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3/29/99

SLU ECONOMIST TO GIVE PISKOR LECTURE

CANTON - St. Lawrence University Associate Professor of Economics 
Steven G. Horwitz will present the Frank P. Piskor Faculty Lecture 
on Monday, April 5, at 7:30 p.m. in Herring-Cole Hall. The topic of 
his presentation is "'Of  Human Action But Not Human Design': Liberalism 
in the Tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment."
	The event, open to the public free of charge, will be 
followed by a reception.
	In the lecture, Horwitz will explain the tradition of the 
Scottish enlightenment, represented by Adam Smith and David Hume in 
the 18th century, the Austrian economist Carl Menger in the 19th, and 
the Nobel Laureate economist/social theorist Friedrich A. Hayek in the 
20th. He will examine their social scientific perspective and explore 
why they came to similar defenses of the market economy, individual rights, 
and limited government.
	According to Horwitz, the tradition of the Scottish enlightenment 
is centered around the concept of "spontaneous orders," which are those 
practices, rules and  institutions that have developed not because human 
actors rationally foresaw their likely benefits and deliberately, consciously 
constructed them, but rather as unintended consequences of various human 
actors pursuing their various purposes and plans. "Understanding that much 
of the social world around us evolved without a designer and can continue 
to operate at its best when we do not attempt to redesign it is a humbling 
insight for humanity," Horwitz says. "We have not made our world nor can 
we remake it in ways we might wish in our more utopian moments.  As 
researchers in numerous other areas are discovering, complex systems work 
best when control is decentralized, or polycentric, which allows for the 
individual parts to evolve effective means of coordinating their actions 
based on their own particular circumstances of time and place."
	A member of the St. Lawrence faculty since 1989, Horwitz is a 
graduate of the University of Michigan, and earned his master's 
degree and the Ph.D. at George Mason University.
	The Piskor Faculty Lectureship was established in 1979 to encourage 
original and continued research among St. Lawrence faculty members, to recognize 
and honor distinguished scholarship and to afford the opportunity for faculty 
to share their learning with the academic community.

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