One way in which my work on Early Modern philosophy and philosophy of economics hangs together, is that I thematize what I call the "Socratic Problem" in both. (Recall the methodology I advocate here.) One version of it focuses on how a philosopher or public intellectual is held accountable for the impact of his/her teachings on students and the rest of society. One of my pieces is on Milton Friedman and the Chilean Chicago Boys. In my paper I try to tease out some of the non trivial philosophic and methodological commitments in Friedman's conception of economics and what happens to these when they are applied by ambitious students in the context of dictatorship. The first review of that effort is in:
"In fact only two of the essays in Part I are at all critical of Chicago economics in any form. Eric Schliesser, in his 'Friedman, positive economics, and the Chicago Boys', provides a timely reminder of a long-forgotten piece of state (not state-sponsored) terrorism, the murder of the former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier by Pinochet's secret police, the DINA, in Washington DC on 21 September 1976, just four weeks after he had published an attack on Friedman in Nation and three weeks before Friedman's Nobel Prize was announced. Schliesser's analysis of the relations between Chicago and the Pinochet regime does not make for pleasant reading." J.E. King reviewing Ross B. Emmett (ed.) The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics, in History of Economics Review, Summer, 2010.
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