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"Just as today's observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world. Conservatives often point to Friedrich Hayek as the most influential defender of the free market. By examining the work of such organizations as the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international association founded by Hayek in 1947 and later led by Milton Friedman, Burgin reveals that Hayek and his colleagues were deeply conflicted about many of the enduring problems of capitalism. Far from adopting an uncompromising stance against the interventionist state, they developed a social philosophy that admitted significant constraints on the market. Postwar conservative thought was more dynamic and cosmopolitan than has previously been understood. It was only in the 1960s and '70s that Friedman and his contemporaries developed a more strident defense of the unfettered market. Their arguments provided a rhetorical foundation for the resurgent conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and inspired much of the political and economic agenda of the United States in the ensuing decades. Burgin's brilliant inquiry uncovers both the origins of the contemporary enthusiasm for the free market and the moral quandaries it has left behind"--Publisher's website.

Abstract: In Crack-Up Capitalism Quinn Slobodian turns his attention to the past half-century, explaining how market advocates pioneered a different approach to restricting the state: the special economic zone.

Mark Greif's The Age of the Crisis of Man is an unusual book. It stands out in part for the grandiosity of its ambitions: Greif tries to provide an expansive new framework for the midcentury trajectory of American ideas. Still more audaciously, he suggests that his findings might help to overcome half a century of factionalism on the left. A founding editor of n+1, he aims to mine the texts of an earlier generation for social philosophies that can serve the political needs of the present day.

In 1977 John Kenneth Galbraith hosted the documentary series The Age of Uncertainty on public television; three years later Milton Friedman hosted a competing series, Free to Choose. This essay examines the development of these two projects, examining both the institutions that supported them and the ways in which Galbraith and Friedman approached the visual representation of economic ideas. Friedman's series drew on support from advocacy organizations and corporate interests, relayed accessible expositions via an empirical documentary style, and framed its episodes around Friedman's proposed solutions to contemporary economic problems. Galbraith's series, by contrast, relied on public financing, adopted an ironic and self-reflective stance toward its medium, and maintained a posture of uncertainty in regard to contemporary economic debates. Free to Choose proved the more enduring popular and critical success. These differences between these two series, the essay argues, help explain the divergent trajectories of right-wing and left-wing economic rhetoric in the late twentieth-century public sphere.

This article examines the most prominent interwar economist at the University of Chicago, Frank Knight, through the lens of a controversial 1932 lecture in which he exhorted his audience to vote Communist. The fact that he did so poses a historical problem: why did the premier American exponent of conservative economic principles appear to advocate a vote for radical change? This article argues that the speech is representative of Knight's deliberately paradoxical approach, in which he refused to praise markets without adding caveats about their substantial limitations, and expressed support for freedom of discussion alongside his skepticism of the public's capacity to exercise the privilege. In parsing these tensions, the article revises the conventional interpretation of Knight, illuminates the contested environment within which postwar free-market economics emerged, and reexamines a restrained defense of capitalism that has been largely forgotten in the subsequent years.