Introduction

Milton Friedman's essay, “The methodology of positive economics” (F53), has been many things to many people since it was published in 1953 as the “Introduction” to Essays in Positive Economics. Generations of graduate students have learned a lesson (the lesson for most) in what it means for economics to be a science. Philosophers and methodologists have seen it as Friedman's apologetic for this or that philosophy of science. Some have used it as a whipping boy to expose the philosophical naiveté of economists. Others have used it to frame the parameters of the “Chicago school.”

For close to four decades after its publication those who have used the essay treated it as the beginning and end of Friedman's methodology. More recently this has changed as interpreters and critics have looked to other works by Friedman, on methodology and on economics, and into the context from which he wrote it for insights to the essay's substance.

A 1988 interview with Milton Friedman (Hammond 1992a) began to uncover the unpublished historical background for Friedman's methodology. However, while he talked at length in the interview about his methodology and speculated about its intellectual roots, Friedman was unable to shed any light on the history of the essay itself. He said, ‘I don't really remember why I wrote that article to tell you the truth … What I don't know is whether the idea of the collection of essays came first, or the essay came first’ (Hammond 1992a, 106). This history, the history of the making of the essay, is important for our understanding of the text in the narrow sense and Friedman's methodology in the broader sense.