McCloskey, History & Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago
Don Boudreaux, Economics, George Mason University
Public Lectures
Hayek Lecture
“The Continuing Relevance of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty,” Richard Epstein, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law and Director of the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University School of Law
Buchanan Speaker
“Education, Inequality, and Incentives,” Roland Fryer, Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University
MS Workshops
The Birth of Religious Freedom: Liberalism, Rule of Law, and State Capacity, 1100-1800, Mark Koyama and Noel Johnson
Public Administration and the Classical Liberal Tradition: Modern Political Economy Foundations, Paul Dragos Aligica, Peter Boettke, & Vlad Tarko
Not a bad year of intellectual engagement. And we are working hard to continue as James Buchanan taught to "Dare to Be Different" and to move "onward and upward" in our research and educational efforts. With that in mind, I think we can stop for a moment and certainly celebrate 2015-2016 (and thank the hard work of our team) and congratulate the graduating PhD, MA and BA/BS students (and celebrate their achievements and placements), however, as we turn to summer our focus is now on 2016-2017 and beyond, and making sure we build on our successful start and continue to represent "Economics with Attitude".
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