Importantly, the person who most doggedly pursued the implications of the concept of the marketplace of ideas for the neoliberal project was not Milton Friedman, but his Chicago colleague (who would also serve as president of the MPS), George Stigler. Stigler’s views did not emerge fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s head, but developed over time as he questioned whether and under what circumstances the university upheld the epistemic virtues of the marketplace. He would eventually relinquish an early hope that existing institutions devoted to producing and ratifying knowledge (universities—or, more precisely, an elite subset of them, such as Chicago) could be reconciled to the proper functioning of the marketplace of ideas, in favor of the more hard-edged position that this would require them to undergo radical reorganization. So, too, would Stigler challenge the most prominent activities of his fellow neoliberals: he would reject Friedman’s approach to dealing directly with an obstinate public, and urged his fellow neoliberals to do the same. Popularizing neoliberal economics was at best useless, at worst dangerous.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 99