Jennifer Burns: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Inspiring. You call Milton Friedman, The Last Great Conservative, maybe to be a little bit controversial and make bold statements that get everybody excited, but what do you mean by that, and what makes it great conservative? So I was really thinking of that in terms of American political identities and particularly the 20th-century conservative movement, which people are always saying, “This isn’t conservatism.” And I’m saying, “Yes, in America, conservatism is different. It looks different. It feels different.” Conservatism in America builds in a big component of what we could call libertarianism, anti-government ideas and critics will say, but conservatism is about conserving institutions and practices, and it has a role for the state and an organic community. But in the United States, it’s always had since the 20th century also this anti-statist, let’s let the market rip. It’s not worry about what the market does to establish traditions. The market is our tradition. Capitalism is our tradition, so that was really synthesized. Many people were there, but Friedman and the importance of his books Free to Choose Capitalism, and Freedom, the television series he did. All of these were core components of this American conservative synthesis as it evolved. And I really see that as having broken down. It is scattered into different pieces and we don’t know where they’re going to come back together again. But Friedman’s push for open global markets, unfettered free trade. It’s getting pushback on both the left and the right. That I think is just a major sign that both parties have turned away from this vision. I don’t know what they’ve turned to, but the way that Friedman brought these pieces together, I think that political moment has passed. So that’s what I was trying to talk about with the book title. There’s another way though in which I think of him also as a conservative, which is that within the field of economics, he went back to this older idea, the quantity theory of money, and said, “This still has value. This can be applied in the modern day. It is something to teach us.” And he pushed back against this trend towards mathematicization, so he kept writing books. You can still pick up a Friedman book and read it, where’s lots of economics articles and output, it’s unreadable unless you’re in the field. And so I think in that way, he was trying to conserve methodologically and intellectually the traditions of the field, the work that he and particularly Anna Schwartz did, that literal counting of things and deep analysis of data from the field that was the completely unfashionable and his time. Now, we’ve gone back to it with big data and with computers, but he helped bring that forward and preserve that tradition. So I think of him intellectually as a conservative, if you think of the mode of his thought. And so, what makes a great conservative is one who takes those older ideas and makes them fresh for a new time period. I think that’s exactly what he did. You’ve also spoken about the fact that the times when he was out in public, there was more of an open battle of ideas where conservatism often had William F. Buckley. He had a more vibrant, deep debate over ideas where it seems less deep now.…

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