Knight, who had himself straddled the boundaries between a liberal sensibility and an explicitly "radical" worldview, urged the society's founding members to align their market advocacy with support for religious toleration and the mantle of humanitarianism. Perhaps the most vociferous advocate of the adoption of the language of progressivism, however, was Milton Friedman. He assailed the tendency of liberals to represent their ideas as a "defence of the status quo" and urged his colleagues to rely instead on rhetoric that was "dynamic and progressive." It was essential, he said, to relay the fact that their or ga ni za tion was "concerned in the progress of man's welfare." In the wake of the Great Depression, no demo cratic polity would be compelled by the cold language of nineteenthcentury market advocates. The remorseless social Darwinism associated with theorists like Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner had little place in a pop u lar conversation in which so many perceived themselves as helpless victims, or potential victims, of an unhindered market. It would be necessary to soften the price mechanism's sometimes rough edges and to shift its rhetorical logic of market advocacy away from an adversarial ethic and toward an emphasis on the benefi ts it could bestow on all.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 276