Milton Friedman’s real role was network organizer, not original theorist

Evidence

Friedman was the fox, not the hedgehog, making strategic arguments in the short term with little concern for long-term vision or consistency. Each of his economics papers held up just long enough to provoke controversy, at which point it would be abandoned for another toy model with some alternative “assumptions” (which were advertised as not mattering, in any event). So-called monetarism barely lasted more than two decades as an intellectual movement. Friedman’s real significance lay elsewhere. Burgin misses the ways in which Friedman, just like Hayek, regularly put himself at the service of the larger group and the common neoliberal cause, mediating between competing camps: such as, for example, the great Mont Pèlerin Society debate on gold standard versus flexible exchange rates. Not the individual intellectual giant, the paladin of collective individualism, but rather the organizational secretary and the political fixer at the service of the networked collective; that was Friedman’s impressive stewardship of the Mont Pèlerin leaders, who then played comparable roles over time for components of the neoliberal thought collective, and for the Mont Pélerin Society in particular. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 13

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the standard portrait of Friedman as the great free-market theorist; connects to broader historiography of how think-tank networks rather than lone thinkers drove neoliberal policy. — connects to: Reading neoliberalism only through Friedman obscures its multiple strategies toward the public; Free-market institutions converted technical economist Friedman into a political intellectual — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 417
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: which specific arguments did Friedman make and then abandon, and how did this rhetorical strategy differ from a hedgehog like Hayek?

Broader Connections

• Free-market institutions converted technical economist Friedman into a political intellectual #expands (0.85) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 417
• Reading neoliberalism only through Friedman obscures its multiple strategies toward the public #expands (0.78)