It is hard even for persons who were then active, let alone for the more than half

of the current population who were then less than ten years old or had not yet been born, to reconstruct the intellectual climate of the time. Those of us who were deeply concerned about the danger to freedom and prosperity from the growth of government, from the triumph of welfare-state and Keynesian ideas, were a small beleaguered minority regarded as eccentrics by the great majority of our fellow intellectuals. And this for a book directed at the general public, written by a professor at a major U.S. university, and destined to sell more than 400, 000 copies in the next eighteen years. It is inconceivable that such a publication by an economist of comparable professional standing but favorable to the welfare state or socialism or communism would have received a similar silent treatment. The change in the climate of opinion was produced by experience, not by theory or philosophy. Russia and China, once the great hopes of the intellectual classes, had clearly gone sour. Great Britian, whose Fabian socialism exercised a dominant influence on American intellectuals, was in deep trouble. Closer to home, the intellectuals, always devotees of big government and by wide majorities supporters of the national Democratic party, had been disillusioned by the Vietnam War, particularly the role played by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Many of the great reform programssuch guidons of the past as welfare, public housing, support of trade unions, integration of schools, federal aid to education, affirmative action were turning to ashes. As with the rest of the population, their pocketbooks were being hit with inflation and high taxes. These phenomena, not the persuasiveness of the ideas expressed in books dealing with principles, explain the transition from the overwhelming defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 to the overwhelming victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980two men with essentially the same program and the same message. Preface to Free to Choose: "The only person who can truly persuade you is yourself. You must turn the issues over in your mind at leisure, consider the many arguments, let them simmer, and after a long time turn your preferences into convictions." Second, and more basic, to keep options open until circumstances make change necessary. tyranny of the status quoin private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis actual or perceivedproduces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. sponsored by the Volker Foundation.

University of Chicago: Frank H. Knight, Henry C. Simons, Lloyd W. Mints, Aaron Director, Friedrich A. Hayek, George J. Stigler.