(GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.), Oct. 30, 2007 -- The Intercollegiate Studies Institute awarded a Templeton Enterprise Award to Dr. Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, for his book, The Commercial Society (Lexington, 2007).
Sponsored by ISI and funded by the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton Enterprise Awards are given annually to the best books and articles published in the previous year on the culture of enterprise. The awards are designed to encourage young scholars (39 years or younger) to explore and illuminate the process by which economics and culture are related throughout the world. The award comes with a $7,500 cash prize.
"I am humbled to receive this award," Dr. Gregg said. "In our new global age of business and free enterprise, the spread of commercial society represents the greatest hope for liberating the developing world from poverty and much of the developed world from the dead hand of bureaucracy and excessive regulation. The free economy is not sufficient for the growth of liberty, but it is essential. If The Commercial Society helps in its small way to forward the cause of economic liberty across the world, then it will have achieved its purpose."
Dr. Gregg has written and spoken extensively on moral questions in law, medicine and finance. He has a Doctor of Philosophy degree in moral philosophy from Oxford University and has authored several other books, including Morality, Law and Public Policy (2000), On Ordered Liberty (2003), Ethics and Economics (1999), A Theory of Corruption (2004) and Banking, Justice and the Common Good (2005). He is an adjunct professor at the Pontifical Lateran University, a consultant for Oxford Analytica Ltd, and general editor of the Lexington Book Series Studies in Economics and Ethics.