Pre-War Chicago Economics and the Chicago School

The analytical connection between the postwar Chicago School and various aspects of the work of earlier Chicago economists has often led to the effort to collapse them into one, divided into “early” and “late,” “old” and “new,” or “first” and “second” versions (Bronfenbrenner 1962; Miller 1962; Reder 1982; van Overtveldt 2007).

Until the early 1950s, Chicago’s economists were largely concentrated in the depart­ment, and used a diverse set of approaches with little coordination among them. Knight can hardly be conceived of as the founder of the School (Reder 1982: 6; Emmett 2009), and Viner departed Chicago for Princeton in 1945, at about the same time as T.W. Schultz arrived. Schultz was a superb program builder, and under his oversight Friedman, Stigler, Fogel, D. Gale Johnson, H. Gregg Lewis, Lester Telser, D.N. McCloskey, and

others forged not only a common economic approach but the institutional framework of teaching and research that supported it (van Horn et al. 2011). By the mid-1950s a coordinated departmental effort had appeared, and the Chicago School grew as those identified with it spread into the university’s business and law schools.