“Dear Professor”: Exploring Lay Comments to Milton Friedman

Abstract

While previous research on the rise of neoliberalism has focused on elite networks of economists, politicians, journalists, and business leaders, this article investigates the attractiveness of Milton Friedman's ideas at the time of the neoliberal breakthrough from a bottom-up perspective. A close reading of mostly favorable letters by two hundred viewers in response to the 1980 television documentary series Free to Choose indicates that neoliberalism's popular legitimacy was based on a broad yet fragile coalition. Four different and in many ways contradictory viewer narratives can be distilled from the letters: (i) a conservative narrative, (ii) a reactionary narrative, (iii) a left libertarian narrative, and (iv) a populist narrative. Although in 1980 Friedman was, and today still is, perceived as a conservative economist, the letters show that under the surface of public debate his reach as a public intellectual far exceeded the realms of postwar conservatism as Friedman was supported by people who were situated further to the right and the left. Perhaps more than the elite sources of the neoliberal project, Friedman's lay reception thus highlights neoliberalism's complex and contradictory history in a plastic manner.