First, there was the reorientation of global “orthodoxy” to the new American normal, which meant a commitment to a formal understanding of the centrality of the Walrasian system of equilibrium as constituting the heart of economics, which in turn accounted for the initial prizes bestowed upon Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, Wassily Leontief, Tjalling Koopmans, and that most Walrasian of Brits, John R. Hicks. The problem faced by the early committee was that this “new postwar orthodoxy” represented by the above roster was pretty uniformly dismissive of the MPS cadre in the 1960s, to the extent of an intransigent unwillingness to allow most of them into the tent named “orthodox economics.” The Nobel committee did end up with a lopsided emphasis on American economics, but they also forced the issue of reconciliation of these two imperatives through a decisive set of awards in 1974–77, as described in the next section.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 501