Mission

The Association for the Study of Free Institutions is a scholarly organization seeking to promote multi-disciplinary inquiry into the free society – its philosophic, cultural, and institutional conditions, its character, its strengths and limitations, and the challenges it faces. ASFI works to unite scholars from a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities – political science, history, law, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, theology, classics, education – in order to revive the study of freedom as a major concern of American higher education. Mindful that the questions to which freedom gives rise are often controversial, that freedom carries certain costs, and that we have things to learn even from its most determined critics, ASFI welcomes intellectual diversity. It seeks the participation of scholars representing not only a variety of intellectual disciplines, but also a diversity of moral and philosophical positions. Ultimately, ASFI aims to revitalize higher education and our public discourse by encouraging scholarship and teaching that will contribute to the preservation and improvement of our free civilization.

Born in antiquity, nurtured in the creative anarchy of the Middle Ages, and brought to maturity through long political struggle in Europe and the Americas, free institutions have now blossomed worldwide, to be increasingly enriched by the contributions of many peoples and cultures. It can now be truly said that they provide the foundation for an emerging global civilization - the very first in the history of our species - liberating human talent and energy to an unparalleled degree.

But the institutions of freedom also face fierce and continuing opposition from forces that would curtail liberty, deny tolerance, and suppress reasoned discourse. Indeed, freedom's enemies have lately born witness to the awful lengths they will to go to smash the confidence of the free, reminding us that each generation must vindicate afresh the liberties bequeathed it by its forbears. Yet freedom cannot be effectively defended unless it is adequately understood, and such understanding demands determined educational effort. Free institutions have not been the human norm, and in the absence of a serious effort to transmit the knowledge, skills, and habits of mind on which they depend, they are likely to prove ephemeral.

There are few subjects of study more integrally related to the mission of liberal education than the nature, history, basis, and prospects of free institutions. Indeed, in its classic conception liberal education is literarily a preparation for freedom, designed to cultivate the frame of mind and fund of learning upon which citizens must draw in making well-reasoned public and private choices.

As an academic subject the study of free institutions includes more than an examination of the constitutional, political, and economic arrangements that allow people to control their own lives. It also encompasses an exploration of the ideas, cultural values, and social and psychological structures that underpin these arrangements. And it is certainly not uncritical. Freedom has its costs as well as benefits, and there are a wide range of views about the worth of its specific instantiations, and the trade offs that accompany its exercise. Moreover, even the most unqualified intellectual opponents of freedom have things of real value to teach us.