Interwar British free market economics faced contempt from mainstream figures

Evidence

Plant, an expert on modern business who ran the LSE’s graduate school of business, and whose knowledge of modern business practice was probably more extensive than that of any other contemporary academic, would have none of this. He put forward simple free market principles so vigorously that the third participant, Harold Macmillan, the future Conservative prime minister, concluded that he had “never listened to a more hard-boiled conception of free Capitalism than that which he [Plant] advances.” According to Macmillan, these ideas belonged to the nineteenth, not the twentieth, century. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 401

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Free-market economists saw themselves as doomed defenders of a dying creed. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 41; By 1945 mainstream economists dismissed market-equilibration theory as obsolete — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 417; British postwar academia made free-market critique incompatible with career legitimacy. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 417 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• British postwar academia made free-market critique incompatible with career legitimacy. #corroborates (0.78) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 417