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[Steve sent this to me to be added to Pete's comments. -- RBE] 
 
Don Lavoie:  Scholar, Teacher, Utopian 
 
Steve Horwitz 
 
Delivered at the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics annual 
dinner * 11/18/01, Tampa, FL. 
 
 
Good evening.  I find this a very difficult talk to give, for a variety of 
reasons.  First of all, I hate death.   I hate it with a passion, and even 
more so when it seems so unfair and so premature. Finding words when 
someone dies too young is always hard.  Capturing something important about 
someone who meant a lot to what we do, and to me personally, can be equally 
difficult.  And, frankly, having seen a copy of the remarks Pete made at 
the memorial service for Don in DC a week ago Friday, I'm not sure I can do 
any better (which is unusual after I read something of Pete's).   
 
Just about everyone here is aware of Don's written contributions to 
Austrian economics.  His Cambridge book marked him as one of the leading 
lights of the post-revival generation.  In the eyes of scholars on all 
sides of the calculation debate, Don's book changed the terms of that 
debate forever.  There is no question that his book, and some of his work 
that followed it, should get significant credit for changing the scholarly 
atmosphere around the discussion of capitalism and socialism, particularly 
in the context of the calculation debate.  His work put Austrian ideas back 
on the table in a powerful way, and did so not just by reiterating what had 
been said before, but by pushing those ideas forward with a recognition of 
the latest work in the profession and relevant ideas from outside 
economics.  And for those of us who care deeply about human freedom, the 
Cambridge book and the companion book National Economic Planning:  What is 
Left? were inspirational in showing us how one could marshal the scholarly 
endeavor of economics in the service of causes we believed in passionately. 
 
That contribuion would have been enough to put Don on the Austrian 
economics map.  However, it's not what I want to talk about tonight.  
Tonight I want to talk about what I think was Don's possibly greater 
contribution to Austrian economics * his work with graduate students, the 
values he cultivated in them, and their relationship to this Society.  By 
my count, there are 9 members of this organization who wrote, or intended 
to write, dissertations under Don's direction.  One of those is our 
outgoing president, another serves as an officer of the Society, and yet 
another is finishing a term on the Executive Committee.  Most are in 
teaching positions at quality universities, and most have published in a 
variety of outlets, all forwarding the ideas that Don cared about.  And 
many of them seem to have an ability to reach out to groups of scholars, 
either in economics or out, who one wouldn't automatically think of when 
trying to communicate or forward Austrian ideas.  This dedication to the 
ideas of Austrian economics and this willingness to engage openly in 
conversation with people from all over the disciplinary map can be traced 
back to Don.   
 
If I can take a few moments to reflect back on my own history with Don and 
then tie it back to my main theme* I first met Don at a Cato Institute 
summer seminar in 1984, before my senior year in college.  I knew I wanted 
to go to grad school and study Austrian economics, but the question was 
where.  At that Cato seminar, I had a chance to spend some time with Don 
and he gave me what I thought was a fair appraisal of the NYU vs. GMU 
question (as, I might add, did Israel when I, in my own inimitable fashion, 
cornered him and pestered him about it after the one talk he gave).  But 
the one thing that Don conveyed to me was his own excitement about having a 
group of students at GMU who were interested in pushing forward Austrian 
ideas in a sustained and deeply committed way.  That was important to me.  
When I visited campus to check things out, I wound up eating lunch with 
Pete, Dave, and Deb Walker. I think they thought less of me than I did of 
them (at the time), but they all conveyed that same sense of excitement 
about working with Don.   
 
The following four years working with Don at GMU were, without question, 
the most intellectually challenging and enjoyable years of my career.  Don 
created an environment for grad students that was, well, utopian.  His door 
was always open and his patience with Pete, Dave, and me was, as you might 
imagine, pressed to the limits.  However, as Pete has said, Don never made 
us feel as though we were interrupting him or interfering with his work.  
We may well have, objectively, been pests, but we never were made to feel 
that way.  In fact, the overriding sense was one of comraderie.  Not 
comraderie in the superficial sense of having a good time (although that we 
surely did), but in the deeper sense of being comrades in the same 
enterprise.  Don took graduate students seriously and treated us, to the 
degree possible, as intellectual peers.  He made us feel, I think, that we 
were contributing as much to his work as he was to ours. 
 
I think it was that aspect of Don that filled his graduate students with 
confidence in our ideas and in that we could cut it as scholars.  I think 
it's fair to say that few of Don's graduate students lacked 
self-confidence.  In fact, some of us were downright cocky!  What I think 
we really were was fearless.  One result of that fearlessness was our 
demand to be taken seriously, often manifested by writing for professional 
outlets - early and often, as they say.  It was Don, for example, that 
pushed Pete, Dave, and I to write the 1986 Market Process piece on 
equilibrium economics.  Whatever its substantive flaws in retrospect, Don's 
encouragement and decision to publish that paper in the journal he edited, 
made us feel like we were players in the game.  So to did his later 
decision to include it on the reading list for the graduate level Austrian 
II course.  Don didn't have to take us seriously.  He could have tried to 
"break" us nd attempt to elevate himself in the process, but he chose a 
different path.  And I think it was a better one, as there is no doubt in 
my mind that his attitude toward us, toward me, has played a crucial role 
in my own development as a scholar. 
 
It's also important to point out that our fearlessness was tempered by 
another Lavoie virtue * an openness to conversation with anyone about 
almost anything.  And that openness was not just a "willingness" to 
converse, but a genuine openness to what the other had to say, and a belief 
that such conversation was, in the best spirit of economics, ex ante 
mutually beneficial.  Watching Don talk to other economists and to scholars 
in other disciplines, one saw his own willingness to listen to what others 
had to say and to digest it and then find ways to make use of it, where 
appropriate, in his own work.  Dialogue, for Don, was not just about 
convincing other people that you were right (although that was certainly an 
element of it), rather it was a Hayekian discovery process.  It was a mode 
of learning, both social and individual, and one that was fueled by a 
recognition of one's own limits as a scholar.  Given the sort of 
self-confidence Don instilled in grad students, it would have been easy for 
us to be holy terrors, but I'd like to think we weren't (and aren't!) 
because he also instilled in us a sense of respect for what others had to 
say.  If it's possible to be both self-confident and humble, Don tried to 
convey that combination to us. 
 
I know that in my own career at St. Lawrence, I've tried very hard to forge 
relationships outside of my department and, in doing so, to "bring" 
economics to the other social sciences and the humanities (and to learn 
from them in the process).  I did these things, in my own mind, because I 
thought that it was important both for improving my own understanding of 
the world and for making the case for human freedom.  I often find myself 
learning a great deal from these encounters and finding ways to incorporate 
them back into my own work. It wasn't until I heard that Don was sick, and 
I started thinking back on my relationship with him, that I realized how 
much of that behavior was reflective of an attitude and values that I had 
absorbed from Don.  As frustrating as those encounters can be at times, 
they have enriched my professional and personal life in innumerable ways, 
and for cultivating that side of me, I will forever be grateful to Don. 
 
All of these reflections bring me back to this room.  I'd like to think 
that the SDAE reflects these two Lavoie values of self-confidence and 
openness to dialogue in profound ways.  The creation of this Society five 
years ago was, perhaps, a sign of collective self-confidence.  We, as 
Austrians, were ready to be organized, to create panels, to get ourselves a 
journal, and to stake our claim in the profession.  Way back when, Don and 
us grad students created a short-lived Society for Interpretive Economics.  
The intellectual marketplace ruled that a failure, but it wasn't for a lack 
of confidence on Don's part.  The time was riper ten years later and the 
environment for Austrians was better, to some degree due to the successes 
of Don and the GMU program in generating work and students that were more 
visible in the profession. And now five years after our birth, we have over 
100 members and 10 panels at these meetings.  Our self-confidence was 
indeed justified.  
In addition, I think we as a Society have tried to cultivate a spirit of 
openness to dialogue with other economists.  This was not one of Don's 
strengths;  he was much more comfortable with people outside economics than 
within it.  Even so, I know that his willingness to engage with those who 
differed from him, and to do so in a spirit not of "colonization" but of 
mutual benefit through exchange, is an idea that drives me every day of my 
professional life.  And it is one that I value deeply in people and 
organizations that I work with. 
 
So for these reasons, Pete's decision to name the SDAE graduate student 
paper competition in Don's memory seem so very appropriate.  I can think of 
no better way to honor Don than through a competition that rewards graduate 
student scholarship and offers opportunities for graduate students to 
engage in conversation with the profession. 
 
I think all of us who worked with Don have our own memories of him, both 
personal and intellectual.  When I think of Don, I can still see his Don 
Johnson rolled-up sport coat sleeves and Austrailian bush hat, his felt-tip 
pens and index cards in the shirt pocket, and that piano keyboard scarf.  
But when I move beyond the visual, the thing I think of most is what I'd 
call Don's "utopianism."  I mean that both in the "Hayekian" sense of a 
"grounded" utopianism, but also in the more colloquial sense of a sort of 
unbounded, and perhaps sometimes unwarranted, optimism that the world's 
problems could be solved once and for all.  Don's dedication to scholarly 
inquiry and to cross-disciplinary diaglogue flowed from this utopianism.  
If I had to capture this in one phrase it would be "if only they'd talk 
with us*"  If only they'd talk with us* then we could make <fill in the 
blank> better.  Maybe it was economics, maybe it was social science, maybe 
it was the human condition.  Whatever it was, Don's faith in people, in 
scholarship, in dialogue and in freedom was unbounded and unshakeable.  
It's a faith I share, and a faith (and it is a faith, at least in the 
Polanyian sense of the term) that I think we need to have both as Austrian 
economists and as citizens of the world in these increasingly trying times. 
There are no answers for why someone gets taken from us before what we 
think is his time.  However, I hope that Don's legacy goes beyond his work 
and beyond the students who he has trained, and also comprises a set of 
values that underlied both of those endeavors.  Don's optimism, his 
confidence in our ideas, his openness to others, and his respect for his 
students are what made him special as a teacher and as a human being.  That 
we had him for the time we did makes us fortunate indeed. 
 
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