Knight and Viner’s philosophical split over economic theory’s foundations poisoned their collegiality at Chicago

Evidence

When Knight was at the University of Iowa in the 1920s, they engaged in a notably warm correspondence, expressing a shared appreciation for theory that distinguished their methodologies from the historicist inclinations of their peers. By 1927, however, Viner began to criticize Knight’s increasing preoccupation with the assumptions that lay at the foundations of socialscientifi c analysis. It was “crazy,” Viner told him, to believe “that metaphysical adventures offer the only scope for your talents.” Privately he wrote to his former mentor at Harvard that Knight was “wasting himself in his metaphysical speculations.” Knight responded by saying that such criticisms made him “wince,” arguing that he was inquiring into precisely the “things on which economists primarily and especially need to be straightened out.” This pattern of intermittently friendly and fraught confl ict over fundamentals persisted after Knight’s arrival at the University of Chicago. In one of the few surviving letters between them from the 1930s, Knight expressed his exasperation at differences in their interpretation of economic theory that had emerged during their discussions of the curriculum. He declared that robbing banks was “a less dishonest way of making a living” than publishing on economic theory amid such disagreement on fundamentals, and expressed his unwillingness to peddle “as science what is either unintelligible or fallacious to my peers in the profession.” Their quarrels carried over to graduate teaching, in which students were sometimes asked to shuffl e between classrooms as proxies in ongoing arguments and were often driven to despair over whose tastes to indulge in oral exams. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 111

Categorization

• SHARE: A colleague interested in the sociology of academic departments would savor the detail that students shuttled between classrooms as proxies in the Knight-Viner feud.
• XREF: connects to: Chicago’s graduate economics rigor came largely from Viner, not Knight — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 98; Frank Knight saw economists’ political activism as science’s suicide and opposed it — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 127; Contemporary classical liberals like Viner saw the Chicago conferences as ideologically rigid and loaded — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1084

Broader Connections

• Frank Knight saw economists’ political activism as science’s suicide and opposed it #corroborates (0.85) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 127
• Chicago’s graduate economics rigor came largely from Viner, not Knight #expands (0.80) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 98
• Contemporary classical liberals like Viner saw the Chicago conferences as ideologically rigid and loaded #corroborates (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1084