Institute for Humane Studies

We believe that ideas within the classical liberal tradition serve as the foundation for the good society—an intellectually open, tolerant, and pluralistic society—in which individuals and communities thrive in peace, prosperity, and mutual respect. For those ideas to take root, it is essential they are taught, explored, challenged, and developed in higher education.

By the end of the '50s, Baldy ... moved to transfer the bulk of the Volker funds to a new Institute for Humane Studies, which would ... provide a permanent home for libertarian fellowships, scholarship, conferences, and publications ... [A]t cost of great personal sacrifice, Baldy patiently, step by step, built up the institute. After nearly a decade of this slow and painfully wrought development, he was able to bring the IHS to the point where it could sponsor conferences, publish books and pamphlets, grant fellowships, and begin to fulfill the Harper dream of a center for libertarian ideas and scholarship.

Since his time at Cornell, Harper had dreamed of establishing an institute devoted to the interdisciplinary study of human action. In 1961, while at the Volker Fund, Harper, with the help of Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, and others, drew up plans for establishing the IHS, which was to be handsomely endowed with Volker money and to carry on the mission of discovering, sponsoring, and publishing the works of libertarian scholars ... In 1962, however, the Volker Fund collapsed before it could fund IHS on a permanent basis ... When he returned to Menlo Park, California, in 1963, he set up the IHS on a shoestring budget in his own garage.

I first met Friedrich A. Hayek in 1975, the year after he received the Nobel Prize in economics. I had had the exceptionally good fortune to be awarded summer fellowships for 1975 and 1977 at the Institute for Humane Studies when their offices were located in Menlo Park, California. For both of those summers, Hayek was a resident scholar at the Institute. I was 25 years old in 1975 and to me Hayek seemed really old at the age of 76 ... So I set myself the task of going into his office at the institute every day, trying to "squeeze" out of him every bit of information that I could ...

In 1972, while still an undergraduate student, I met Floyd "Baldy" Harper, founder of the Institute for Humane Studies, at the Institute's headquarters in Menlo Park. I explained my interest and self-taught knowledge in Austrian Economics ... Then in both 1975 and 1977, I was offered summer student fellowships at the Institute for Humane Studies at their Menlo Park, California headquarters. IHS brought together a group of promising young Austrian-oriented students, some of who had been at that first Austrian Economists conference in South Royalton, Vermont in June 1974.

Leonard’s career advancing liberty spanned seven decades, during which time he served as the President of ... the Institute for Humane Studies, where he later continued to serve as its Distinguished Senior Scholar ... In the 1970s, Leonard was a Liberty Fund fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies, which played a key role in the revival of Austrian Economics in the wake of F.A. Hayek’s receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1974 ... Leonard returned to Institute for Humane Studies, which he ran through much of the 1980s, steering numerous young academics toward fruitful research agendas and careers of influence.

In his long career, Leonard was associated with [among others] the Institute for Humane Studies ... [M]y contact with him increased dramatically in 1985 when I went to work for [IHS], where Leonard also worked. That was the year IHS, led by John Blundell (who, alas, also died this year), moved from Menlo Park, California, to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Now I was in a position to talk to Leonard nearly every day (though he traveled often). What an opportunity! ... Leonard ... could generate a long bibliography on virtually any topic in the humane studies at the drop of a hat.

[T]he institutions that emerged during those early years were perhaps even more important, ... the Institute for Humane Studies, founded by F.A. "Baldy" Harper in 1961, which in time would become a significant force in bringing the modern libertarian legal movement into being ... Located at the time in Menlo Park, California, ... and led by Leonard Liggio, a historian, and Davis Keeler, ... who headed up their Law & Liberty project, IHS and its people had an exceptionally keen appreciation of the need to establish not simply the economic arguments for liberty, including economic liberty, but the moral and legal arguments as well.

Along with food and consumer goods, residents of the former Soviet Bloc crave information from the outside world—especially books. The Institute for Humane Studies, a classical liberal academic foundation, based at George Mason University, has launched a campaign to ship at least $1 million worth of market-oriented books to private book stores in Eastern and Central Europe. Donations from publishers and bulk purchases have permitted IHS to obtain the books at 15 to 30 percent of the retail cost. The first shipment of books, valued at about $100,000, went to Poland in early November.