Knight was a critic, not a free-market advocate

Evidence

Attempts to harden Knight’s oppositional remarks into a unitary social philosophy, however, run the risk of imparting a selective order to the deliberate messiness of Knight’s worldview. His writings have never neatly aligned with his imputed role as a dedicated advocate of free enterprise. Instead, he perceived himself to be primarily a critic, more comfortable exposing the obfuscations of other theorists’ systems than constructing his own. He lived, as he acknowledged in Risk, Uncertainty and Profi t, in “a world full of contradiction and paradox,” and his primary instinct as a scholar was to expose these qualities where he perceived them to be elided. His one philosophical absolute was a refusal to indulge in the uncritical adoption of absolutes. “There is always a principle, plausible and even sound within limits, to justify any possible course of action and, of course, the opposite one,” he explained in his 1950 presidential address before the American Economic Association. Like cookery, he continued, economic theory “calls for enough and not too much, far enough and not too far, in any direction.” Throughout his career he refused to extol the virtues of markets without drawing attention to their limitations, or to observe those limitations without enumerating the costs inherent in any attempt to overcome them. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 94

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The founding ‘advocate’ of the Chicago School turns out to be deliberately anti-absolutist and self-contradictory by design — a caution against narrativizing a messy thinker into a unitary ideology that colors how the whole MPS history is read.
• XREF: Complicates the standard account of an ideological Chicago School, resonating with Mirowski and Plehwe’s work on neoliberal thought collectives. — connects to: Knight shaped Friedman’s worldview about economics’ limits rather than specific doctrines. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 398; Frank Knight saw himself as a critic, not a market advocate — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 94; Frank Knight held that market rationalism morally degrades society rather than improving it — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 95 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Knight shaped Friedman’s worldview about economics’ limits rather than specific doctrines. #corroborates (0.82) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 398