ABSTRACT
Central to the lore surrounding the University of Chicago’s economics department is the story of its transition in the 1930s and 1940s from a “mixed bag” of proto-Chicago school types, institutionalists, and quantitative economists (Reder 1982: 361-2) to the unified research program that we call the “Chicago school.” The story of this transition is sufficiently entrenched in the historical sensibilities of economists that most contemporary treatments simply equate Chicago economics with the school (Stein 1994) and therefore focus attention only on the ideological commitments, scientific theories, and policy/legal advice that form its unique approach to economics (Miller 1962; Bronfenbrenner 1962; Stigler 1962; Friedman 1974; Samuels 1976; Reder 1982, 1987; Schmidt and Rittaler 1989).
