Stigler’s blueprint for market science freed scientists from peers but bound them to patrons.

Evidence

Well in advance of these developments, Stigler had provided a blueprint for the emerging epistemic regime. A market-governed science should utilize contract research and be conducted outside the structure of academic departments, under close supervision of one empowered to deliver on promises made to patrons. The purpose was not merely to produce “more” science, and certainly not to ensure the freedom of the individual scientist to pursue independent inquiry. Far from it. Instead, it was to free elite scientists from the need to satisfy their students and fellow faculty. If it worked to plan, it would free them from the need to persuade most anyone of anything. Anyone, that is, apart from their patrons, who demanded they produce the “right” kind of knowledge, and justifiably so. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 158

Categorization

• XREF: Directly speaks to the reader’s austerity/neoliberalism project: this is the intellectual genealogy behind contract research and the ‘knowledge economy’ — connects to Mirowski’s later Machine Dreams and to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine critique of neo-conservative think tanks.
• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘market-governed science’ actually meant to Stigler — not commercial entrepreneurship but patron-bound contract research outside departmental structures.