Free market musing

In The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Harvard University Press, 2012), Department of History Assistant Professor Angus Burgin masterfully explores how economic reckonings of free markets have influenced the currency of ideas, from John Maynard Keynes declaring the end of laissez-faire in 1924 through Milton Friedman's advocacy of deregulated free markets in the 1960s and 1970s. Burgin recognizes economics theory as a philosophical imperative, showing how free markets' moral imperative differs in the ideas of those two Chicago School titans, Friedrich von Hayek and Friedman. Impressively researched and engagingly written, The Great Persuasion explores how free markets morphed from socioeconomic pariah to panacea over the 20th century's latter half.