Steven G. Horwitz: A Tribute.

• Author: Bohanon, Cecil E.

In June 2021, classical liberal economics lost one of its most able and prolific voices. Scholar, teacher, and public communicator Steven G. Horwitz died of multiple myeloma at the far too young age of fifty-seven. A native of the Detroit area, he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1985 with an AB in economics and philosophy. He continued his studies at George Mason University, where he earned a MA in 1987 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1990.

Steve joined the economics faculty at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, in 1989. He rose through the ranks to professor and retired in 2017 as the Dana Professor of Economics. During his time at SLU, he served as associate dean of the first-year experience from 2001 to 2007. In 2017, he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics and founding director of the Institute for the Study of Political Economy (ISPE) in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.

In addition to his university affiliations, Steve served as an editor, writer, and conference discussion leader for numerous free-market organizations, including the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Mercatus Center, the Indiana Humanities Council, and the Future of Freedom Foundation. This list is not exhaustive. He also was founding editor of the website Bleeding Heart Libertarians. Upon his move to Indiana, he became unofficially a "senior visiting intern" at Liberty Fund in Indianapolis--an unofficial title that continued to evolve.

One major influence on Steve's career was Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan, who was one of his mentors and advisers as well as a member of his dissertation committee. (The late Don Lavoie was his chair. (1)) Buchanan often challenged his doctoral students and young colleagues to think about the trajectory of their scholarship. Is their focus on contributing insights to current issues and policy discussions or, in contrast, to the more general and longer-lived theoretical and philosophical issues of political economy? Although Buchanan had a marked personal preference for the latter and encouraged his students to that end, he certainly saw the value of both kinds of endeavors. Steve Horwitz was unique in that he was truly distinguished in both realms. He was the consummate public intellectual and communicator, and he made what will be lasting contributions to economics.

Steve as Scholar

Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective (2000) is perhaps Steve's most profound work. In 2021, the editors of the Review of Austrian Economics dedicated the major portion of an issue of the journal to a twenty-year retrospective on the book.

As Nicholas Cachanosky points out in his contribution to the volume, a reading of the canonical Austrian writers "gives the impression that Austrian macroeconomics is a collection of unconnected macro-topics," but "Horwitz's (2000) main contribution consists in showing that this is not the case. Horwitz shows how to put these topics together consistently ... one gets the message that there is, after all, such a thing as Austrian macroeconomics" (2021, 279).

William Luther notes that two important books on Austrian macroeconomics were published in the year 2000: Horwitz's book and Roger Garrison's Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of...