Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Many today consider Friedman to be the master neoliberal economic thinker, and yet you argue that “neoliberalism” is basically the parlance of academics. But didn’t Friedman himself use the term to describe his economic project? And why do you think that calling him a “conservative” makes more sense?
Jennifer Burns: There is one instance among all of Friedman’s collected writings, published and unpublished, in which he calls himself a neoliberal—and that was a short article aimed at a European audience, where the term had more currency. That said, it is also true that Friedman didn’t call himself a conservative! However, I argue the term fits him in two senses. The first is that as an economist, he often attempted to conserve older economic ideas and analytic techniques, from the quantity theory of money to the data-gathering methods typical of institutional economics. The second is that throughout his lifetime, Friedman allied himself openly with politicians, intellectuals, and the broader political movement that identified as conservative. One of the things that makes American conservatism unique, in fact, is that it absorbed the economic analysis of Friedman, which in the context of any other nation would be considered liberal, or neoliberal, and profoundly anti-conservative.
DSJ: Let’s talk about Friedman’s early life. You mention that he grew up just outside of New York City in Rahway, N.J., in a town ruled by Anglo-Protestants, and in a family that threw itself into the small but growing Jewish community there. Is there anything about his childhood and/or adolescence that would foreshadow his staunch free-market thinking?
JB: It is noteworthy that Friedman’s family life and childhood were atypical for Jewish immigrants of his era—he had less of the urban, communal experience and more the type of small-town upbringing characteristic of Americans whose families were not recent immigrants. That said, Friedman was firmly attached to his Jewish identity, even as an atheist. I show that Friedman often looked to the experience of Jews in Europe to understand the dangers of state power, which he ranked as more significant than private discrimination. He also believed that economic regulation often served to mask prejudice. One particularly meaningful episode for him involved the American Medical Association’s discrimination against the Jewish émigré doctors fleeing Nazi Germany, seen in the new English-language requirements for medical practice instituted after Kristallnacht. Friedman extended this into a larger critique of occupational licensure, which he believed protected larger economic players against new competition.