45 Pages Posted: 14 Aug 2014

Date Written: July 6, 2014

Abstract

The existence of a ‘Chicago school of economics’ has for many years been all but taken for granted in the profession, recognized in scholarly articles and books, in history of economics texts, and even in the popular media. Its defining characteristics and membership, though, have been the subject of controversy, and some have even questioned whether it is proper to speak in terms of a ‘school’ of economists associated with Chicago. Though the Chicago school has been the subject of no small amount of research over the past several decades, that scholarship has focused largely on persons, ideas, and influence — in short, on the school itself. No attention has been paid to how it was that economists came to apply the ‘Chicago school’ label to a particular set of ideas and the individuals propounding them — that is, to the origins and emergence of the professional perception of a Chicago school of economics. This paper attempts to address that lacuna, showing how the idea of a ‘Chicago school’ crept into the economics literature and what it was that economists believed made this ‘school’ sufficiently distinctive to merit the label.