President’s Welcome (Chafuen 2017)

President’s Welcome

It is an immense privilege to greet you as President of The Philadelphia Society.  

My first experience with The Philadelphia Society was in 1988 when I spoke about freedom in Latin America. I was elected a member in 1992, so this is my silver anniversary.  While not the first foreign-born president of the Society, I am the first who was born in Latin America. This is especially meaningful for me, because renewing our understanding of what happened in Philadelphia in 1776 and in 1787 is relevant not only for the United States but for freedom loving people around the world.  

The organization where I work full time, the Atlas Network, has a long history with The Philadelphia Society. Our founder, Antony Fisher, was the first dinner speaker at a national meeting of the Society. At that first national meeting, in 1965, Fisher gave a dinner talk that preceded a presentation by Milton Friedman, who served three terms as a trustee for a total of 9 years.  In 1968, Fisher was the luncheon speaker at a program where F.A. Hayek had, the evening before, delivered his lecture, “Competition as a Discovery Procedure.” The late Atlas VP Leonard P. Liggio, served as President of The Philadelphia Society on two occasions, and senior fellow William Dennis once. Among Atlas senior staff, John Blundell (RIP) and Jo Kwong served as trustees, as well as Daniel S. Peters, a former trustee and current member of Atlas advisory board.

Please mark your calendars now and plan to join us for the 2017 Fall Meeting—New Insights on the American Founding—to be held October 13-14 at the Ritz Carlton, Tysons Corner, Virginia. We will explore how to give new strength to the vision of our Founding Fathers. How can we use the best knowledge of the Founding and of today to better fulfill the goals of the Constitution? We will touch upon themes in economics, foreign policy and defense, rule of law, and social topics.

Our 2018 Spring Meeting—Big Questions in Keeping the Republic—will be held April 6-8, 2018, at the Sheraton Society Hill in Philadelphia. Here we will take up some of the challenging intellectual and scientific questions affecting our efforts to understand and disseminate the principles of the free society.

Alejandro A. Chafuen
President, 2017-18

(Photo credit: @elpais.uy)