The History of Thought in the Development of the Chicago Paradigm

My colleagues, who entrepreneured this symposium after having decided there is a Weltanschauung which emanates from a particular institution in Chicago, also have correctly concluded that this view includes a place for the history of economic thought. The purpose of this essay, accordingly, is to discuss the role which the history of economic theory has had in the formulation of the "Chicago approach" to economics, a paradigm which stresses the primacy of consumer choice and individual freedom, limited only by the constraint "of the means available to the subject [consumer] and the terms of allocation presented by the facts of his given situation."'