NEW YORK—George Soros, the chair and founder of the Open Society Foundations, on Friday accepted the prestigious Joseph A. Schumpeter Award for innovative achievements in the field of business, economics, or economic policy, at a ceremony at the National Bank of Austria, in Vienna.
The award was presented by Ewald Nowotny, the bank’s governor and president of the Vienna Schumpeter Society, who cited Soros’s “commitment to freedom and the promotion of the pursuit of knowledge.”
“We are honoring George Soros with the Schumpeter Prize for making the world more open, more just and more equitable for all,” he said.
Past recipients of the award, honoring the memory of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, have included Helmut Kohl, Vaclav Klaus, Romano Prodi, and Mario Draghi.
The award is given annually by the Schumpeter Society, and funded by the Helmut Zilk Fund for International Relations of Vienna.
Besides his career as one of the world’s most successful investors, Soros’s philanthropic achievements include founding the Open Society Foundations, the world’s largest private funder of human rights and civil society groups, and co-founding Central European University (CEU), which now has over 1,400 students from around the world.
In September, CEU begins its first academic year at a new home campus in Vienna, after being forced out of Budapest by the government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
“It is a great honor to receive this award, because I have always been a great admirer of Schumpeter’s thinking,” Soros said. “I am also personally heartened to be so warmly received in Vienna, which has become the new home of the Central European University. I trust the CEU, with its focus on the social sciences, will contribute to the great intellectual life of this city, in the tradition of Schumpeter and so many others.”