Keynote Address — From Neo-Liberalism to the New Medievalism

Abstract

In the autumn of 1950, a young man, the son of refugees from Nazi Germany, enrolled in the economics program at the University of Chicago. Chicago’s department of economics was an unusual place in those days. Ever since the publication of John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory in 1936, Keynesian economics — with its stress on the use of state intervention to manage economic development — had become more or less orthodoxy. Chicago stood against this trend, becoming something of a refuge for neoclassical economists. Neoclassical economics, with its faith in free markets, minimalist government and the ability of mathematical models to explain