Frank Knight saw economists’ political activism as science’s suicide and opposed it

Evidence

In his prose Knight responded to this problem by adopting a relentlessly paradoxical style that drew attention to its own elisions in order to gesture toward truths that resisted linguistic reduction. Needless to say, this approach remained uncommon within the economics profession. Knight found himself, as he wrote in private correspondence in 1933, “bitterly disappointed and disgusted” with his colleagues within the discipline, seeing them as thinly disguised polemicists who leveraged their academic status to infl uence public debate on issues that remained controversial within the profession. The “headlong plunge of my colleagues in the social science professions here and elsewhere into po liti cal activity,” he asserted in a letter the following year, “seems to me the suicide of science.” It at once debased public debate and eroded the public’s alreadylimited trust in the authority of experts. In a spirit of deliberate contrast, Knight worked hard to embody the restrained public persona that he found lacking in his peers. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 127

Categorization

• XREF: This complicates the standard narrative that pro-market economists of the 1930s were eager public advocates; Knight’s abstentionism anticipates the MPS-era tension between scholarly detachment and movement-building that Burgin traces. — connects to: Knight and Viner’s philosophical split over economic theory’s foundations poisoned their collegiality at Chicago — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 111; Knight warned that economists’ political advocacy would destroy public trust in science. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 127

Broader Connections

• Knight warned that economists’ political advocacy would destroy public trust in science. #corroborates (0.95) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 127