“One book is a book, two books is a trend,” goes an old adage in publishing. And what of three books? The 2012 publication of Angus Burgin's The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression and Daniel Stedman Jones's Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, together with the 2011 publication of Nicholas Wapshott's Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, suggests that the intellectual history of conservatism is not merely a trend, but an interest that is here to stay. At least the study of free markets, that is, for the books under consideration here focus more on conservative economic ideas than on religious or cultural ideals, capturing the intellectual history of free markets in the twentieth century through the Mont Pelerin Society, transatlantic policy, and the debate between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. While remarkably similar in subject and source, these are three different books, distinguished from each other in interpretation, execution, and focus. All three, however, display a similar temperament, assessing conservative ideas in an evenhanded if not overtly sympathetic tone suggesting that scholars have finally found a shared register through which to consider the most controversial and politically consequential ideas of the late twentieth century. They also converge upon a perhaps surprising synthesis, positioning free-market thought not only at the interstices of America and Europe, but between and across left and right, conservative and liberal.

Of the three, Burgin's The Great Persuasion stands out for its deep research, elegant writing, and substantial contribution to the field. Using the Mont Pelerin Society as a tight lens, Burgin sets out a basic trajectory of intellectual history on the right that future scholars will take as foundational. Burgin begins with a speech delivered by Keynes in 1924, “The End of Laissez-Faire,” tracing the path from a place where laissez-faire could plausibly be pronounced dead to its roaring comeback at the end of the twentieth century. That the market has risen in supremacy over the course of the twentieth century is hardly news, but too often that story is divided neatly along partisan lines, with the right pushing for unfettered markets and the left striving to enlarge the scope of government for social ends. The story that Burgin uncovers is both more subtle and more interesting. He shows the shifts and transformations among a group of thinkers who considered themselves conservative, classical liberals, or of the right, and diagrams the personal and intellectual dynamics of a robust debate among these proponents of capitalism about just what exactly capitalism should look like. To what extent should markets be constrained by the state? To what extent did the free market need the state? How free should the price mechanism be? What values could and should challenge economic growth and efficiency?

The original contribution of his book is to show that these questions were just as contested on the right as across ideological divides. The proving ground for this thesis is the Mont Pelerin Society, a transatlantic group of intellectuals convened by Friedrich Hayek in 1947. After a first gathering upon a remote Swiss mountaintop, the society's members went on to play “a decisive role in the construction of the contemporary market-centered world” (9). Burgin is less interested in this broader role than in exploring “how, over time, their assumptions and arguments discreetly but decisively transformed” (7). Burgin argues that “the more strident market advocacy of recent years emerged only after an extended period of contestation and debate,” to the extent that “as they grew older, many of [the society’s] founders came to view the emboldened market advocacy of its later members as a violation of its original ideals” (11). The key to this transformation, according to Burgin, was the ascendancy of Milton Friedman, who displaced Hayek as the central figure in the society in the 1960s and augured the rise of a new generation of influential economists who doubled as public intellectuals. Burgin concludes, “Friedman's confident language signaled that the moral quandaries and programmatic ambiguities of an earlier generation had been left behind, and a great persuasion had begun” (11). Alongside this central argument, Burgin makes a number of interventions in the literature on conservatism, among them an argument for abandoning “the close observance of national boundaries that has continued to define the parameters of research into the origins of the conservative movement” (7) and a related assertion that conservative thought be understood as cosmopolitan and dynamic, “the product of a collapsed rather than a rigidified world view” (9). Conservatism, in other words, was not a desperate clinging to the past but a constructive response to the exhaustion of once-cherished ideals and assumptions.

Burgin begins by focusing on a founding generation of market advocates who were all deeply shaped and unsettled by the crisis of capitalism that unfolded globally in the 1930s, most significant among them University of Chicago economists Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, and Henry Simons, and Hayek, then at the London School of Economics. Linked by a tendency to “apocalyptic excess” (13) in their rhetoric, this first generation keenly felt both their isolation from the broader intellectual world and the urgency of the economic problems facing Europe and America, yet remained on principle aloof from popular disputes. Hayek, for example, declined to review Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), which Burgin calls a “devastating decision” (29) because it left the impression that there was no intellectual case to be made against Keynes. Even more problematic, “Hayek faced the prohibitive challenge of advocating for quiescence in the face of an economic catastrophe that Keynes claimed he could solve” (29). At the same time, Burgin emphasizes that neither Hayek nor his close colleague Lionel Robbins idealized capitalism or expected its problems to swiftly and naturally resolve. They were willing to critique the solutions offered by others, but had none of their own on hand.

At Chicago, there was even less faith in the free market. “Although they shared with their colleagues in London an inclination to defend markets against excessive or ill-conceived interventions,” Burgin writes, the Chicago economists “believed that the government had an essential role to play in the modern economy” (34). Knight worried about the morals of market society; Viner stridently advocated limitations on the power of large corporations; Simons called for a “steeply progressive” income tax to reduce economic concentration, along with the nationalization of railroad and utility companies. Moreover, Knight, Viner, and Simons “demonstrated only limited affinity for one another and little sense that they considered themselves members of an ideological community” (41). How, then, could these three have been taken as founders of the famous Chicago school? Burgin proposes that the answer lies in the largely left-leaning intellectual climate of the time, particularly the widespread interest in and enthusiasm for socialism: “in that context the faculty's restrained defenses of the competitive economy and cogent explications of the value of price theory appeared to students as radical validations of the freedom of markets” (45). The Chicago school, Burgin argues, is best understood not as the creation of these legendary teachers, but rather was born in the minds of its students. Here, Burgin touches upon the dynamics of generational change, turnover, and discontinuity, a recurring theme of his work that allows him to highlight the essential role of context in the perception and reception of ideas.

Over time, this basic conviction that the true scholar stood above the fray itself began to fray, and at that opportune moment a white knight arrived: Walter Lippmann, who in 1937 published An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society, a broadside against “collectivism” which “sent seismic waves through the Depression era's nascent network of academic supporters of free markets” (55). Lippmann was no isolated, cranky economist at the end of his productive career, but a syndicated columnist read by millions of Americans and a bona fide member of the intellectual establishment. Burgin's reading of the long-neglected The Good Society is a highlight of his book. He argues that “The Good Society established the framework for the arguments adopted by market advocates in the subsequent decade, and in particular for the political project that Hayek began to conceive in the wake of its publication” (63). Lippmann had been reading Hayek, but Burgin emphasizes that Hayek had also been reading Lippmann, arguing that this “contrary line of influence, running from Lippmann's argument in The Good Society to Hayek's developing political philosophy and the subsequent decades, is still more pronounced” (63). This is an important and compelling discussion that should lead scholars to reconsider Lippmann's later work and career.

In the wake of Lippmann's book, a number of “uncertain, lurching, and transient” (56) efforts to create a free-market community were established, including the Colloque Lippmann, the Centre international d’études pour la renovation du libéralisme, and the free-market study at the University of Chicago. Burgin dedicates close analysis to the Colloque Lippmann that flowed out of the book, emphasizing that just as Keynes's lecture title would have it, participants believed that laissez-faire was dead. The Colloque Lippmann was built upon dissatisfaction with homo economicus and fundamental belief that nineteenth-century liberalism needed to be renovated and renewed. This revision would, of necessity, incorporate a positive role for the state, with participants agreeing that the government could legitimately support national defense, social insurance, social services, education, and scientific research. The timing of these efforts was inopportune; Hitler's rabid warmongering jeopardized the lives and careers of many European participants, and nothing would really get off the ground until the postwar era. But the fatalism and reserve of the previous years had been definitively left behind. In these forerunners of the Mont Pelerin Society, Burgin finds critical commonalities with what would follow: a desire to overhaul traditional liberalism, with both “collectivism” and “laissez-faire” emerging as equal targets; a new interest in assembling broad coalitions to precipitate long-term ideological change; and a willingness to think outside national boundaries.

The Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947, grew out of the Colloque Lippmann and the new fame that Hayek encountered after the 1944 publication of The Road to Serfdom. Hayek arrived in the United States at war's end to find he had become a celebrity of sorts, in the process losing both his academic respectability and the subtlety of his message. Hayek was taken as a defender of laissez-faire rather than as one who wished to rescue capitalism from its own excesses, and Burgin suggests that he largely acquiesced in this redefinition, eventually embracing his new role as public icon of political conservatism. The book tour cemented Hayek's sense that only deliberate engagement rather than ivory-tower theorizing could create social change, and at the tour's end he began planning for the organization that would become the Mont Pelerin Society. While Hayek now possessed a unique intellectual stature, he needed organizational support, finding it in Albert Hunold, a Swiss businessman who supported the first gathering in collaboration with the Kansas City-based Volker Fund. More than a funder, Hunold gladly shouldered “basic organizational tasks that his academic colleague was not competent to fulfill” (99). But Hayek was no naïf, for the long years of isolation during the 1930s had convinced him that compromise was essential. When the Volker Fund balked at some of the original participants, Hayek gladly excluded the troublesome few, yet was still able to convince his academic colleagues of the society's intellectual integrity.

Although Burgin does not press the point, Hayek's experience in the United States, both on the book tour and with the Volker Fund, suggests that the first stage of the American conquest of the Mont Pelerin Society had already begun. Just as The Road to Serfdom had been understood in the American context as a reactionary blow against the New Deal rather than a principled effort to found a new political philosophy, so too would the Mont Pelerin Society come to reflect a radical American faith in the possibilities of free markets rather than the more tempered European sensibility that had defined the Colloque Lippmann.

In the meantime, however, the 1947 meeting meant that the rising generation of free-market advocates, like Friedman and George Stigler, would not experience the isolation and marginalization of the others, but would come of age in a group of peers committed to political and social change. Again, Burgin emphasizes the role of context in creating connections and resonances that might not exist in the abstract. During the society's first decade, “a natural alliance formed between defenders of the market mechanism and those who sought to protect established moral and cultural norms” (116), cemented by the shared belief that socialist planners represented rationalism gone awry. This idea grew out of a “focus on knowledge that escaped the confines of the rational” (111), spearheaded by Hayek, Michael Polanyi, and Michael Oakshott (who accepted society membership but never attended a meeting). Over time, however, rationalism would come to seem inhered also in the mechanism of the market, leading to disagreements “over whether a social ideal would be fostered because of, or in spite of, the implicit ethos of the marketplace” (116). Eventually Polanyi and others more inclined to humanistic approaches would minimize their participation in the society, or leave it altogether.

Also bubbling under the surface was the complex relationship between economic and political freedom, one of the few dynamics that Burgin fails to probe satisfactorily. He notes that many original members of the society perceived a close linkage between capitalism and democracy. Yet other influential voices, like rational-choice theorist James Buchanan, worried about the tyranny of the majority. Colonial policy, Burgin admits, was one place where the limits of the society's commitment to popular sovereignty was clearly laid bare. In assessing this issue, Burgin's normally crystalline language turns opaque. These debates, he writes, “helped foster a perception that its members regarded all politics as subsidiary to the logic of the marketplace” (120). Given that many scholars have accused conservatives of doing exactly that, or even claimed that conservative rhetoric about democracy and freedom conceals a deep-seated instinct towards authoritarianism, Burgin's caution here is a missed opportunity for engagement on a critical issue.Footnote ¹

As the society entered the 1960s, Burgin charts the slow unraveling of its original goals and aims, symbolized by the revival of laissez-faire and the continuing Americanization of the society. “Tensions between Anglo-American and Continental Europeans, economists and representatives of other disciplines, and libertarians and social traditionalists were increasingly central to its debates” (125), he reports. Much of this clash played out in what became known as “the Hunold affair,” a power struggle between the Chicago economists and the society's longtime secretary, who became increasingly erratic and paranoid as he perceived the drift of the society away from his direct control. Underlying the personnel problem was a clash of world views. While the society fragmented along demographic and geographic lines, Hunold also believed—correctly, Burgin implies—that his opponents were manqué-Marxists of the right who wanted “to construct a philosophy out of the economy” and turn the society into an “economic club” (137). Hunold's enemies, led by an energetic and increasingly confident Friedman, soon pushed him out of the society, to the chagrin of older members who bemoaned both the treatment of Hunold and the increasingly economistic tone of discussion at the meetings. Even Hayek himself became disenchanted with the society and considered shutting it down.

At this juncture, Burgin turns away from the Mont Pelerin Society itself and towards the central figure of Friedman, whom he identifies as “a point of origin for a process of extraordinary social and political change.” With the toppling of Hunold and the slow eclipse of Hayek, “the age of Milton Friedman had begun” (151). The book's concluding two chapters diagram Friedman's thought and his rapid rise within the economics profession and the broader public sphere. While revelations abound, with Burgin particularly good on rhetorical strengths and strategies Friedman employed to leverage his scientific expertise into policy and political power, in another sense these two chapters lack the dynamic engagement with ideas that characterizes the rest of Burgin's account. The tensions that had animated the earlier part of the book fade, yielding to a brisk account of Friedman's intellectual development and expanding influence. “Friedman's views hardened during the 1950s in conjunction with a network of colleagues at the University of Chicago who had also attended the 1947 meeting at Mont Pelerin” (171), Burgin writes, but the causes of this hardening remain difficult to pinpoint. The differences between Friedman and Hayek are both generational and contextual, he suggests, noting that “while his predecessor's work was ingrained with a sense of caution at the knife's edge of catastrophe, Friedman's was infused with Cold War dualisms” (156). This yielded both a more optimistic take on the possibilities of free markets and a narrowed range of intellectual concerns. The free-market fundamentalism of the late twentieth century was now in place, with the earlier conservative vision of a tempered, reformed, and chastened capitalism lost to history.

The Great Persuasion lays out this narrative with persuasive verve. Like a skilled conductor playing a major symphonic work, Burgin moves in different keys and registers, creating a complex yet integrated whole. At the same time, Burgin's book is so polished, it suggests a story complete in its execution, with little agenda for further research. While scholars are likely to absorb Burgin's narrative into their own renderings of twentieth-century intellectual history, they may miss the openings and opportunities suggested throughout the story. One is the relationship between ideas and institutions, or the impact of funding on the Mont Pelerin Society. Burgin hints at the importance of but does not fully explore the role of the Volker Foundation, a group surely deserving of further research. Likewise, the relationship the society's members drew between economic freedom and political freedom should be better characterized and more critically probed. Finally, while Burgin does an effective job of connecting the Mont Pelerin Society to debates within American conservatism about the relative weighting of state and market, it remains to be seen how widespread this pattern was at mid-century, and if it could be written on a canvas larger than the Mont Pelerin Society.

By contrast, while Daniel Stedman Jones's Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics lacks the same analytic and artistic coherence, its very untidiness suggests a proliferating number of avenues for future investigation. The most obvious difference between the books is that Stedman Jones frames his analysis under the rubric of “neoliberalism,” a word that Burgin explicitly eschews. Where Burgin's goal is to draw careful distinctions between the varieties of right-wing thought, Stedman Jones tends to collapse all into the meta-category of neoliberalism, in the process erasing the differences between what American historians would understand as conservatism, neoconservatism, and libertarianism and obscuring the developmental process that lies at the heart of Burgin's work. By virtue of its embrace of the trendy term “neoliberalism,” Stedman Jones's book will surely date faster than Burgin’s. But because Stedman Jones collapses not only the right but the left into neoliberalism, in the short term his work may prove more productive to scholars unsatisfied with, yet intrigued by, his analysis.

In Masters of the Universe, Stedman Jones argues that there is a distinctive body of neoliberal thought, and that it can be found on both the right and the left. Although the book's cover displays the clichéd images of Reagan, Thatcher, Friedman, and Hayek, Stedman Jones's most original contribution is to emphasize the bipartisan tenor of neoliberal thought, with unexpected figures like Jimmy Carter and Labour prime ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan playing key roles. But what exactly is neoliberal thought? In his book's first sentence, Stedman Jones identifies neoliberal ideas as “monetarism, deregulation, and market-based reforms” (1). A page later he calls transatlantic neoliberalism “the free market ideology based on individual liberty and limited government that connected human freedom to the actions of the rational, self-interested actor in the marketplace” (2). Stedman Jones frames his book as an argument against “the loose use of the term neoliberal as a general conceptual category” (17), but his account cannot escape this very looseness. Neoliberalism is both a theory of individual freedom and potentially “authoritarian” (11); it encompasses American libertarianism and the German social market economy. Later in the book, Stedman Jones will argue that neoliberalism is distinguished by an emphasis on human rationality and the expression of human freedom through the market. Part of the difficulty comes from Stedman Jones's attempt to both distinguish between and write about neoliberal thought and neoliberal politics in one account. And part of it comes from the very nomenclature of neoliberalism itself, an overtheorized term that lacks a historically specific constituency and has been applied haphazardly to nearly every feature of the globalized modern world.

Although Stedman Jones attempts to cut through the neoliberal morass by declaring his intention to focus on the “second phase of neoliberalism,” lasting from 1950 to Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s, he begins, like Burgin, in the 1930s, with a discussion of the ideas of Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Karl Popper. Stedman Jones emphasizes the ways all three responded to the gathering crisis in Europe, in the process laying down “the beginnings of a recognizably neoliberal world view” (33). In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek underscored the dangers facing Western civilization. Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) provided a historical understanding of individualism and collectivism, based upon a critique of Plato. And in Bureaucracy (1944), Mises identified a logic of bureaucracy that pulled in even those from the private sector and could only be checked by clear and straightforward rules. Together, Stedman Jones argues, these books “articulated a distinctive view of historical development, of the history of ideas, and of the practice of politics that, taken together, systematically undermined . . . the New Deal, in the United States, and the social democratic state in Britain” (33). Stedman Jones acknowledges, in an implicit nod to Burgin's thesis, that a “less compromising and more forthright set of neoliberal ideas” would be developed later, but argues that such a reconceptualization would never have happened without the “robust philosophical ballast” (33) of these three works.

Stedman Jones then moves on to consider this newer set of neoliberal ideas, arguing that the relationship between political and economic freedom is essential to understanding the distinctiveness of neoliberalism. Where Burgin traces ideological change through the debates of the Mont Pelerin Society, Stedman Jones uses Adam Smith as a lens to distinguish between old and new. While Friedman and others claimed Smith as a progenitor, such a connection is “deceptive” because “neoliberalism departed from the classical political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment in its unambiguous view of the free market and its effects” (100). Neoliberals also failed to understand the critical importance of moral cultivation and sympathy to Smith's thought, instead seizing upon a crude rendering of self-interest and promoting a political philosophy “fundamentally based in dry economic processes rather than values” (112). At the heart of this philosophy lay a new idea about freedom: “the marketplace is the primary arena in which freedom is experienced and expressed” (114). Who articulated this new set of ideas? Like Burgin, Stedman Jones fingers Friedman as a major contributor, particularly his popular tract Capitalism and Freedom (1962). He makes a glancing case for the relevance of German Ordo-liberalism, even while admitting German neoliberalism's support of the welfare state and a regulated market distinguishes it from Friedman's program. He gives more attention to public-choice theory and rational-choice theory, US schools of thought which argued that “politics, government, and the public sector should not be considered apart from the rest of the economy” (127). Linking these intellectual programs was a common outcome, “that politics and the provision of public services were increasingly seen in terms of market processes rather than in terms of citizenship rights” (133).

There are a number of problems in Stedman Jones's account of neoliberalism. First and foremost is the linking of very disparate impulses under one conceptual umbrella. What forms for Burgin a narrative of ideological fissure and disjunction becomes for Stedman Jones a story of convergence. In The Great Persuasion, German Ordo-liberals and their sympathizers are aghast at Friedman's imperialist economism, but little of this tension makes it into Stedman Jones's account. Then there is Stedman Jones's insistence that neoliberalism is essentially devoid of values, even as he analyzes texts like Capitalism and Freedom which pulse with normative energy (Burgin titles a chapter on Friedman “Moral Capitalism”). Stedman Jones notes at several points the way that neoliberalism converges with other American values like individualism and antistatism, but he portrays these as distinct rather than interwoven impulses. In some ways, he has accepted the claims to value-free science advanced by the Chicago school itself.

Still, what Stedman Jones has written is not just an intellectual history but a policy history, and on those grounds he has an interesting story to tell. His account, like Burgin’s, becomes ever more Friedman-centric as he moves into the 1950s, with a chapter on the evolution of transatlantic think tanks situating Friedman “as the neoliberal network's beating heart” (135) and another focusing on the rise of monetarism in the United States and Britain. To his credit, Stedman Jones is alert to the ways in which ideas intersected with politics rather than acting always as the driving force; for example, he describes British politician Enoch Powell's interest in monetarism as pre-dating the rise of Friedman, noting that Powell was uninterested in the United States more generally and not greatly enthusiastic about Friedman.

His concluding two chapters, on the economic crises of the 1970s and the comparative evolution of housing policy in the United States and Britain, offer both an account of how ideas move into politics and support for his overarching argument that “neoliberalism offers a lens through which to view a transformation across the political spectrum, not just of the conservative or Republican party” (12). In charting the rise of neoliberalism during the 1970s, Stedman Jones focuses not only on conservatism, but on the broader rise of market thinking. Jimmy Carter, in particular, plays a starring role as the first president to introduce significant efforts at deregulation, a move which eventually “washed away controls from large segments of the economy in the last two decades of the 20th century” (217). Likewise, under James Callaghan, the Labour Party converted “to a version of monetarism” (242) which prioritized the reduction of inflation over full employment. At the same time, however, the neoliberalism of the left was different to that of the right, Stedman Jones argues. Policy innovations like deregulation and control of the money supply were, in the hands of the Democrats and the Labour Party, mere tools. It was only with the advent of Reagan and Thatcher that neoliberalism became a “theology” (270) with widespread social consequences, as seen in American urban enterprise zones and Thatcher's move to privatize council housing.

Both Stedman Jones and Burgin offer new ways to understand the rise of free-market ideas and policies in the twentieth century. Where Burgin presents the right as more supportive of government action for social ends than might be typically assumed, Stedman Jones highlights a left/liberal receptivity to markets that has been little appreciated. Unlike the other two books, Nicholas Wapshott's Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, written by a journalist and aimed a popular audience, chooses simplicity over complexity by boiling down the rise of the right to a defining “clash” between economists. Although lauded as “lively” and “absorbing” by reviewers, intellectual historians may find the set-piece structure of the book too schematic to satisfy. Wapshott labors to bring intellectual combat to life through short chapters with martial titles like “The Battle Lines Are Drawn” and “Pistols at Dawn,” yet perhaps because of this very transparent effort to generate thrills, the book remains somewhat flat as a reading experience. Wapshott's interpretative goals are only secondarily historical; rather, using the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, he promises to declare a winner. Despite this intention, and the dualistic framework of his narrative, like the others Wapshott's book ends up underscoring the ways in which liberal and conservative economic ideas have been commingled from the start.

John Maynard Keynes quickly upstages Hayek as the central protagonist, with Wapshott describing a charismatic figure who, as the last of the British Liberals, might have been at home in the Mont Pelerin Society had it not been founded by his great rival. “Keynes was at pains to make clear that, unlike Marxists and some socialists, he was not advocating that the state replace private enterprise,” Wapshott writes. “Keynes was never a socialist of any sort, nor did he even flirt with socialism, even in its anemic British version, Fabianism” (36). Instead, he wished to improve, not overturn, the capitalist mechanism of society. More exciting in the telling than his duel with Hayek is Keynes's establishment of macroeconomics with the General Theory, which Wapshott situates fluidly in his earlier career and the economic crisis of the 1930s. Wapshott emphasizes the rich intellectual culture that both greeted and nurtured Keynes's summa, highlighting the contributions in particular of Richard Kahn, a Keynesian “Favorite Pupil.” Turning to Hayek, Wapshott also describes his signature breakthrough:

But it is Keynes who emerges as the preeminent intellectual and political figure of the age, from his inadvertent founding of macroeconomics, soon to become “an official instrument of the US government” (231), to his role in the crafting of Bretton Woods.

Wapshott establishes Keynes's dominance even over those who would pledge fealty to the politics of Hayek, like Friedman. While it is refreshing to read an account of twentieth-century economic history that does not pivot around Friedman, in another sense Friedman emerges as the ultimate arbiter between Hayek and Keynes. Wapshott stresses that Friedman's monetarism unfolded in a framework defined by Keynes: “Friedman adopted Keynes's idea of running an economy through macroeconomics, and politicians have gone along with it, whatever Hayekian rhetoric they may sometimes employ” (286). While he characterizes Reaganomics as owing its inspiration to Hayek and Friedman, as he describes it, Keynes was an important factor too: the famous Laffer curve suggesting that high taxation might reduce instead of increase government revenue was presaged by Keynes's ideas, as was the trickle-down effect, which echoed Kahn's multiplier. It was also Keynes who first proposed that tax cuts could stimulate an economy. Wapshott quotes Robert Solow: “the boom that lasted from 1982 to 1990 was engineered by the Reagan administration in a straightforward Keynesian way by rising spending and lower taxes, a classic case of an expansionary budget deficit” (265). Still, for all the intellectual debt he owed to Keynes, when it came to political philosophy and the proper role of government, Friedman sided unambiguously with Hayek.

But the larger portrait of Friedman and Hayek that Wapshott paints is jarring, particularly when contrasted with Burgin, for Wapshott presents Hayek as the radical utopian and Friedman as the practical compromiser. Relying particularly on his later writings, Wapshott argues that Hayek “proposed a utopia every bit as idealistic and unrealizable as all of the proceeding ideal societies envisioned by thinkers ranging from Thomas More to Karl Marx” (290). By contrast, while “wishing for the government to be minimized, [Friedman] believed that an economy should be managed to provide steady growth. Friedman's chosen instrument, monetary policy, required a state-run central bank” (287). How to square these two contradictory views? Much of the conflict comes down to the relative weight placed upon economic versus social policy. For Wapshott, it is most significant that Hayek advocated for private control of money, even while accepting “mandatory universal healthcare and unemployment insurance, enforced, if not directly provided, by the state” (291). The government's control of the economy, rather than its commitment to social provision, is what divides the radical from the practical. Although Burgin does not address this issue explicitly, the thrust of his work is on the social and political philosophy that flows from economic positions, and thus he weights Friedman's relentless drive towards privatization of education and welfare as more significant than his acceptance of a central bank.

At the end of the book, Wapshott dodges the question he laid out so clearly in the introduction. A few snide comments about Keynesianism as a “wonder drug” (246) now leached of efficacy suggest an emerging argument for Hayek. He also critiques Nixon's scattershot economic policy as “Keynesian to a fault” (243) (despite Nixon's decision to effectively destroy the Keynes-designed Bretton Woods currency standard by delinking gold and the dollar). But then, in the final pages, Wapshott argues that Keynes “saved capitalism twice in eighty years” (295) and signs off with a quote from John Kenneth Galbraith, leading the reader to the implicit conclusion that it is Keynes, after all, whom he judges to have won the great debate.

But how distinctive was this clash, said to define both modern economics and the modern political world? All three books suggest that despite the partisan tenor of discussion about all things relating to capitalism in the twentieth century, the true story of the market economy in both ideas and politics is far more complicated than any simple bifurcation could suggest. Burgin does an exemplary job of showing how even among the most committed partisans of the right, disagreement flourished as to the proper role of the government and the balance that should be struck between economic growth, social stability, efficiency, and traditional values. Some members of the Mont Pelerin Society firmly believed that the state had a positive role to play in creating both a stable society and a thriving economy; others believed that state intervention was always and everywhere destructive. Over time, the latter party gained the upper hand organizationally. Stedman Jones argues that this attitude even permeated the policies of their opponents, laying the groundwork for a bipartisan neoliberal ideology that continues to shape both American and British politics. But it may be that the losers of the Mont Pelerin Society were ultimately more triumphant than Stedman Jones's rationalistic, value-free ideologues, for all continue to work within the framework of a durable and established welfare state equipped with multiple mechanisms for economic intervention. As Wapshott's focus on Keynes reminds us, even the most ardent preachers of the antigovernment faith found themselves working within an irreplaceable network of ideas and institutions established by their opponents. To focus exclusively on one side or the other ignores the dialectical push and pull that has long shaped our politics, and now our scholarship.