Chicago’s postwar economics department harbored socialist and institutionalist factions

Evidence

The existing Economics Department, given its wartime depopulation, was in no shape to boast a dominant ideological orientation or to attract external funds. The Cowles Commission, an externally endowed economics research institution, was mostly stocked with self-identified socialists. The department also sported a rump representation of older-style Institutionalist economists. These factions would have surely scoffed at such an openly antistatist-oriented unit: but they were mostly kept out of the loop. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 742

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the monolithic picture of early Chicago economics; connects to historiography debates about how neoliberal hegemony was built against internal opposition. — connects to: The Chicago faculty instilled price-system conservatism into its graduate students — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 89; Chicago economists’ advocacy emerged in their students, not Knight and Viner themselves — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 130