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This article examines the role of the consumer in the writings on regulation launched by the Chicago school from the 1930s to the 1980s. It shows how Chicago school scholars used the concept of the consumer to shape and justify their calls for deregulation, as they continually claimed to offer market solutions that protect and benefit the consumer. The focus is on how the scholars at issue executed a shift from choice to welfare in their consumer concept as they began more decisively to embrace deregulation in the postwar period. From initially having described consumers as individual agents, capable of ensuring democracy and freedom in modern society by expressing their choices on a partly regulated market, they began to portray consumers as a coherent, homogeneous and predictable mass, acting on a deregulated market and serving merely as a tool of so-called consumer welfare, understood as economic efficiency and aggregate wealth.

George Josef Stigler is known as the scientist who strongly influenced the formation of the Chicago School of Economics. He promoted the idea of expanding price theory beyond the boundaries of economics and developed it into a universal model for the analysis of human behaviour, known as the economic approach to human behaviour. His research inspired the Public Choice literature and the Economic Theory of Law. Besides, Stigler made numerous contributions which nowadays are integral parts of economic theory. In this essay we summarize some of Stigler's outstanding contributions, particularly his work on information economics and the economic theory of regulation.

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 the origins of that label and the avenues via which the notion of a "Chicago school" of economics came to be. This paper attempts to address that lacuna, drawing on both published and archival resources. What emerges is a story of a label of uncertain origin but wrapped up in competing agendas, the first stage in the history of which culminates in 1962 with its rejection by two of the very people who helped birth it.

Intro -- Contents -- Chronology -- Part I Hayek's Luck -- 1 'I Have Been Lucky in This Game' -- 1 'Von' Hayek's Luck -- 2 Producer Sovereignty -- 3 Property: 'Reflections on Becoming an Austrian Economist and Staying One' -- 4 The Four Gospels -- 5 Chicago and Their Austrian 'Other Half': Repulsive Attraction -- 6 Volume Overview -- Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics (and Related Projects) -- 2 The Tobacco, Obesity and Fossil Fuel Lobby-'As Happy as Hell' -- 1 An Overview of the Argument Plus Indirect Test (1) -- 2 Indirect Test (2) -- 3 Indirect Test (3) -- 4 Indirect Test (4) -- Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics (and Related Projects) -- 3 1-15: Residual Reverence Towards the Second Estate -- 1 Recruitment to the London School of Economics -- 2 'Free' Market 'Intellectuals': Recruitment Through 'Specious' Visions -- Bibliography -- 4 16-20: Loyal 'Intermediaries' -- 1 Robbins and Machlup, Knight and Viner -- 2 Knight: A Second Chicago Oral Tradition? -- 3 Schmidt and Berger -- Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics -- 5 21-24: 'I Desire to Preserve Correct Relations in Public' -- 1 Kaldor, Scitovsky and Thomas -- 2 Galbraith and 'Knowledge' Communities -- 3 Keynes, Sraffa, Kahn and Joan Robinson -- 4 Friedman's Prediction of Stagflation -- 5 Slum Dwellers -- 6 'Not a Matter of a Simple Defence of a Liberal System of Society': Austrians and the Eternal 'Merit' of 'Fascism' -- References -- 6 25: Suppression, the Dogs That Didn't Bark and the Emerging Chicago School of Economics -- 1 Suppression -- 2 Dogs That Didn't Bark -- 3 Non-recruitment to the University of Chicago Department of Economics -- 4 Hayek Mark I and Hayek Mark II? -- Archival Insight into the Evolution of Economics (and Related Projects) -- 7 31 Conclusions About Hayek's Nineteen Thirty-One 'Prediction'.

part Section I Historical reconstruction in the history of economics -- chapter 1 Exegesis, hermeneutics, and interpretation -- chapter 2 Reflections on "breaking away": Economics as science and the history of economics as history of science -- part Section II Interpreting Frank Knight -- chapter 3 The therapeutic quality of Frank Knight's Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit -- chapter 4 The Economist and the Entrepreneur: Modernist impulses in Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit -- chapter 5 Frank Knight's dissent from Progressive social science -- chapter 6 "What is truth" in capital theory?: Five stories relevant to the evaluation of Frank Knight's contributions to the capital controversy -- chapter 7 Maximizers versus good sports: Frank Knight's curious understanding of exchange behavior -- chapter 8 Frank Knight on the conflict of values in economic life -- part Section III Interpreting Frank Knight and Chicago economics -- chapter 9 Frank Knight, Max Weber, Chicago economics, and institutionalism -- chapter 10 Entrenching disciplinary competence: The role of general education and graduate study in Chicago economics -- chapter 11 De gustibus est disputandum: Frank Knight's reply to George Stigler and Gary Becker's "De gustibus non est disputandum" with an introductory essay -- chapter 12 Did the Chicago School reject Frank Knight?: Assessing Frank Knight's place in the Chicago economics tradition -- part Section IV Economics, religion, and politics -- chapter 13 Frank Knight: Economics versus religion -- chapter 14 Is economics a religion? -- chapter 15 The idea of a secular society revisited.

On 9 August 1974, Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment; on 29 April 1975, the United States scuttled from their Embassy in Saigon - optics that were interpreted as defeats for the 'International Right'. Yet in 1975, Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party; and in 1976 Ronald Reagan almost unseated a sitting Republican Party President. Pivotal to the 'turn to the Right' was Friedrich 'von' Hayek's 1974 Nobel Prize for Economic Science - awarded for having used Austrian Business Cycle Theory to predict the Great Depression: 'For him it is not a matter of a simple defence of a liberal system of society as may sometimes appear from the popularized versions of his thinking.' The evidence suggests that Hayek's fraudulent assertion was uncovered at the University of Chicago in the early 1930s - but not reported. The most likely explanation is self-censorship - for reasons of ideological correctness, fund raising and residual deference to the Second Estate. Four indirect tests suggest that 'free' market economists have - in other instances and presumably for fund-raising motives - suppressed embarrassing 'knowledge': which suggests that they were perfectly capable of suppressing 'knowledge' about Hayek's non-prediction of the Great Depression. With respect to the Nobel Prize and thus his ability to reach a wider audience, Hayek was fortune in having two loyal 'intermediaries': Lionel Robbins and Fritz Machlup who were - and probably felt themselves to be - 'socially' inferior to 'von' Hayek.--