The principles that Plant advanced so ruthlessly were very much part of the twentieth century. They reflected the way in which modern economics was evolving into an apparently closed, self-referring system of thought suitable for teaching to young people and capable of ever-increasing technical elaboration—rather like Ramist logic in sixteenth-century France. Plant’s arguments on labor discrimination and copyright employed very simple economic principles to great effect. But what distinguished the exposition of economic principles at the London School of Economics was a strong normative belief that such classroom principles could be translated unmediated into economic argument and policy agendas. What lent this, for the time, idiosyncratic belief resonance was the school’s position in the expanding educational system.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 402