Bauer’s anti-aid polemics won state and institutional honors despite scholarly dismissals

Evidence

Nevertheless, Bauer was subsequently awarded a life peerage in 1982 by Margaret Thatcher, and in 2002, shortly before his death, he was the first recipient of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, a biannual prize of $500,000 given by the Cato Institute. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 411

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize become a vehicle for legitimizing figures whose scholarly work was not highly regarded?
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how the neoliberal network leveraged patronage (Thatcher’s peerages, well-funded institutes) to embed itself in policy influence.