Joshua Cohen
NEAR THE END of Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Milton Friedman states the central thesis of his influential book: “Equality comes sharply into conflict with freedom; one must choose. One cannot be both an egalitarian …and a liberal.” What Friedman calls “liberalism” is the market fundamentalism that is now commonly called “neoliberalism.”
Friedman’s argument, radical in 1962, became the country’s guiding public philosophy with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Its power as public philosophy owed less to the compelling force of its economic analysis than to its success in recruiting the value of liberty—our “equal right to freedom”—to its cause. Recruiting liberty, while dismissing equality and subordinating the civic liberty associated with democracy.