Henry Simons was the most politically engaged of the 1930s market economists.

Evidence

Of all the leading market advocates in the economics profession during the 1930s, however, he was the least rigid in his interpretation of academic disinterestedness. He readily accepted invitations to give public lectures on matters of relevance to politics. His essays had a consistent po liti cal orientation and a strong rhetorical dimension, and his only major book, the posthumously published Economic Policy for a Free Society, consisted of a loosely related collection of po liti cal tracts. Although he was anxious to avoid association with any ideological dogma, he openly positioned himself as a policy thinker concerned primarily with ideas that were relevant to contemporary po liti cal problems. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 136

Categorization

• SEED: The tension between Academic disinterestedness rhetoric and actual policy engagement in early free-market economics — a potential essay on how ‘neutrality’ functioned as cover for advocacy.
• XREF: connects to: Viner saw Simons’s polemical style as violating the academic ideal of objective analysis. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 113; Henry Simons saw Keynes’s General Theory as a potential fascist economic bible. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 161