Ordo ex Libertate
Austrian economics,
practiced.
A private society of entrepreneurs, investors, and executives devoted to the study of Austrian economics and its bearing on the practical affairs of enterprise, capital, and exchange.
The Society
A society of practitioners.
The Austrian tradition has always taken seriously the knowledge contained in action: in prices formed, risks borne, opportunities perceived, errors discovered, and plans revised. Its concern with individual liberty follows from much the same view of human affairs: that knowledge is dispersed, purposes are various, and men and women must be free to choose and act for themselves.
The Austrian Praxis Society brings together people who know these forces through experience as well as study. Its purpose is to examine what theory can illuminate in practice, and what practice can reveal to theory.
Subjective Value
Human Action
Spontaneous Order
Membership
The value of membership.
Conversation
The Society creates a place for sustained conversation among people who have read widely, worked seriously, and come to these questions by different paths. Economics is the common ground, though seldom the boundary of the discussion.
Reading
The Society returns to the primary texts: Menger, Mises, Hayek, and others who have shaped and extended the tradition. We read them closely, consider old arguments in light of new circumstances, and reason from first principles.
Practice
Members carry the ideas back into their businesses, their portfolios, and their daily decisions, and bring what they learn there back to the table. The Society measures itself by how useful the tradition proves in the affairs its members answer for.
Admission
It begins with a letter.
The Society is new and deliberately small, and its first members will have a hand in what it becomes. Membership is by invitation and inquiry.
We seek members with a serious interest in these ideas and a working life spent in the affairs of enterprise and the market. The Society depends upon a variety of experience among its members: different professions, different markets, different questions, and, inevitably, different conclusions.
Members are owners and operators, investors and advisers, and scholars whose work bears on the same questions. What they share is serious reading and responsibility for outcomes.
The Emblem
Why an octopus.
Much of an octopus’s nervous system lies beyond its brain, distributed throughout its arms. Each encounters its surroundings locally, sensing and responding on its own, while remaining part of a larger and remarkably coordinated whole.
It is a fitting emblem for a tradition concerned with local knowledge, decentralized action, and the emergence of order without command. The Society’s mark is a single arm, curled into a P for Praxis; four of them turning together make the rosette.
Cognitio localis. Ordinatio sine imperio.
The Convener
James W. Vermillion III
- Founder, Vermillion Private Wealth
- Editor, Venture & Gain
- The Notebook, jamesvermillion.com
James Vermillion is an investor, adviser, and writer in Lexington, Kentucky. He founded the Austrian Praxis Society in 2026, bringing together interests that have long occupied his professional and intellectual life: markets, enterprise, individual liberty, and the problem of how knowledge becomes action.
He writes on economics, Popperian epistemology, and the classical liberal tradition. His essays appear in Venture & Gain and in the Notebook.
Membership Inquiry
Write to us.
If the Society seems suited to your interests and your work, we invite you to write. Tell us a little about what you do, what you read, and the questions that occupy you.