Capitalism and Freedom [antikvár]

Preface, 1982 I he lectures that my wife helped shape into this book were delivered a quarter of a century ago. It is hard even for persons who were then active, let alone for the more than half of the current population who were then less than ten years old or had not yet been born, to reconstruct the intellectual climate of the time. Those of us who were deeply concerned about the danger to freedom and prosperity from the growth of government, from the triumph of welfare-state and Keyne-sian ideas, were a small beleaguered minority regarded as eccentrics by the great majority of our fellow intellectuals. Even seven years later, when this book was first published, its views were so far out of the mainstream that it was not reviewed by any major national publication—not by the New York Times or the Herald Tribune (then still being published in New York) or the Chicago Tribune, or by Time or Newsweek or even the Saturday Review—though it was reviewed by the London Economist and by the major professional journals. And this for a book directed at the general public, written by a professor at a major U.S. university, and destined to sell more than 400,000 copies in the next eighteen years. It is inconceivable that such a publication by an economist of comparable professional standing but favorable to the welfare state or socialism or communism would have received a similar silent treatment. How much the intellectual climate has changed in the past quarter-century is attested to by the very different reception