Today, I’m remembering my friend and colleague, Steve Horwitz, who was born on this date in 1964.
When we lost Steve to multiple myeloma on June 27, 2021, I wrote in part:
Steve was first and foremost a wonderful human being and a very dear friend. But he was also a thought-provoking scholar of the highest order. He was long associated with St. Lawrence University, and later became the Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In 2020, he was the recipient of the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Steve and I first met way back in the mid-1990s; his important work in the area of Austrian economics and on the progressive nature of market institutions (which would culminate in his wonderful book “Hayek’s Modern Family”) led me to spotlight his contributions to the “dialectical” turn in libertarian thought, in my book “Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism” (2000). So enthused was he with the dialectical project that he gladly accepted an invitation to contribute a wonderful essay (“The Dialectic of Culture and Markets in Expanding Family Freedom“) to the 2019 anthology, “The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom,” for which I was a co-editor.
Our professional relationship also extended to Rand studies; he was a contributor to two of the symposia published by “The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies”: one to our 2003 discussion of Rand and progressive rock (“Rand, Rush, and De-totalizing the Utopianism of Progressive Rock“) and another to our 2005 centenary symposium on “Ayn Rand Among the Austrians” (“Two Worlds at Once: Rand, Hayek, and the Ethics of the Micro- and Macro-Cosmos“).
Steve joined the journal’s Board of Advisors in 2012 and was a valued peer reader for JARS.
Steve was an inspiration to those of us who knew him. May his memory be a blessing. 
Notablog 