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Paul Lewis (1971-2025)
A Beloved Colleague
Paul Lewis, Professor of Political Economy at King’s College London and Affiliated Fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, passed away on March 5, 2025. He was a beloved colleague and will be dearly missed.
Paul is likely best known for his work in the history of economic thought. His contributions to scholarship on F. A. Hayek have forever changed how we understand Hayek’s post-WWII work on themes like order, emergence, and adaptive systems. He has demonstrated to what extent Hayek’s work in this period was influenced by early pioneers of cybernetics like Ludwig Bertalanffy. Paul also edited volume 18 of the Collected Works of Hayek: Essays on Liberalism and the Economy, published with the University of Chicago Press in 2022. In 2016, he won the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics Best Essay Prize for his article, "The Emergence of 'Emergence' in the Work of F.A. Hayek: An Historical Analysis" published in the History of Political Economy journal (vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 11-150).
Another of Paul’s sustained research interests was his engagement with Tony Lawson’s work on critical realism and social ontology, which he more recently applied to the scholarship of thinkers like Elinor Ostrom, James Buchanan, and F. A. Hayek. Paul first became interested in social ontology during his PhD’s studies at Cambridge where he studied under Jochen Runde and attended Lawson’s seminars.
Paul was also dedicated to studying and advancing the importance of mentorship, apprenticeship, and vocation training. Not only did he pursue academic and policy research on the topic, but also was an advisor for the TALENT Commission, on the future of UK’s technical talent.
One of his more outstanding qualities was his intellectual openness. He was familiar with and deeply engaged with multiple heterodox schools of economics and methodological approaches and served as a needed bridge across disparate scholarly communities in a way that generated fruitful insights that a more isolated approach would have missed. Indeed, Paul was always ready to learn and to challenge others in wide-ranging conversations.
Hayek Program Director, Peter Boettke, reflects that: “I knew Paul Lewis for more than two decades, and we interacted often—me visiting with him as far back as Cambridge and more recently at Kings, and he frequently visiting us at Hayek Program, or seeing one another at professional conferences. Paul was a wonderful man and an exacting scholar, yet an engaging and charitable teacher and scholar. I will miss him dearly, as I learned much from him through the years, and enjoyed greatly our banter as well as our discussions about the NFL and NBA, Joy Division and New Order, and, of course, Hayek, the problems with economics, and the nature of the liberal society. My deepest sympathy and condolences to Nadine.”
Paul’s curiosity, generosity, and interest in ideas shown through in every room he entered and interaction he had. We are profoundly saddened by his loss and share our condolences with his wife Nadine as well as his family and friends.