Postwar Chicago neoliberals weaponized science’s prestige to advance their politics

Evidence

Knight, and possibly Hayek prior to the early 1950s, had decided that “science” was having a nefarious intellectual influence that threatened market liberties. But Wallis and Friedman and their Chicago followers soon came to realize that it was a deadly error to set one’s political commitments as pitted against science in the era of the Atomic Bomb. Their embrace of statistics and their evocations of the mystique of science thus became one of the major neoliberal calling cards of the Chicago School. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 781

Categorization

• QUESTION: What precisely flipped between Knight’s pre-1950s anti-science stance and Friedman’s scientism — which events and actors?
• XREF: connects to: The Chicago School’s rise was part of a transnational postwar project of building neoliberalism. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 713; Neoliberals recast Hayek’s tacit knowledge into a commodified thing for scientific resonance — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2162; Neoliberalism wants science dissolved into market activity — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 231 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals recast Hayek’s tacit knowledge into a commodified thing for scientific resonance #expands (0.82) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2162
• Neoliberalism wants science dissolved into market activity #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 231
• Neoliberalism crystallized partly as opposition to scientists promoting planned socialism #responds-to (0.75)