The Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders

The Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders (FSSO) seeks to encourage further development of a
general theory of purposeful human action, termed praxeology by Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian
school of economics. FSSO supports scholars who are advancing our understanding of the non-
economic dimensions of the science of human action and social cooperation.

FSSO engages practitioners of the liberal arts and social sciences along with natural scientists,
mathematicians, and technologists in exploring foundational questions about social cooperation:
How do people organize most effectively to accomplish coinciding and/or agreed upon social ends?
What new forms of social organization may be needed to nurture the capacity of people to voluntarily
coordinate their social activities, often creating public benefits through non-commercial, non-
governmental means? To what extent can self-organizing social enterprises be relied upon to identify
new ways of organizing financial, social, and human capital to accomplish desirable ends that positively
benefit the general welfare? Can we trust self-organizing mechanisms to continue to generate humane
social orders that are both free and responsive to change?

From 2001-2012, FSSO was run as a project of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.