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.
ASFI seeks to advance its mission through the following specific activities: