Friedman believed scholarly ostracism improved the quality of minority-view advocates.

Evidence

Hayek was notable, Friedman informed the room, because of “the extent to which he has succeeded in straddling two kinds of worlds”; the act of “spreading ideas among the public at large” was “very seldom combined with thorough, deep, and profound scholarly work that can infl uence the course of science.” The scholarly world was not friendly to those who used positions of academic authority to expound minority views to the public, and Hayek’s exemplary per for mance as both academic and advocate had forced him to endure diffi culties that were too rarely acknowledged. Such an observation might easily have been a prelude to expressions of frustration, but Friedman was adept at fi nding inspiration where others saw grounds for despair. Discouragement from colleagues was “a very good thing,” he concluded, “because it means that those of us who hold our views have to be better to get recognized than people who hold the other views. And in the long run, what matters is the quality of people who propose the ideas and not their number and not their position.” — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 386

Categorization

• DEFINE: Captures the MPS-era self-understanding of neoliberalism inverts scholarly marginality into a mechanism of intellectual selection and eventual vindication.
• DEEPTHINKING: Friedman converts professional exclusion into a theory of how ideas win — a paradigm of minority-view intellectual strategy that undergirds the whole neoliberal project’s confidence in long-run persuasion.