Dwight D. Murphey, author of A Shared Market Economy, practiced law in Colorado before joining the business law faculty at Wichita State University in 1967, from which he retired in 2003. He did his undergraduate work in political science at the University of Colorado, and then after two years in the Marine Corps attended the classes and seminar of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises at New York University before going to law school at the University of Denver, from which he was graduated magna cum laude in 1959.
Professor Murphey considers himself a “neo-classical liberal” and has long been a prolific writer. His first book, Emergent Man (1963), stated the model of a classical liberal free society. The University Press of America later published a four-volume set: Understanding the Modern Predicament (1982), Modern Social and Political Philosophies: Burkean Conservatism and Classical Liberalism (1982), Socialist Thought (1983), and Liberal Thought in Modern America (1985). The latter of these was republished in 1992 as Liberalism in Contemporary America by the Council for Social & Economic Studies. Early in the 1990s he became associate editor of The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies and of The Conservative Review under its then ownership.
Born in Tucson in 1934, Murphey grew up in Miami, Florida, Guadalajara, Mexico, and Denver, Colorado. He and his wife lived in Wichita, Kansas, for 52 years before moving to Hermitage, Tennessee, in late 2019.
A much-deserved word of appreciation
A hearty “thank you” goes to Victoria Piercey, Dwight’s daughter, for her use of her computer expertise to improve so greatly the easy readability and attractiveness of this publication of A Shared Market Economy, and of the accompanying article (which also appear on Murphey’s “collected writings” web site).