Friedman appropriated John Neville Keynes’s designation “positive economics” to describe this approach, and announced that it was “in principle in de pen dent of any par tic u lar ethical position or normative judgments” and could be “an ‘objective’ science, in precisely the same sense as any of the physical sciences.” In Western societies, he asserted, “differences about economic policy among disinterested citizens derive predominantly from different predictions about the economic consequences of taking action— differences that in principle can be eliminated by the progress of positive economics— rather than from fundamental differences in basic values, differences about which men can ultimately only fi ght.” Despite the severity of its implicit criticism of prevalent modes of economic analysis, “The Methodology of Positive Economics” was a fundamentally optimistic text. In Friedman’s view economists could overcome the par tic u lar challenges of the social sciences to achieve an “objective” perspective and in doing so could build a reasoned consensus in the population at large.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 405