Stigler eclipsed Friedman as Chicago’s most influential market thinker by the 1980s

Evidence

At the University of Chicago, figures other than Friedman were at least as responsible (and arguably more so) for its ascendance to the most influential neoliberal outpost in the US. By the 1980s those who were at Chicago acknowledged that Friedman’s views about markets had been eclipsed by George Stigler’s, which were in some important respects opposed to Friedman’s, as we will see below. To the general public, Stigler was not nearly as well-known as Friedman, and the same could be said of other neoliberals in close proximity (such as Aaron Director and Allen Wallis), pointing to a second curiosity. Many of the most influential neoliberals had little patience for “persuasion,” and hence carried out their activities well outside the public eye. Indeed, one might attribute the very existence of the MPS precisely to the wish to carry out a political program to which the public could not be reconciled, at least in the foreseeable future. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 97

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that Stigler’s market views ‘eclipsed’ Friedman’s by the 1980s and were ‘in some respects opposed’ is a strong revisionist thesis worth chasing for its evidence.
• XREF: Connects to Evelyn forgetting about the collective nature of Mt. Pelerin versus single-guru caricature.