“Onward Still” is a commemorative historical essay on the founding, mission, and continuing urgency of the Foundation for Economic Education. Sennholz situates FEE’s birth in 1946 amid postwar shortages, strikes, controls, and the intellectual dominance of Keynesian, Marxian, and interventionist economics. Its thesis is that Leonard Read’s project was not merely institutional but civilizational: to restore public understanding of liberty, private property, and moral responsibility against the recurring temptations of socialism and welfare-statism.
Leonard Read saw the great issues of his time in a different light.
The essay first reconstructs the climate into which Read, Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, and others intervened. Americans had largely accepted New Deal premises; debate concerned not whether government should manage economic life, but who should do it best. Against this consensus, FEE defined education as prior to politics. Its principles required abstention from party activity, cultivation of demand for understanding, dissemination through intellectual networks, and the patient reaching of unknown future leaders.
To undertake this giant task, they molded The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).
Sennholz’s central conceptual move is to define “freedom education” as both economic and moral. It is not only instruction in markets, prices, and property, but training in self-reliance, responsibility, and virtue. Read’s institutional genius lay in gathering writers, teachers, economists, clergy, and trustees who could make liberty intelligible and admirable. FEE’s role is therefore presented less as advocacy than as stewardship of an intellectual and ethical inheritance.
The Foundation helped to revive and guide the intellectual opposition to the ideological mainstream.
The middle of the essay widens the scope from FEE’s founding circle to its influence on later freedom-oriented institutions in the United States, Britain, Latin America, and elsewhere. Sennholz treats these organizations as evidence that FEE became a “home” and beacon for friends of liberty. Yet the collapse of Soviet communism does not make the mission obsolete. The end of the “Evil Empire” opened political gates, but those gates remain fragile.
Only the philosophy of individual freedom and the property order can keep them open.
The latter half turns polemical and diagnostic. Sennholz argues that socialism’s formal collapse did not kill socialist habits of thought. They survive in welfarism, “middle-of-the-road” politics, and the language of social justice and security. His comparison of socialism and welfare-statism is the essay’s sharpest theoretical claim: both politicize economic life, weaken property, replace contract with public command, and turn citizens into entitlement claimants.
Socialism and welfarism are cousins of the same family having many features in common.
This argument leads to a darker account of social disintegration. Entitlements create rival classes of beneficiaries and victims; politics becomes a struggle over tax burdens and claims on others; moral responsibility gives way to rights understood as demands. Sennholz sees welfare debt, bureaucratic dependence, crime, family decline, and multicultural hostility as symptoms of a “conflict system.” The danger is not only economic stagnation but civic fracture.
The essay closes by returning to FEE’s distinctive discipline: principled education outside politics. Sennholz insists that the remedy cannot come from government schooling, which he regards as part of the welfare-state structure, but from purposeful private education in economics and Judeo-Christian moral habits.
The Foundation shuns politics and keeps a respectful distance from politicians.
Its relevance lies in this fusion of institutional memory and warning. “Onward Still” presents FEE as a model of intellectual fidelity: anti-fashionable, nonpartisan, moral, and pedagogical. The final emphasis is not optimism in events but confidence in truth, virtue, and education as the conditions of a free society.
It cares more for the truth than for popularity, for truth is its own witness.
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