Stephan du Toit Viljoen
Stephan P. du Toit Viljoen (28 June 1901, Caledon – 11 May 1993, Pretoria) was a South African academic economist and public servant who served as a professor and the Head of the Department of Economics at the University of …
Category: People
The liberals who served and continue to serve the cause of freedom in South Africa.
Ludwig Lachmann
The economist Ludwig Maurits Lachmann, well-known for Capital and Its Structure (1956) and The Market as an Economic Process (1986), taught at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, between 1948 and 1972, and was president of the …
William Hutt
William Harold Hutt was a renowned economist from Britain who came to work in South Africa at the University of Cape Town in 1928. He became dean of the Faculty of Commerce in 1931. His best-known contribution to South African …
Leon Louw
Leon Marais Louw has been considered the face of the free-market movement in South Africa since the 1970s. In a December 1987 biographical article by journalist Stan Kennedy in the Johannesburg paper The Star, Louw was described as “the driving force …
Michael O’Dowd
Michael Conway O’Dowd (27 February 1930, Johannesburg – 15 March 2006) was a South African businessman and classical liberal intellectual known for his 1966 essay which became known as “the O’Dowd Thesis”. In the essay, O’Dowd argued that South Africa’s …
Edgar Brookes
Edgar Harry Brookes (1897–1979) was a Liberal Party senator in Parliament for 15 years, representing the blacks of Zululand (Brookes 1956, 190) between 1937 and 1952. He was national chairman of the Liberal Party between 1963 and 1968 (Webb 1979, …
Jan Hofmeyr
Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr (1894-1948) was regarded as the leader of South Africa’s fledgling liberal political movement in the 1930s and 1940s. He had been a veteran politician, but was also “convinced that prevailing South African racial attitudes and policies could …