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ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE: FREE MARKETS FROM RIGHT TO LEFT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2014

JENNIFER BURNS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Stanford University E-mail: jenniferburns@stanford.edu

Extract

“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.

Type
Review Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 Mirowski, Philip and Plehwe, Dieter, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robin, Corey, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.