The Chicago School’s rise was part of a transnational postwar project of building neoliberalism.

Evidence

Our objective in the present chapter is to relate the sequence of events that led to the rise of the Chicago School of economics. This chapter in many respects is a revisionist story, grounded more directly in archival evidence than in the personal reminiscences that have tended to be the staple of this area in the past. It situates the rise of the school at a very critical juncture of events at a very specific date, namely, 1946. It subverts certain widely held notions about the history of economics, such as the mistaken conflation of the rise of the Chicago School with the larger rise to dominance of neoclassical economics in postwar America, or the supposed continuity of social doctrine that was thought to characterize the preand postwar Chicago School, as well as the belief that it was some “core scientific theory” that provided the backbone of the school, whereas the applications in such areas as law and business only came later. Although space limitations prevent us from giving a comprehensive account of the later shape of the Chicago School, this chapter nevertheless downgrades any idea that some abstract analytical characterization of the economy formed the nucleus around which the school crystallized (such as Reder’s concept of tight prior equilibrium), and replaces it with explicit political orientation, something that weighed very heavily on the minds of all the main protagonists. Indeed, our central thesis is that the rise of the Chicago School must be understood as one component of a specific larger transnational project of innovating doctrines of neoliberalism for the postwar world. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 713

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that 1946 is a specific critical juncture for Chicago’s rise is worth verifying against other histories of the school.
• SEED: An article contrasting ‘tight prior equilibrium’ scientific framing versus political-orientation framing of the Chicago School could illuminate how intellectual schools narrate their own origins.
• XREF: connects to: The Chicago School’s coherence was constructed later by students and outsiders. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 109; Postwar Chicago neoliberals weaponized science’s prestige to advance their politics — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 781; Neoliberalism rose to hegemony through transnational networks of scholars and allies — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 81 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Postwar Chicago neoliberals weaponized science’s prestige to advance their politics #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 781
• Neoliberalism rose to hegemony through transnational networks of scholars and allies #corroborates (0.78) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 81