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Vladimir Bukovky, Ross Levatter are the 2007 Thomas Szasz Civil Liberties Award Winners! Click for the press release!

Click here to read Jim Bovard's speech when Representative and U.S. Presidential Candidate Ron Paul received the Szasz Award at the Cato Institute in 2002

2006 Winners Announced!

The 2006 recipients of the Thomas S. Szasz Awards for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties are historian Robert Higgs (general category) and psychologist-philosopher Robert Spillane (professional category).

For more than 30 years Spillane, who lives in Australia, has fought against what Szasz calls the medicalization of moral behavior. He actively campaigns against the mass drugging of children and the use of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in management and its misuse in psychology.

Spillane teaches philosophy and psychology at Macquarie University in Sydney, and has taught at the Universities of New South Wales, Stockholm, the London and Manchester Business Schools, and the Abcor Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. He has written nine books, including Organisational Behaviour: The Australian Context, Stress at Work: A Review of Australian Research, Achieving Peak Performance, and Personality and Performance: Foundations for Managerial Psychology (co-written with the late John Martin), which draws on the work of George Herbert Mead, Peter Drucker and Szasz to argue that psychology should be used to understand and master oneself, not manipulate others, and that management should concern itself with what people do, not with their "psyches." His most recent book is The Management Contradictionary (co-written with Rodney Marks and Benjamin Marks), is a humorous look at the linguistic pretensions of managers and psychologists. Spillane has also written more than 120 professional articles and a play, the comedy "Entertaining Executives."

Higgs's work has focused on the reasons and methods by which government grows and usurps liberty. He has recently concentrated on how the state creates and exploits fears in order to expand its power over its subjects.

Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for the Independent Institute and editor of the Institute's quarterly The Independent Review. He is the author of Depression, War, and Cold War; Resurgence of the Warfare State; Against Leviathan; The Transformation of the American Economy 1865-1914; Competition and Coercion; and most famously, Crisis and Leviathan. He is also the editor of The Challenge of Liberty; Re-Thinking Green; Hazardous to Our Health?; Arms, Politics, and the Economy; and Emergence of the Modern Political Economy. He has written more than 100 articles and reviews in academic journals.

Past Szasz Award Recipients:

2005: Libertarian/feminist Joan Kennedy Taylor was the winner of the general award for her lifelong devotion to liberty. Winner of the professional award was Brian Caplan, economist at George Mason University. Caplan, a specialist in psychology and economics, is the author of "The Economics of Szasz: Preferences, Constraints, and Mental Illness," which will be published in the journal Rationality and Society. The paper restates Szasz's philosophy of human behavior in economic terms, giving a different perspective on Szasz's position that mental illness is a myth and that coercive psychiatric interventions are a violation of human dignity and autonomy.

2004 Winners Announced!

The Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties

Renowned Sociologist, Columnist, Win 2004 Thomas Szasz Civil Liberties Awards

The distinguished sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz and syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum are the winners of 2004 Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties.

Irving Louis Horowitz, winner of the professional award, is Hannah Arendt University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers University. Over the past several decades Horowitz has worked to develop a political sociology that can measure the extent of a society's personal freedom and State-sanctioned violence. As a result of his work, a standard for the quality of life in any particular nation or social system has been constructed based on the number of people arbitrarily killed, maimed, injured, incarcerated, or deprived of basic civil liberties. Horowitz has tried to build a bridge between his current analysis of State power and authority and his earlier studies of comparative international stratification and development. He is recognized as the individual who introduced the phrase "Third World" into the lexicon of social research.

Horowitz is the founder of Studies in Comparative International Development-now in its 40th year. He is also chairman of Transaction-Aldine Publishers. From 1962 to 1969, Horowitz was professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. He has also been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin, Queen's University in Canada, and the University of California, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Argentina, Israel, and India. He is a prolific author. Among his most recent books are Tributes: An Informal History of Social Science in the Twentieth Century; Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power, in its fifth edition; and Behemoth: The History and Theory of Political Sociology.

Jacob Sullum, winner of the general award, is a senior editor at REASON magazine and writes a column distributed by Creators Syndicate to newspapers throughout country, including the New York Post, The Washington Times, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His articles also have appeared in Cigar Aficionado, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and many other publications. He is a frequent guest on radio and television programs.

Sullum's work relentlessly defends the rights of consenting adults to consume even potentially harmful products, such as drugs and tobacco. He is a consistent champion of all civil and economic liberties. Sullum is most recently the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, which refutes the idea that certain intoxicants must be banned because, unlike alcohol, they cannot be used responsibly. His previous book, For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health unmasks the anti-freedom agenda of those who would legally harass people who choose to smoke.

Click here for pictures from the awards ceremony, held at the home of Andrea and Howie Rich, in New York city, on Saturday, October 30, 2004.

The professional award is given to a specialist, such as a psychiatrist, psychologist, or sociologist, who has drawn particular attention to abuses of civil liberties. The general award is given annually to a journalist or activist who has done exceptional work to promote the importance of civil liberties. The winners each receive a plaque and $1,000.

Past winners include anti-affirmative-action activist Ward Connerly, First Amendment journalist Nat Hentoff, computer-privacy champion Phil Zimmermann, author James Bovard, William Mellor and Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice, law professor Richard Epstein, development economist Peter Bauer, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, and Second Amendment scholar David Kopel.

Click here for more information about past winners.

Click here for remarks by Jeffrey Schaler on receiving the Szasz Award in 1999

The Thomas S. Szasz Award is a tribute conferred annually in the general and professional categories on persons or organizations, American or foreign, judged to have contributed in an outstanding degree to the cause of civil liberty. The award is intended to encourage civil libertarians to persevere in the battle to protect personal autonomy from state encroachment. The greatest encouragement, however, may be found in the life of Thomas Szasz himself.

For almost five decades, Szasz has distinguished himself as the preeminent defender of individual rights in the fields of psychiatry and psychology. He has remained a steadfast champion of the classical-liberal values of voluntary interaction, the rule of law, and an open society. His struggle on behalf of civil liberties has been indefatigable, sustained despite intense opposition over a lifetime of brilliant intellectual accomplishment.

Emeritus professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center/Syracuse, Szasz is the author of some 25 books, hundreds of scholarly articles, and a regular column in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. His most recent volumes are Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary and Faith in Freedom: Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices, both published by Transaction-Aldine Publishers.

His other books include The Myth of Mental Illness; The Therapeutic State; Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts and Pushers; Insanity: The Idea and It's Consequences; Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted; Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide; Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America; and Liberation by Oppression: A Comparative Study of Slavery and Psychiatry

The Thomas S. Szasz Award is a project of the Center for Independent Thought.

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