The existing Economics Department, given its wartime depopulation, was in no shape to boast a dominant ideological orientation or to attract external funds. The Cowles Commission, an externally endowed economics research institution, was mostly stocked with self-identified socialists. The department also sported a rump representation of older-style Institutionalist economists. These factions would have surely scoffed at such an openly antistatist-oriented unit: but they were mostly kept out of the loop.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 742