American orthodox neoclassical economics was deemed world benchmark economics by the Bank of Sweden Prize committee, and this had very profound consequences for the trajectory of economics in Europe. In the 1950s and ’60s there were still scattered home-grown schools of economic thought in various countries that generally published the bulk of their research in their home language; some, such as the French regulation school or the Italian neo-Ricardians, were openly hostile to the American version of neoclassical economics. Marxian economics was ensconced behind the Iron Curtain. There were even reputable Brits such as the Cambridge Keynesians who were very skeptical concerning the American ascendancy. Not only did none of these groups ever merit a Bank of Sweden Prize in the opinion of the Swedes; but the prize served to sanction the displacement of the cutting edge of economics in Europe from indigenous traditions to a narrow (and sometimes tone-deaf) construction of the American economic orthodoxy. In some instances, the purge was brutal and quick; but more frequently it took decades of replacing older faculty with youngsters who had read the writing on the wall. Perhaps European economists would have intellectually knelt to the hegemon in any event in the absence of the prize; but one suspects the local politics might have played out very differently.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 483