Knight found himself, as he wrote in private correspondence in 1933, “bitterly disappointed and disgusted” with his colleagues within the discipline, seeing them as thinly disguised polemicists who leveraged their academic status to infl uence public debate on issues that remained controversial within the profession. The “headlong plunge of my colleagues in the social science professions here and elsewhere into po liti cal activity,” he asserted in a letter the following year, “seems to me the suicide of science.” It at once debased public debate and eroded the public's alreadylimited trust in the authority of experts.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 127