Frank H. Knight and the Committee on Social Thought : Contrasting Visions of Interdisciplinarity in the 1950s

The paper uses the occasion of Frank Knight's return to the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 1952 to link Knight's disagreements with Hayek during the 1950s and 1960s, when they were both members of the Committee, with his disagreements with Nef and Hutchins during the early 1940s, when they were forming the Committee. Two common threads appear in the paper. The first is Knight's disagreement with his disputants over the nature of the knowledge appropriate to intelligent action in a liberal society. The second is his disagreement with all of them on the type of education necessary for an educated elite in such a society. Throughout the paper, I show that Knight's criticisms of Hayek share common cause with his criticisms of Nef