Knight warned that economists’ political advocacy would destroy public trust in science.

Evidence

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. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 127

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s MPS history: here is a founding figure denouncing exactly the advocacy the Society later embraced — a key tension to track through the book. — connects to: Frank Knight saw economists’ political activism as science’s suicide and opposed it — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 127
• QUESTION: Did this Knightian skepticism explain why Hayek, Friedman, and others had to overcome this legacy to found an explicitly activist MPS?
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone studying how academic credibility gets leveraged into political influence — ‘the suicide of science’ over political activity is a striking early formulation.