The mainstream adopts every good idea, making schools of thought pointless

Evidence

More generally, I don’t find the whole idea of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, or the related notion of schools of thought, particularly useful. It seems to me to imply a kind of intellectual ancestor-worship which is of no use to anybody. It goes with debates about what Keynes or Commons or Hayek really thought, which seem to me to be almost entirely pointless. In most cases, if their ideas were good ones, they will have been adopted by at least some people in the mainstream, and tracing their intellectual ancestry is of at most second-order interest. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 56

Categorization

• QUESTION: Quiggin’s claim that good ideas get absorbed into the mainstream is precisely the sort of Whig progressivism the thought-collective thesis denies — worth chasing.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 56