Revisiting the shared foundations of human action
across philosophy, politics, and economics

Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) programs now run at more than 250 universities worldwide. Their purpose is to draw on the paradigms of the three disciplines to provide a comprehensive account of the world, human nature, and society—one that is essential for guiding public policy, governance, and engaged citizenship.

In practice, modules from three departments are often placed side by side, leaving scope for more integration. To the extent that fragmentation persists within PPE, it is not merely a matter of curriculum; it reflects — and reinforces — concerning patterns in public discourse and in the thinking
of political elites. Economics narrows to mathematical modeling, severed from foundational assumptions and anthropological paradigms about exchange and value. Politics, in turn, is often reduced to power dynamics without proper philosophical or economic grounding to grasp human action, social life, and markets as a unified reality.

In response, this call seeks to recover what underpinned the Western intellectual tradition, from classical philosophy to political economy: the recognition that philosophy, economics, and politics share common ontological and anthropological premises about the human condition, the nature of human action, and the structure of social life.

The central premise of this call is that PPE fulfills its promise when the disciplines are treated as related perspectives on purposive human action — under structural conditions of incompleteness, temporality, agency, and social interdependence. These deeper conditions lie beneath the observable phenomena studied by each discipline—the order of being and change, market exchange, institutional behavior, moral choice, or political contestation. Once made explicit, they enable a unified inquiry into social cooperation, institutions, and human flourishing.

The relation between individual action and aggregate social outcomes — long contested across philosophy, economics, and political theory — is precisely the terrain on which an integrated PPE approach becomes most necessary. Collective orders are constituted by individual action — and
condition it in return. Bridging this gap demands what no single discipline can supply alone: philosophical accounts of agency and value, the economic logic of scarcity and coordination, and the political structures through which social cooperation holds. This call invites contributions that take this irreducibility seriously — and show what becomes visible when philosophy, economics, and political theory are made to think together.

It may have direct implications for institutional analysis, policy design, and social science research. Assessing the relevance and validity of hypotheses, theories, and models requires clarifying their underlying anthropological assumptions, the scope and limits these impose, and the policy implications they entail.

We therefore ask: what lies beneath philosophy, economics, and politics as perspectives on purposive human action, and what enables a unified inquiry into social cooperation, institutions, and human flourishing? How can attending to the structural conditions and limits of human action sharpen the distinct contributions of each discipline — and illuminate what becomes possible when they are brought together?

The Lithuanian Free Market Institute’s studies of incompleteness and lack offer one such generative principle and provide an impetus to explore other foundational premises bridging philosophy, politics, and economics.

Key Questions

We invite contributions that engage, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• What ontological and anthropological conditions underlie purposive human action? What structural assumptions follow from them as a common ground across philosophy, politics, and economics?
• How do human limitation, finitude, and imperfect knowledge connect economic exchange, moral choice, and institutional design?
• How can an integrated PPE approach better account for the relationship between individual action and aggregate social outcomes?
• What do the three disciplines illuminate in one another — and what can they produce together that none can produce alone?
• Which intellectual traditions and schools of thought have treated PPE as an integrated mode of inquiry, and what can be drawn from them to inform a more advanced PPE framework?

We are particularly interested in points of intersection where the three disciplines converge and where structural tensions become visible — enduring features of the human condition that no single discipline can fully exhaust: human agency and systemic boundaries • order and spontaneity • autonomy and dependence • freedom and necessity • value and valuation • stability, adaptation, and change.

Within this frame, we welcome conceptual originality, engagement with existing intellectual traditions, and reflection on PPE’s integrative potential.

Abstract and Paper Submission

Please submit your abstract by 15 August 2026. The abstract should be 300-500 words and accompanied by a short bio. Selected contributors will be invited to submit full essays for publication in a volume on emerging advances in the theory and method of integrative PPE. Contributors are welcome to submit developments of ongoing or previous work, provided appropriate attribution is given.

Notifications will be issued by 15 September 2026.

The deadline for paper submission is 15 January 2027.

The tentative publication date for the volume is July 2027. A publication contract has not yet been finalized with any specific outlet; participants will be informed as publication plans develop.

Invited contributors will receive a honorarium of €2000–€3000. Invitations will be extended later to participate in a co-creation forum on PPE integration at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala (early 2027) and in multi-day bootcamps for university faculty and policy practitioners (Spring–Summer 2028).

Contact for submission and questions

Aneta Vaine, Vice President of the Lithuanian Free Market Institute at aneta@llri.lt.
Elena Leontjeva, President of the Lithuanian Free Market Institute at elena@llri.lt.

This call for papers is supported by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. (funder ROR https://ror.org/00x0z1472) under the grant “Bringing Markets Back In: Enhancing the Theory and Practice of Social Cooperation.”