Ronald Hamowy

He returned to the United States in 1968 to become an instructor in and later assistant director of the History of Western Civilization Program at Stanford University. In 1969, he accepted a position as assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Western Canada's largest university. He taught there until 1975, when he took a position in the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia; after two years at Simon Fraser, he returned to the University of Alberta where he remained until his retirement from active teaching in 1998. He lived near Washington, DC.

Hamowy was born in Shanghai, China. His family was Jewish; his father was from Syria and his mother was from Egypt. He was raised in New York City. He did his undergraduate studies in economics and history at Cornell University and at City College of New York. In 1960 he was admitted to the doctoral program at the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago and did his doctorate under the supervision of Professor Friedrich Hayek. He did postgraduate work at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied under Sir Isaiah Berlin and did further postgraduate work at the University of Paris.

The best of the scholars gravitated to three American universities: the New School for Social Research in New York City; the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana; and most importantly, a cluster of these scholars formed at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where Hamowy had done his doctoral work in the 1960s.

Mises greatly influenced a generation of American thinkers in addition to Hamowy including Ralph Raico, Leonard Liggio, George Reisman, Israel Kirzner, and Rothbard. Hamowy first met Hayek when Hamowy arrived to Chicago in the fall of 1960 to do doctoral work under Hayek's supervision.

After he arrived at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1960, one year after Raico, who had departed New York for Chicago the previous year, Hamowy was appointed book review editor of the seminal libertarian student publication, the New Individualist Review. Soon after he joined Raico as co‑Editor in Chief. The Review, though only a student publication, received important scholarly contributions from numerous famous scholars including future Nobel Prize winners Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Ronald Coase. In addition to his editing responsibilities, Hamowy engaged in a friendly debate in print with his doctoral supervisor Hayek, and a perhaps less friendly though entertaining rapportage with the conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr.

Hamowy's first brush with libertarianism was through George Reisman who was an early classmate. By the mid-1950s Hamowy was associated with Ralph Raico and Murray Rothbard.

The group of younger libertarians that formed around Rothbard in the 1950s began to call themselves the Circle Bastiat, so named after the French classical liberal Frédéric Bastiat. The group's core included Hamowy, Rothbard, Raico, Reisman, Leonard Liggio, and Robert Hessen. Regular meetings and all night discussions at Rothbard's Manhattan apartment were routine. The close association and friendship between Hamowy and Rothbard continued unabated until Rothbard's death in January 1995, at the age of 68.

Ronald Hamowy (/həˈmaʊi/; April 17, 1937 – September 8, 2012) was a Canadian academic, known primarily for his contributions to political and social academic fields. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus of Intellectual History at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Hamowy was closely associated with the political ideology of libertarianism and his writings and scholarship place particular emphasis on individual liberty and the limits of state action in a free society. He is associated with a number of prominent American libertarian organizations.

Although he shared the multidisciplinary approach with Rothbard, ten years his senior, on that point, one might too quickly overemphasize Rothbard's influence or Hamowy's time spent that was doing postgraduate work in Europe. Hamowy is best understood as the product of a unique scholarly era in America that was heavily influenced by thinkers immersed in the continental style, many of whom arrived, directly or indirectly, from Europe to the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s.

He admired his City College intellectual history professor Kohn, who had arrived to America in the 1930s and later taught at City College for many years, beginning in the late 1940s. Indeed, it was Kohn who first interested him in intellectual history after he returned to New York City from Ithaca, New York, in 1956. At about the same time, he also began to attend open seminars and lectures offered by the outstanding Austrian economist Von Mises, who had also arrived to America in the 1940s.