In 2016, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) organized a distinguished lecture series in honor of Karl Brunner’s (1916–1989) centenary, with presentations from former friends and colleagues and Ken Rogoff. To the great credit of the SNB, they followed that event with a second conference in 2018, this time featuring scholars specializing in the history of economic thought alongside economists assessing its contemporary adequacy. The resulting volume is one part hagiography (in the non-polemical sense), two parts intellectual history, and one part economic theory—a remarkable concatenation of historicism and relevance. Although this volume does not succeed in its “goal … to produce a coherent whole rather than a collection of isolated articles,” the parts nevertheless do add up to a valuable contribution (p. xi).

Unlike the other leading monetarists, Brunner has not received his due. Milton Friedman is the subject of a large literature, most recently Jennifer Burns’ Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (2023), as are his antecedents, for instance, in George Tavlas’ The Monetarists: The Making of the Chicago Monetary Tradition, 1927–1960 (2023). But many of the SNB volume authors persuasively contend that Brunner was the most rigorous and subtle of the monetarist crew and, in some ways, the most influential. The journals he founded—the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and Journal of Monetary Economics—are still leading sites of research. The Shadow Open Market Committee, which he founded with Allan Meltzer to hound the Federal Open Market Committee, does not receive much attention in this volume despite influencing policy conversations. In addition, he was a consummate institution builder, sourcing private donors and, eventually, central banks to help fund the Konstanz, Interlaken, and Carnegie-Rochester Seminars he initiated. Yet, the payoff from these substantial investments in mentoring junior academics was ambiguous for monetarism: These very conferences incubated the New Classical school, which deviated from Brunner in assuming such perfect access to information that no monetary policy was necessary.

Perhaps the most interesting theme that emerges across several essays is the strange theoretical and political lines of conflict that run through Brunner’s work. Postwar debates within economics were much more intricate and multidimensional than “Keynesian revolution, monetarist counter-revolution.” Friendly fire was common. As early as 1971, Edward Nelson notes Brunner was frustrated with the “outbreak of ‘Friedmanitis’ … that was hindering him from being seen … as one of the premier monetarists” (p. 138). Kevin Hoover makes an especially compelling case that Brunner’s philosophical ideas, based in a thoroughgoing logical empiricism, have been “overshadowed by Milton Friedman” (p. 294), in particular, Friedman’s much-debated but muddled and imprecise “The Methodology of Positive Economics” (1953). When Robert Gordon organized Milton Friedman’s Monetary Framework: A Debate with His Critics (1974), Brunner’s criticism was as savage as the Keynesians’ (p. 339). Where Friedman was focused on overthrowing Keynesianism and winning policy influence, Brunner sought a full theoretical alternative. Hence, he was impatient with Friedman’s willingness to debate empirical questions from within the IS–LM framework, which Brunner saw as hopelessly impoverished. As several contributors note, Brunner’s position here was very close to the Keynesian stalwart James Tobin’s view. Both agreed that relative asset prices, not just interest rates, were key to the monetary transmission mechanism; that the details of the money supply process mattered (whereas Friedman declared himself no more interested in the details of banking “than in the technology of a pin-making factory” [p. 271]); and that fiscal policy could not be left out of any proper macromodel. Finally, Brunner emphasized “the importance of uncertainty in the sense of Knight and Keynes” (p. 23). Steven Williamson even sees the genealogy of Brunner’s monetarism beginning with Keynes, John Hicks, and Don Patinkin (p. 425). Brunner’s was a stranger and more interesting monetarism than the more familiar Friedman variety.

But at this point, what survives of the monetarist/Keynesian distinction, if either Brunner or Tobin, or both, were offsides? The basic difference boils down to Brunner’s faith in the private system’s ability to remain relatively stable without macroeconomic intervention, that markets do not endogenously create instability that needs to be managed. From this follows the monetarist preference for rules and the Keynesian preference for giving monetary authorities a wide area of discretion.

Apart from an introductory epigraph drawn from the SNB vaults, there is no new archival material here—even the historians of economics work from the published record. The contributors tend to overemphasize Brunner’s useful ideas while downplaying or passing over the awkward fact that the most distinctive aspect of monetarist analysis, an unrelenting focus on the aggregate money supply, has not survived into the twenty-first century, and indeed appears decisively refuted by the post-2008 experience. Finally, one wishes we had a better understanding of the real-time policy calls by Brunner’s Shadow Open Market Committee. One contributor defends Brunner from charges that monetarists had been glib about the costs of disinflation and gives him credit for correctly calling, in 1981, that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy would produce a recession (p. 277). There was indeed a recession later in 1981—but it was the second part of the double-dip recession that started with Paul Volcker’s 1979 decision to target the money supply. What did Brunner and the Shadow Open Market Committee make of that initial decision? Did they learn anything about money supply targeting in the intervening 2 years? Brunner was worried the experiment would discredit monetarism and put effort into clarifying that, despite targeting the money supply, the Fed’s continuing use of discretion in setting the target rather than adopting a legislatively established rule with credible pre-commitment, as required by his theories, meant that real monetarism has never been tried.

The final chapters argue that Brunner’s theories about the frequency and durability of shocks remain relevant, as does his emphasis on the need to include more assets than just money and bonds in any model of monetary policy. But the last word is Stephen Williamson’s: “It is important to understand where our ideas came from, and we can certainly trace many good ideas to Brunner. But I think most of us would be disappointed if in thirty years’ time the profession had not moved on from where it is today” (p. 440).