ABSTRACT
The concept of the marketplace of ideas often structures discussions about the institutions promoting and the laws governing political and intellectual life. This chapter examines how the "marketplace of ideas" as a concept fared at the hands of these neoliberal economists. It focuses on the views of the neoliberal who most doggedly pursued the implications of this concept for the neoliberal project, the Chicago School economist, George Stigler. Neoliberals expressed a commitment to promote freedom of inquiry. Stigler took exception with what he believed to be the confused image of the marketplace of ideas that was implicit in Capitalism and Freedom. Viewed as practical strategy in the political mobilization of science, the measures laid out by Stigler in his memo made one crucial omission that sympathizers to the neoliberal project would have clearly and immediately perceived. The debates between neoliberals over how to operationalize the marketplace of ideas gave rise to alternative strategies for skinning the cat.
