This short commemorative retrospective is a single-author institutional essay on the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), written from the vantage point of its fiftieth anniversary. Its scope is not theoretical exposition in the abstract, but historical interpretation: Sennholz frames FEE’s founding in 1946 as a principled response to wartime controls, postwar shortages, labor conflict, and the apparent worldwide ascendancy of socialism. The essay moves from crisis, to founding purpose, to personnel, to readership and donors, and finally to an assessment of intellectual change between 1946 and the 1990s.
Sennholz’s central thesis is that FEE served as a durable intellectual center for recovering “the enduring principles” of liberty, private property, and sound economics at a time when those principles were culturally and politically embattled. He begins by situating Leonard Read’s project amid price controls, the Office of Price Administration, and the broader moral prestige of socialist planning. Fascism had been defeated militarily, but Sennholz insists that communism and democratic socialism remained powerful “blood relatives” of the same collectivist impulse. Against that background, FEE appears not as one nonprofit among others, but as a counter-institution built for civilizational recovery.
The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) was meant to be an intellectual fort of resistance and, hopefully, a rallying point for this country to re-establish the enduring principles on which it was founded.
The conceptual move here is characteristic of postwar classical-liberal self-understanding: political economy is treated as a moral and educational struggle before it is a legislative one. FEE’s purpose is described not as lobbying, campaigning, or policy engineering, but as the restoration of an “order” grounded in freedom and harmony.
The FEE plan was a great design, the restoration of an order of freedom and harmony.
The essay’s middle section gives institutional substance to that claim by naming the people who made FEE more than an idea. Sennholz presents Leonard Read as founder and convener, then situates around him scholars, journalists, administrators, editors, and teachers. F. A. Harper, George C. Roche III, Paul Poirot, W. M. Curtiss, Robert G. Anderson, Bettina Bien Greaves, Edmund Opitz, Ludwig von Mises, and Henry Hazlitt are not merely listed as personnel; they represent the division of labor within a movement of ideas. Some founded other institutions, some edited and administered, some taught, and some supplied moral or theoretical foundations.
There was unassuming greatness in their dedication and will, their faith and moral strength.
Sennholz then shifts from leadership to audience. FEE’s supporters are divided into customers and donors, but the distinction is moral as much as financial. Subscribers to The Freeman, readers of FEE books and booklets, seminar participants, and voluntary contributors all become part of the institutional ecology by which ideas are preserved and transmitted. His description of The Freeman clarifies FEE’s preferred mode of persuasion: it is anti-ad hominem, nonpartisan, and grounded in moral and rational argument rather than political combat.
Standing far above the fray of politics, it emphasizes ideas rather than party programs and political agendas, prescriptions for public policy, and government edicts.
The essay’s relevance lies in this defense of educational liberalism: Sennholz portrays lasting political change as downstream from patient intellectual work. In his view, FEE mattered because it kept alive a coherent case for the free society when such a case had few public defenders.
When there were no other voices defending the free society, The Freeman spoke clearly and convincingly.
The conclusion turns openly celebratory. Sennholz does not claim to measure FEE’s influence precisely, but he argues that the global retreat of communism and socialism, along with greater public skepticism toward political power, vindicates the long labor of economic education. The essay thus functions as both institutional memory and movement argument: it remembers FEE’s founders in order to reaffirm the continuing need for principled, nonpolitical instruction in liberty.
For five decades, FEE has been the Rock of Gibraltar of sound economics and moral principle, of devotion to individual freedom and the private property order, in a turbulent and dangerous world.
Its final historical judgment is modest but pointed. The America of the 1990s is presented as still imperfect and still tempted by bureaucracy, yet less intellectually captive to planning than the America of the 1940s. Sennholz’s closing thought compresses the essay’s educational philosophy into a paradox: progress required not only learning new truths but discarding inherited errors.
They may have learned what had to be unlearned.
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