George Stigler’s Career Moves: The Roles of Contingency, Self-Interest, Ideology, and Intellectual Commitment

Abstract

George Stigler is commonly seen as one of the central figures in the Chicago School of Economics. However, he did not actually take a faculty position at the University of Chicago until the age of 47. This essay will provide a narrative account of George Stigler’s various career transitions from graduate school through his “retirement.” This narrative structure will be employed to bring out what archival material implies about a number of general themes regarding Stigler’s career. Particular attention will be devoted to the 1946 episode in which Chicago failed to make him an offer and the 1957–1958 episode in which W. Allen Wallis successfully induced him to take charge of the Walgreen Foundation and Walgreen Professorship. A first theme considered concerns the role of contingency in Stigler’s academic appointments. A second theme concerns the intellectual diversity of the academic milieus in which Stigler operated, which runs counter to the conventional view of a monolithic Chicago School focused on free markets. A third theme concerns the extent to which Stigler was a partisan or a scientist in his academic endeavors. This aspect entails whether he viewed the economics profession as more swayed by the social environment of its times or whether it made independent scientific and intellectual contributions to social policy. A final theme will concern the extent to which Stigler, as Nik-Khah has suggested, was an empire builder, especially during his tenure as the Walgreen Professor of American Institutions and then in establishing the Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. Brief consideration is also given to the issue of how to reconcile these contrasting, if not conflicting, features of Stigler’s career.