The 20th century British scientist Sir James Jeans wrote that "the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine"

In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas — especially beliefs and values — shape society. ^[1] As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit.^[2] Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to the mind. An extreme version of this idealism can exist in the philosophical notion of solipsism.

Religious and philosophical thought privileging the immaterial or supernatural over the material and natural is ubiquitous and ancient. However, the earliest extant arguments that the world of experience is grounded in the mental derive from India and Greece. The Hindu idealists in India and the Greek Neoplatonists gave pantheistic arguments for an all-pervading consciousness as the ground or true nature of reality.^[3] In contrast, the Yogācāra school, which arose within Mahayana Buddhism in India in the 4th century CE,^[4] based its "mind-only" idealism to a greater extent on phenomenological analyses of personal experience. This turn toward the subjective anticipated empiricists such as George Berkeley, who revived idealism in 18th-century Europe by employing skeptical arguments against materialism.

Beginning with Immanuel Kant, German idealists such as G. W. F. Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Arthur Schopenhauer dominated 19th-century philosophy. This tradition, which emphasized the mental or "ideal" character of all phenomena, birthed idealistic and subjectivist schools ranging from British idealism to phenomenalism to existentialism. The historical influence of this branch of idealism remains central even to the schools that rejected its metaphysical assumptions, such as Marxism, pragmatism, and positivism.

Definitions[link]

Idealism is a term with several related meanings. It comes via idea from the Greek idein (ἰδεῖν), meaning "to see". The term entered the English language by 1796. In ordinary use, as when speaking of Woodrow Wilson's political idealism, it generally suggests the priority of ideals, principles, values, and goals over concrete realities. Idealists are understood to represent the world as it might or should be, unlike pragmatists, who focus on the world as it presently is. In the arts, similarly, idealism affirms imagination and attempts to realize a mental conception of beauty, a standard of perfection, in opposition to aesthetic naturalism and realism.^[5][6]

Any philosophy that assigns crucial importance to the ideal or spiritual realm in its account of human existence may be termed "idealist". Metaphysical idealism is an ontological doctrine that holds that reality itself is incorporeal or experiential at its core. Beyond this, idealists disagree on which aspects of the mental are more basic. Platonic idealism affirms that abstractions are more basic to reality than the things we perceive, while subjective idealists and phenomenalists tend to privilege sensory experience over abstract reasoning. Epistemological idealism is the weaker view that reality can only be known through ideas, that only psychological experience can be apprehended by the mind.^[2][7][8]

Subjective idealists like George Berkeley are anti-realists in terms of a mind-independent world, whereas transcendental idealists like Immanuel Kant are strong skeptics of such a world, affirming epistemological and not metaphysical idealism. Thus Kant defines idealism as "the assertion that we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining".^[9] However, not all idealists restrict the real or the knowable to our immediate subjective experience. Objective idealists make claims about a transempirical world, but simply deny that this world is essentially divorced from or ontologically prior to the mental. Thus Plato and Gottfried Leibniz affirm an objective and knowable reality transcending our subjective awareness—a rejection of epistemological idealism—but propose that this reality is grounded in ideal entities, a form of metaphysical idealism. Nor do all metaphysical idealists agree on the nature of the ideal; for Plato, the fundamental entities were non-mental abstract forms, while for Leibniz they were proto-mental and concrete monads.^[10]

As a rule, transcendental idealists like Kant affirm idealism's epistemic side without committing themselves to whether reality is ultimately mental; objective idealists like Plato affirm reality's metaphysical basis in the mental or abstract without restricting their epistemology to ordinary experience; and subjective idealists like Berkeley affirm both metaphysical and epistemological idealism.^[11]

Classical idealism[link]

Monistic idealism holds that consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all being. It is monist because it holds that there is only one type of thing in the universe and idealist because it holds that one thing to be consciousness.

Anaxagoras (480 BC) was known as "Nous" ("Mind") because he taught that "all things" were created by Mind, that Mind held the cosmos together and gave human beings a connection to the cosmos or a pathway to the divine.

Many religious philosophies are specifically idealist. The belief that beings with knowledge (God/s, angels & spirits) preceded insentient matter seems to suggest that an experiencing subject is a necessary reality. Hindu idealism is central to Vedanta philosophy and to such schools as Kashmir Shaivism.^[12] Proponents include Amit Goswami,^[13] P.R. Sarkar and his disciple Sohail Inayatullah.

Christian theologians have held idealist views, often based on Neoplatonism, despite the influence of Aristotelian scholasticism from the 12th century onward. Later western theistic idealism such as that of Hermann Lotze offers a theory of the "world ground" in which all things find their unity: it has been widely accepted by Protestant theologians.^[14] Several modern religious movements, for example the organizations within the New Thought Movement and the Unity Church, may be said to have a particularly idealist orientation. The theology of Christian Science includes a form of idealism: it teaches that all that truly exists is God and God's ideas; that the world as it appears to the senses is a distortion of the underlying spiritual reality, a distortion that may be corrected (both conceptually and in terms of human experience) through a reorientation (spiritualization) of thought.

Wang Yangming, a Ming Chinese neo-Confucian philosopher, official, educationist, calligraphist and general, held that objects do not exist entirely apart from the mind because the mind shapes them. It is not the world that shapes the mind but the mind that gives reason to the world, so the mind alone is the source of all reason, having an inner light, an innate moral goodness and understanding of what is good.

The consciousness-only approach of the Yogācāra school of Mahayana Buddhism is not true metaphysical idealism^[15] as Yogācāra thinkers did not focus on consciousness to assert it as ultimately real, it is only conventionally real since it arises from moment to moment due to fluctuating causes and conditions and is significant because it is the cause of karma and hence suffering.^[16]

In recent years, a form of monistic idealism has been defended by the physicist Amit Goswami:^{[17][18][19][20]}

The current worldview has it that everything is made of matter, and everything can be reduced to the elementary particles of matter, the basic constituents — building blocks — of matter. And cause arises from the interactions of these basic building blocks or elementary particles; elementary particles make atoms, atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, and cells make brain. But all the way, the ultimate cause is always the interactions between the elementary particles. This is the belief — all cause moves from the elementary particles. This is what we call "upward causation." So in this view, what human beings — you and I think of as our free will does not really exist. It is only an epiphenomenon or secondary phenomenon, secondary to the causal power of matter. And any causal power that we seem to be able to exert on matter is just an illusion. This is the current paradigm.
Now, the opposite view is that everything starts with consciousness. That is, consciousness is the ground of all being. In this view, consciousness imposes "downward causation." In other words, our free will is real. When we act in the world we really are acting with causal power. This view does not deny that matter also has causal potency — it does not deny that there is causal power from elementary particles upward, so there is upward causation — but in addition it insists that there is also downward causation. It shows up in our creativity and acts of free will, or when we make moral decisions. In those occasions we are actually witnessing downward causation by consciousness.

Platonism and neoplatonism[link]

Plato's theory of forms or "ideas" describes ideal forms (for example the platonic solids in geometry or abstracts like Goodness and Justice), as universals existing independently of any particular instance.^[21] Arne Grøn calls this doctrine "the classic example of a metaphysical idealism as a transcendent idealism",^[22] while Simone Klein calls Plato "the earliest representative of metaphysical objective idealism". Nevertheless Plato holds that matter is real, though transitory and imperfect, and is perceived by our body and its senses and given existence by the eternal ideas that are perceived directly by our rational soul. Plato was therefore a metaphysical and epistemological dualist, an outlook that modern idealism has striven to avoid:^[23] Plato's thought cannot therefore be counted as idealist in the modern sense.

With the neoplatonist Plotinus, wrote Nathaniel Alfred Boll; "there even appears, probably for the first time in Western philosophy, idealism that had long been current in the East even at that time, for it taught… that the soul has made the world by stepping from eternity into time…".^[24][25] Similarly, in regard to passages from the Enneads, "The only space or place of the world is the soul" and "Time must not be assumed to exist outside the soul",^[26] Ludwig Noiré wrote: "For the first time in Western philosophy we find idealism proper in Plotinus,^[3] However, Plotinus does not address whether we know external objects, unlike Schopenhauer and other modern philosophers.

Subjective idealism[link]

Subjective Idealism (immaterialism or phenomenalism) describes a relationship between experience and the world in which objects are no more than collections or "bundles" of sense data in the perceiver. Proponents include Berkeley,^[27] Bishop of Cloyne, an Irish philosopher who advanced a theory he called immaterialism, later referred to as "subjective idealism", contending that individuals can only know sensations and ideas of objects directly, not abstractions such as "matter", and that ideas also depend upon being perceived for their very existence - esse est percipi; "to be is to be perceived".

Arthur Collier^[28] published similar assertions though there seems to have been no influence between the two contemporary writers. The only knowable reality is the represented image of an external object. Matter as a cause of that image, is unthinkable and therefore nothing to us. An external world as absolute matter unrelated to an observer does not exist as far as we are concerned. The universe cannot exist as it appears if there is no perceiving mind. Collier was influenced by An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World by "Cambridge Platonist" John Norris (1701).

Bertrand Russell's popular book The Problems of Philosophy highlights Berkeley's tautological premise for advancing idealism;

"If we say that the things known must be in the mind, we are either un-duly limiting the mind's power of knowing, or we are uttering a mere tautology. We are uttering a mere tautology if we mean by 'in the mind' the same as by 'before the mind', i.e. if we mean merely being apprehended by the mind. But if we mean this, we shall have to admit that what, in this sense, is in the mind, may nevertheless be not mental. Thus when we realize the nature of knowledge, Berkeley's argument is seen to be wrong in substance as well as in form, and his grounds for supposing that 'idea'-i.e. the objects apprehended-must be mental, are found to have no validity whatever. Hence his grounds in favour of the idealism may be dismissed."

The Australian philosopher David Stove harshly criticized philosophical idealism, arguing that it rests on what he called "the worst argument in the world". Stove claims that Berkeley tried to derive a non-tautological conclusion from tautological reasoning. He argued that in Berkeley's case the fallacy is not obvious and this is because one premise is ambiguous between one meaning which is tautological and another which, Stove argues, is logically equivalent to the conclusion.

Alan Musgrave^[29] argues that conceptual idealists compound their mistakes with use/mention confusions;

Santa Claus the person does not exist.

"Santa Claus" the name/concept/fairy tale does exist because adults tell children this every Christmas season (the distinction is highlighted by using quotation-marks when referring only to the name and not the object)

and proliferation of hyphenated entities such as "thing-in-itself" (Immanuel Kant), "things-as-interacted-by-us" (Arthur Fine), "table-of-commonsense" and "table-of-physics" (Sir Arthur Eddington) which are "warning signs" for conceptual idealism according to Musgrave because they allegedly do not exist but only highlight the numerous ways in which people come to know the world. This argument does not take into account the issues pertaining to hermeneutics, especially at the backdrop of analytic philosophy. Musgrave criticized Richard Rorty and Postmodernist philosophy in general for confusion of use and mention.

A. A. Luce^[30] and John Foster are other subjectivists.^[31] Luce, in Sense without Matter (1954), attempts to bring Berkeley up to date by modernising his vocabulary and putting the issues he faced in modern terms, and treats the Biblical account of matter and the psychology of perception and nature. Foster's The Case for Idealism argues that the physical world is the logical creation of natural, non-logical constraints on human sense-experience. Foster's latest defence of his views is in his book A World for Us: The Case for Phenomenalistic Idealism.

Paul Brunton, a British philosopher, mystic, traveler, and guru, taught a type of idealism called "mentalism", similar to that of Bishop Berkeley, proposing a master world-image, projected or manifested by a world-mind, and an infinite number of individual minds participating. A tree does not cease to exist if nobody sees it because the world-mind is projecting the idea of the tree to all minds.^[32]

John Searle criticising some versions of idealism, summarises two important arguments for subjective idealism. The first is based on our perception of reality;

(1) All we have access to in perception are the contents of our own experience and

(2) The only epistemic basis for claims about the external world are our perceptual experiences

therefore;

(3) The only reality we can meaningfully speak of is that of perceptual experience ^[33]

Whilst agreeing with (2) Searle argues that (1) is false and points out that (3) does not follow from (1) and (2). The second argument runs as follows;

Premise: Any cognitive state occurs as part of a set of cognitive states and within a cognitive system

Conclusion 1: It is impossible to get outside all cognitive states and systems to survey the relationships between them and the reality they cognize

Conclusion 2: There is no cognition of any reality that exists independently of cognition^[34]

Searle contends that Conclusion 2 does not follow from the premises.

Epistemological idealism is a subjectivist position in epistemology that holds that what one knows about an object exists only in one's mind. Proponents include Brand Blanshard.

Transcendental idealism[link]

Transcendental idealism, founded by Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, maintains that the mind shapes the world we perceive into the form of space-and-time.

... if I remove the thinking subject, the whole material world must at once vanish because it is nothing but a phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of ourselves as a subject, and a manner or species of representation.

— Critique of Pure Reason A383

The 2nd edition (1787) contained a Refutation of Idealism to distinguish his transcendental idealism from Descartes's Sceptical Idealism and Berkeley's Dogmatic Idealism. The section Paralogisms of Pure Reason is an implicit critique of Descartes' idealism. Kant says that it is not possible to infer the 'I' as an object (Descartes' Cogito ergo sum) purely from "the spontaneity of thought". Kant focused on ideas drawn from British philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume but distinguished his transcendental or critical idealism from previous varieties;

The dictum of all genuine idealists, from the Eleatic school to Bishop Berkeley, is contained in this formula: “All knowledge through the senses and experience is nothing but sheer illusion, and only in the ideas of the pure understanding and reason is there truth.” The principle that throughout dominates and determines my [transcendental] idealism is, on the contrary: “All knowledge of things merely from pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but sheer illusion, and only in experience is there truth.”

— Prolegomena, 374

Kant distinguished things as they appear to an observer and things in themselves, "that is, things considered without regard to whether and how they may be given to us".^[35] We cannot approach the noumenon, the "thing in Itself" (German: Ding an sich) without our own mental world. He added that the mind is not a blank slate, tabula rasa but rather comes equipped with categories for organising our sense impressions.

In the first volume of his Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer wrote his "Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real". He defined the ideal as being mental pictures that constitute subjective knowledge. The ideal, for him, is what can be attributed to our own minds. The images in our head are what comprise the ideal. Schopenhauer emphasized that we are restricted to our own consciousness. The world that appears is only a representation or mental picture of objects. We directly and immediately know only representations. All objects that are external to the mind are known indirectly through the mediation of our mind. He offered a history of the concept of the "ideal" as "ideational" or "existing in the mind as an image".

[T]rue philosophy must at all costs be idealistic; indeed, it must be so merely to be honest. For nothing is more certain than that no one ever came out of himself in order to identify himself immediately with things different from him; but everything of which he has certain, sure, and therefore immediate knowledge, lies within his consciousness. Beyond this consciousness, therefore, there can be no immediate certainty ... There can never be an existence that is objective absolutely and in itself; such an existence, indeed, is positively inconceivable. For the objective, as such, always and essentially has its existence in the consciousness of a subject; it is therefore the subject's representation, and consequently is conditioned by the subject, and moreover by the subject's forms of representation, which belong to the subject and not to the object.

— The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, Ch. 1

Charles Bernard Renouvier was the first Frenchman after Nicolas Malebranche to formulate a complete idealistic system, and had a vast influence on the development of French thought. His system is based on Immanuel Kant's, as his chosen term "néo-criticisme" indicates; but it is a transformation rather than a continuation of Kantianism.

Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Kant confuses tautology and petitio principii, and ridicules his pride in tackling "the most difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics.".^[36] Yet he attacks the idealism of Schopenhauer and Descartes with an argument similar to Kant's critique of the latter (see above);

Objective idealism[link]

Objective idealism asserts that the reality of experiencing combines and transcends the realities of the object experienced and of the mind of the observer.^[37] Proponents include Thomas Hill Green, Josiah Royce, Benedetto Croce and Charles Sanders Peirce.^[38]

Absolute idealism[link]

Johann Fichte was the first German philosopher to make an attempt at a presuppositionless theory of knowledge, wherein nothing outside of thought is assumed to exist apart from the primordial analysis of the Ego. So that his philosophy could be solely grounded in itself, he assumed nothing without his Fichtean deductions from first principles, and elaborated what he called a Wissenschaftslehre. Fichte denied Kant's noumenon and held that consciousness constitutes its own foundation, that the mental life of the Ego, of pure selfhood, relies upon nothing wholly external to itself and that the hypothesis of an outer world of any kind is the same thing as admitting a Kantian realm.

Schelling (1775–1854) claimed that the Fichte's "I" needs the Not-I, because there is no subject without object, and vice versa. So there is no difference between the subjective and the objective, that is, the ideal and the real. This is Schelling's "absolute identity": the ideas or mental images in the mind are identical to the extended objects which are external to the mind.

Absolute idealism is G. W. F. Hegel's account of how existence is comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole. Hegel called his philosophy "absolute" idealism in contrast to the "subjective idealism" of Berkeley and the "transcendental idealism" of Kant and Fichte,^[39] which were not based on a critique of the finite and a dialectical philosophy of history as Hegel's idealism was. The exercise of reason and intellect enables the philosopher to know ultimate historical reality, the phenomenological constitution of self-determination, the dialectical development of self-awareness and personality in the realm of History.

In his Science of Logic (1812–1814) Hegel argues that finite qualities are not fully "real" because they depend on other finite qualities to determine them. Qualitative infinity, on the other hand, would be more self-determining and hence more fully real. Similarly finite natural things are less "real"—because they are less self-determining—than spiritual things like morally responsible people, ethical communities and God. So any doctrine, such as materialism, that asserts that finite qualities or natural objects are fully real is mistaken.^[40]

Hegel certainly intends to preserve what he takes to be true of German idealism, in particular Kant's insistence that ethical reason can and does go beyond finite inclinations.^[41] For Hegel there must be some identity of thought and being for the subject (human reason or consciousness) to be able to know an object (the world) at all.

Kierkegaard criticised Hegel's idealist philosophy in several of his works, particularly his claim to a comprehensive system that could explain the whole of reality. Where Hegel argues that an ultimate understanding of the logical structure of the world is an understanding of the logical structure of God's mind, Kierkegaard asserting that for God reality can be a system but it cannot be so for any human individual because both reality and humans are incomplete and all philosophical systems imply completeness. A logical system is possible but an existential system is not. "What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational".^[42] Hegel's absolute idealism blurs the distinction between existence and thought: our mortal nature places limits on our understanding of reality;

So-called systems have often been characterized and challenged in the assertion that they abrogate the distinction between good and evil, and destroy freedom. Perhaps one would express oneself quite as definitely, if one said that every such system fantastically dissipates the concept existence. ... Being an individual man is a thing that has been abolished, and every speculative philosopher confuses himself with humanity at large; whereby he becomes something infinitely great, and at the same time nothing at all.

^[43]

A major concern of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and of the philosophy of Spirit that he lays out in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817–1830) is the interrelation between individual humans, which he conceives in terms of "mutual recognition." However, what Climacus means by the aforementioned statement, is that Hegel, in the Philosophy of Right, believed the best solution was to surrender one's individuality to the customs of the State, identifying right and wrong in view of the prevailing bourgeois morality. Individual human will ought, at the State's highest level of development, to properly coincide with the will of the State. Climacus rejects Hegel's suppression of individuality by pointing out it is impossible to create a valid set of rules or system in any society which can adequately describe existence for any one individual. Submitting one's will to the State denies personal freedom, choice, and responsibility.

In addition, Hegel does believe we can know the structure of God's mind, or ultimate reality. Hegel agrees with Kierkegaard that both reality and humans are incomplete, inasmuch as we are in time, and reality develops through time. But the relation between time and eternity is outside time and this is the "logical structure" that Hegel thinks we can know. Kierkegaard disputes this assertion, because it eliminates the clear distinction between ontology and epistemology. Existence and thought are not identical and one cannot possibly think existence. Thought is always a form of abstraction, and thus not only is pure existence impossible to think, but all forms in existence are unthinkable; thought depends on language, which merely abstracts from experience, thus separating us from lived experience and the living essence of all beings. In addition, because we are finite beings, we cannot possibly know or understand anything that is universal or infinite such as God, so we cannot know God exists, since that which transcends time simultaneously transcends human understanding.

Bradley saw reality as a monistic whole apprehended through "feeling", a state in which there is no distinction between the perception and the thing perceived. Like Berkeley Bradley thought that nothing can be known to exist unless it is known by a mind.

We perceive, on reflection, that to be real, or even barely to exist, must be to fall within sentience ... . Find any piece of existence, take up anything that any one could possibly call a fact, or could in any sense assert to have being, and then judge if it does not consist in sentient experience. Try to discover any sense in which you can still continue to speak of it, when all perception and feeling have been removed; or point out any fragment of its matter, any aspect of its being, which is not derived from and is not still relative to this source. When the experiment is made strictly, I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.

— F.H. Bradley, 'Appearance and Reality', Chapter 14

Bradley was the apparent target of G. E. Moore's radical rejection of idealism. Moore claimed that Bradley did not understand the statement that something is real. We know for certain, through common sense and prephilosophical beliefs, that some things are real, whether they are objects of thought or not, according to Moore. The 1903 article The Refutation of Idealism is one of the first demonstrations of Moore's commitment to analysis. He examines each of the three terms in the Berkeleian aphorism esse est percipi, "to be is to be perceived", finding that it must mean that the object and the subject are necessarily connected so that "yellow" and "the sensation of yellow" are identical - "to be yellow" is "to be experienced as yellow". But it also seems there is a difference between "yellow" and "the sensation of yellow" and "that esse is held to be percipi, solely because what is experienced is held to be identical with the experience of it". Though far from a complete refutation, this was the first strong statement by analytic philosophy against its idealist predecessors, or at any rate against the type of idealism represented by Berkeley. This argument did not show that the GEM (in post–Stove vernacular, see below) is logically invalid.

Actual idealism[link]

Actual Idealism is a form of idealism developed by Giovanni Gentile that grew into a "grounded" idealism contrasting Kant and Hegel.

Pluralistic idealism[link]

Pluralistic idealism such as that of Gottfried Leibniz^[44] takes the view that there are many individual minds that together underlie the existence of the observed world and make possible the existence of the physical universe.^[45] Unlike absolute idealism, pluralistic idealism does not assume the existence of a single ultimate mental reality or "Absolute". Leibniz' form of idealism, known as Panpsychism, views "monads" as the true atoms of the universe and as entities having perception. The monads are "substantial forms of being",elemental, individual, subject to their own laws, non-interacting, each reflecting the entire universe. Monads are centers of force, which is substance while space, matter and motion are phenomenal and their form and existence is dependent on the simple and immaterial monads. There is a pre-established harmony established by God, the central monad, between the world in the minds of the monads and the external world of objects. Leibniz's cosmology embraced traditional Christian Theism. The English psychologist and philosopher James Ward inspired by Leibniz had also defended a form of pluralistic idealism.^[46] According to Ward the universe is composed of "psychic monads" of different levels, interacting for mutual self- betterment.^[47]

Personalism is the view that the minds that underlie reality are the minds of persons. Borden Parker Bowne, a philosopher at Boston University, a founder and popularizer of personal idealism, presented it as a substantive reality of persons, the only reality, as known directly in self-consciousness. Reality is a society of interacting persons dependent on the Supreme Person of God. Other proponents include George Holmes Howison^[48] and J. M. E. McTaggart.^[49]

Howison's personal idealism ^[50] was also called "California Personalism" by others to distinguish it from the "Boston Personalism" which was of Bowne. Howison maintained that both impersonal, monistic idealism and materialism run contrary to the experience of moral freedom. To deny freedom to pursue truth, beauty, and "benignant love" is to undermine every profound human venture, including science, morality, and philosophy. Personalistic idealists Borden Parker Bowne and Edgar S. Brightman and realistic personal theist Saint Thomas Aquinas address a core issue, namely that of dependence upon an infinite personal God.^[51]

Howison, in his book The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism, created a democratic notion of personal idealism that extended all the way to God, who was no more the ultimate monarch but the ultimate democrat in eternal relation to other eternal persons. J. M. E. McTaggart's idealist atheism and Thomas Davidson's Apeirionism resemble Howisons personal idealism.^[52]

J. M. E. McTaggart of Cambridge University, argued that minds alone exist and only relate to each other through love. Space, time and material objects are unreal. In The Unreality of Time he argued that time is an illusion because it is impossible to produce a coherent account of a sequence of events. The Nature of Existence (1927) contained his arguments that space, time, and matter cannot possibly be real. In his Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (Cambridge, 1901, p196) he declared that metaphysics are not relevant to social and political action. McTaggart "thought that Hegel was wrong in supposing that metaphysics could show that the state is more than a means to the good of the individuals who compose it".^[53] For McTaggart "philosophy can give us very little, if any, guidance in action... Why should a Hegelian citizen be surprised that his belief as to the organic nature of the Absolute does not help him in deciding how to vote? Would a Hegelian engineer be reasonable in expecting that his belief that all matter is spirit should help him in planning a bridge?^[54]

Thomas Davidson taught a philosophy called "apeirotheism", a "form of pluralistic idealism...coupled with a stern ethical rigorism"^[55] which he defined as "a theory of Gods infinite in number." The theory was indebted to Aristotle's pluralism and his concepts of Soul, the rational, living aspect of a living substance which cannot exist apart from the body because it is not a substance but an essence, and nous, rational thought, reflection and understanding. Although a perennial source of controversy, Aristotle arguably views the latter as both eternal and immaterial in nature, as exemplified in his theology of unmoved movers.^[56] Identifying Aristotle's God with rational thought, Davidson argued, contrary to Aristotle, that just as the soul cannot exist apart from the body, God cannot exist apart from the world.^[57]

Idealism in the philosophy of science[link]

Nicolas Malebranche, though a student of Cartesian rationalism, disagreed that the existence of the external world is dubious and known only indirectly and declared instead that the real external world is actually God. For Malebranche we directly know internally the ideas in our mind. Externally, we directly know God's operations. This kind of idealism led to the pantheism of Spinoza.

Idealist notions took a strong hold among physicists of the early 20th century confronted with the paradoxes of quantum physics and the theory of relativity. In The Grammar of Science, Preface to the 2nd Edition, 1900, Karl Pearson wrote, "There are many signs that a sound idealism is surely replacing, as a basis for natural philosophy, the crude materialism of the older physicists." This book influenced Einstein's regard for the importance of the observer in scientific measurements^{[citation needed]}. In § 5 of that book, Pearson asserted that "...science is in reality a classification and analysis of the contents of the mind...." Also, "...the field of science is much more consciousness than an external world."

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, a British astrophysicist of the early 20th century, wrote in his book The Nature of the Physical World; "The stuff of the world is mind-stuff";

"The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds…. The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it…. It is necessary to keep reminding ourselves that all knowledge of our envi-ronment from which the world of physics is constructed, has entered in the form of messages transmitted along the nerves to the seat of consciousness…. Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness; and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature…. It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference."^[58]

Ian Barbour in his book Issues in Science and Religion (1966), p. 133, cites Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World (1928) for a text that argues The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principles provides a scientific basis for "the defense of the idea of human freedom" and his Science and the Unseen World (1929) for support of philosophical idealism "the thesis that reality is basically mental".

Sir James Jeans wrote; "The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter."^[59]

Jeans, in an interview published in The Observer (London), when asked the question:

Do you believe that life on this planet is the result of some sort of accident, or do you believe that it is a part of some great scheme?

replied:

I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe... In general the universe seems to me to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine. It may well be, it seems to me, that each individual consciousness ought to be compared to a brain-cell in a universal mind.

What remains is in any case very different from the full-blooded matter and the forbidding materialism of the Victorian scientist. His objective and material universe is proved to consist of little more than constructs of our own minds. To this extent, then, modem physics has moved in the direction of philosophic idealism. Mind and matter, if not proved to be of similar nature, are at least found to be ingredients of one single system. There is no longer room for the kind of dualism which has haunted philosophy since the days of Descartes. Sir James Jeans addressing the British Association in 1934.

Finite picture whose dimensions are a certain amount of space and a certain amount of time; the protons and electrons are the streaks of paint which define the picture against its space-time background. Traveling as far back in time as we can, brings us not to the creation of the picture, but to its edge; the creation of the picture lies as much outside the picture as the artist is outside his canvas. On this view, discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting, by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of its Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility. Sir James Jeans The Universe Around Us page 317.

The chemist Ernest Lester Smith wrote a book Intelligence Came First (1975) in which he claimed that consciousness is a fact of nature and that the cosmos is grounded in and pervaded by mind and intelligence.^[60]

Bernard d'Espagnat a French theoretical physicist best known for his work on the nature of reality wrote a paper titled The Quantum Theory and Reality according to the paper: "The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment."^[61] In an article in the Guardian titled Quantum weirdness: What we call 'reality' is just a state of mind d'Espagnat wrote that:

"What quantum mechanics tells us, I believe, is surprising to say the least. It tells us that the basic components of objects – the particles, electrons, quarks etc. – cannot be thought of as "self-existent". He further writes that his research in quantum physics has lead him to conclude that an "ultimate reality" exists, which is not embedded in space or time.^[62]

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with an historical introduction by Ludwig Noiré, available at [4]
• Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Princeton, ISBN 978-0-691-02081-5
• Neujahr, Philip J., Kant's Idealism, Mercer University Press, 1995 ISBN 0-86554-476-X
• Watts, Michael. Kierkegaard, Oneworld, ISBN 978-1-85168-317-8

Further reading

• Gustavus Watts Cunningham Idealistic Argument in Recent British and American Philosophy Books For Libraries Press, 1967
• Hugh Joseph Tallon The concept of self in British and American idealism Catholic University of America Press, 1939
• Gerald Thomas Baskfield The idea of God in British and American personal idealism Catholic University of America, 1933
• Vergilius Ture Anselm Ferm A history of philosophical systems Littlefield Adams, 1968 ISBN 0-8226-0130-3

External links[link]

Look up idealism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• A.C. Grayling-Wittgenstein on Scepticism and Certainty
• Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy: idealism in religious thought
• Idealism and its practical use in physics and psychology
• 'The Triumph of Idealism', lecture by Professor Keith Ward offering a positive view of Idealism, at Gresham College, 13 March 2008 (available in text, audio, and video download)

This article's lead section may not adequately summarize its contents. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of the article's key points. (November 2010)

After Forever
Background information
Origin	Netherlands
Genres	Symphonic metal, progressive metal
Years active	1995–2009
Labels	Nuclear Blast
Associated acts	Epica, Ayreon, Star One, HDK, ReVamp, Hangover Hero
Past members
Sander Gommans Mark Jansen Joep Beckers Jack Driessen Luuk van Gerven Floor Jansen André Borgman Lando van Gils Bas Maas Joost van den Broek

After Forever was a Dutch symphonic metal band with strong progressive metal influences.^[1] The band relied on the use of both soprano vocals and death grunts. In February 2009, it was announced that After Forever had disbanded.

Biography[link]

After Forever was originally assembled in 1995 under the name Apocalypse,^[2] playing death metal, with harsh male vocals.^[2] With the joining of vocalist Floor Jansen in 1997, their style and sound shifted towards symphonic metal, in order to give emphasis to her soprano voice, in contrast with the grunts and screams provided by Gommans and Mark Jansen. Their line-up at this point comprised Floor Jansen, Mark Jansen, Sander Gommans, Luuk van Gerven, Jack Driessen and Joep Beckers.

In 1999 the band began composing their own songs and recorded two demos entitled Ephemeral and Wings Of Illusion, which drew the attention of the Dutch Transmission Records label, with whom the band signed a contract.

Their debut album Prison Of Desire was recorded in 2000, featuring the guest appearance of Sharon Den Adel of the Dutch band Within Temptation on the song "Beyond Me". The album obtained very good reviews in Europe.^[3][4] By the end of the year, drummer André Borgman and keyboardist Lando van Gils joined the band, replacing Joep Beckers and Jack Driessen. During the year 2000, Floor Jansen was invited to guest sing in Ayreon's Universal Migrator Part 1: The Dream Sequencer album. Ayreon is the most successful of the many projects by Dutch guitarist Arjen Anthony Lucassen and this album is only the first of many other collaborations with Floor Jansen.

In 2001, the band released the album Decipher, that featured for the first time live classical instruments and a live choir. The complex arrangements of the new compositions pushed After Forever's music even more towards the symphonic metal genre. In 2002 Mark Jansen, one of the main composers of the band, was fired from After Forever and subsequently assembled the band Epica,^[5] where he continued to pursue the contamination of symphonic metal with death metal elements, already present in the first two albums by After Forever. He was replaced by Bas Maas, who had been a roadie for the band for years.^[6] In 2003, the new line-up of After Forever released the EP and DVD Exordium.

In 2004, the concept album Invisible Circles was released. The album, that deals with childhood traumas and abuse, introduced progressive metal elements to the music of After Forever and the use of a clean male voice. The album reached 24th place in the Dutch Top 100 musical chart.^[7] In the same year, Lando van Gils also left the band and was replaced by Joost van den Broek, a keyboard player that Floor Jansen had met during her tour with Star One .

In early September 2005, the band released their fourth album Remagine. The album was produced using pre-recorded drum tracks by André Borgman, who had to take a long leave of absence to cure his illness. The songs of the album are simpler and more straightforward than in the previous albums, preserving anyway the usual dual voice dynamic in the sound of the band.^[8][9] On March 3, 2006, the band left the Transmission Records label, due to the scarce promotion that the label was providing to their albums.^[10] Following this departure, Transmission Records released the Mea Culpa compilation, with plenty of rarities and b-sides. By October of the same year, After Forever had signed to Nuclear Blast Records.^[11]

In the end of 2006 the band recorded their final and only album on the Nuclear Blast label, self titled After Forever. It features guest appearances from Annihilator guitarist Jeff Waters and Doro Pesch. Videos of the recording sessions were available for download on the band's website. The album was released on April 23, 2007.

In January 2008, After Forever announced on their website that the band would be taking a break of at least a year, mainly to assess the health problems of vocalist and guitarist Sander Gommans, who had been absent during most of the tour supporting the album After Forever.^[10] In an interview with Ragnarök radio, Floor said the band would get together early 2009 to discuss After Forever's future.^[12]

On February 5, 2009, After Forever announced that they decided to call it quits.^[13] The long break, during 2008 and 2009, had made them realize that they did not feel the passion towards the band any longer.^[14]

After the split up of the band, Sander Gommans published in 2009 the album System Overload with his solo project HDK and continues working as a high school art teacher. Floor Jansen started a new band called ReVamp and signed in 2010 a contract with Nuclear Blast for their first eponymous album.^[15] Joost van den Broek collaborated with both Gommans and Jansen on their new musical projects, meanwhile producing the Christmas Metal Symphony shows in 2008 and 2009^[16] and Stream of Passion's second album The Flame Within. Guitarist Bas Maas joined the live band supporting German hard rock singer Doro Pesch in 2008.

Line-up[link]

Floor Jansen during After Forever concert on Masters of Rock 2007 festival in Zlín.

Final line-up[link]

• Floor Jansen - Lead vocals (1997–2009)
• Sander Gommans - Guitar, grunts (1995–2009)
• Bas Maas – Guitar, vocals (2002–2009)
• Luuk van Gerven - Bass guitar(1996–2009)
• André Borgman - Drums, percussion (2000–2009)
• Joost van den Broek - Keyboards (2004–2009)

Previous members[link]

• Mark Jansen - Guitars, grunts (1995–2002)
• Joep Beckers - Drums, percussion (1995–2000)
• Jack Driessen - Keyboards (1995–2000)
• Lando van Gils - Keyboards (2000–2004)

Guests[link]

• Sharon den Adel - Guest vocals on song "Beyond Me" (Prison Of Desire)
• Melissa 't Hart - Soprano on songs "Mea Culpa", "Leaden Legacy", "Follow In The Cry", "Silence From Afar" and "Yield To Temptation" (Prison Of Desire)
• Simone Simons - Vocals on song "Beyond Me" (Live in Hardenberg 26 December 2007)
• Irene Jansen - Vocals on song "Who I Am" (Live in Tilburg 23 December 2007)
• George Oosthoek - Vocals on the 2007 tour, replacing Sander Gommans
• Doro Pesch - Vocals on song "Who I Am" (Release Party @ Tivoli 17. April 2007 Tilburg)
• Mark Jansen - Guitars and vocals on song "Beyond Me" (Live in Hardenberg 26 December 2007)
• Arjen Anthony Lucassen - Guitars on song "Who Wants to Live Forever" (Emphasis/Who Wants to Live Forever)
• Jeff Waters - Guitars on song "De-Energized" (After Forever)
• Rannveig Sif Sigurdardottir - Mezzo-soprano (After Forever)
• Amanda Somerville - Alto (Remagine, After Forever)
• Yvonne Rooda - Alto (Prison Of Desire)
• Previn Moore - Bass (After Forever)
• Hans Cassa - Bass (Prison Of Desire)
• Caspar De Jonge - Tenor (Prison Of Desire)

Discography[link]

Studio albums[link]

• Prison of Desire (2000)
• Decipher (2001)
• Invisible Circles (2004)
• Remagine (2005)
• After Forever (2007)

EPs[link]

• Exordium (2003)

Singles[link]

• "Follow In The Cry" (2000)
• "Emphasis/Who Wants To Live Forever" (2002)
• "Monolith Of Doubt" (2002)
• "My Choice/The Evil That Men Do" (2003)
• "Digital Deceit" (2004)
• "Being Everyone" (2005)
• "Two Sides/Boundaries Are Open" (2006)
• "Energize Me" (2007)
• "Equally Destructive" (2007)

Demos[link]

• Ephemeral (1999)
• Wings of Illusion (1999)

Compilations[link]

• Mea Culpa (2006)

Interviews[link]

• Interview of Floor Jansen (August 2007) - From www.metal-ways.com
• Ragnarok Radio Interview with Floor Jansen and Lori Linstruth (December 2008)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: After Forever

• Official website
• After Forever on Myspace
• Pictures of After Forever concerts
• After Forever videography

Milton Friedman

Chicago School of Economics
Born	(1912-07-31)July 31, 1912 Brooklyn, New York
Died	November 16, 2006(2006-11-16) (aged 94) San Francisco, California
Nationality	American
Institution	Hoover Institution (1977–2006) University of Chicago (1946–77) Columbia University (1937–41, 1943–45, 1964–65) NBER (1937–40)
Field	Economics
Alma mater	Columbia University (Ph.D.), 1946, University of Chicago (M.A.), 1933 Rutgers University (B.A.), (1932)
Opposed	John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Murray Rothbard
Influences	Adam Smith, Irving Fisher, Frank Knight, Murray Rothbard, Jacob Viner, Harold Hotelling, Arthur Burns, Friedrich Hayek, Homer Jones, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Simons, George Stigler
Influenced	Margaret Thatcher, Alan Greenspan, David D. Friedman, Anna J. Schwartz, Ben Bernanke, Gary Becker, Thomas Sowell, Harry Markowitz, Chicago Boys, William F. Buckley, Jr., Cato Institute
Contributions	Price theory, Monetarism, applied macroeconomics, floating exchange rates, volunteer military, Permanent income hypothesis, Friedman test
Awards	John Bates Clark Medal (1951) Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (1976) Presidential Medal of Freedom (1988) National Medal of Science (1988)
Signature

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist, statistician, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. He was a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and is known for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy.^[1] As a leader of the Chicago school of economics, he influenced the research agenda of the economics profession. A survey of economists ranked Friedman as the second most popular economist of the twentieth century behind John Maynard Keynes,^[2] and The Economist described him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it."^[3]

Friedman's challenges to what he later called "naive Keynesian" (as opposed to New Keynesian) theory^[4] began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function, and he became the main advocate opposing activist Keynesian government policies.^[5] In the late 1960s he described his own approach (along with all of mainstream economics) as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its "initial" conclusions.^[6] During the 1960s he promoted an alternative macroeconomic policy known as "monetarism". He theorized there existed a "natural" rate of unemployment, and argued that governments could increase employment above this rate (e.g., by increasing aggregate demand) only at the risk of causing inflation to accelerate.^[7] He argued that the Phillips curve was not stable and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation.^[8] Friedman argued that, given the existence of the Federal Reserve, a constant small expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy.^[9]

Friedman was an economic adviser to conservative President Ronald Reagan. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention. He once stated that his role in eliminating U.S. conscription was his proudest accomplishment, and his support for school choice led him to found The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax, and education vouchers.^[10] His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's response to the global financial crisis.^[11]

Milton Friedman's works include many monographs, books, scholarly articles, papers, magazine columns, television programs, videos, and lectures, and cover a broad range of topics of microeconomics, macroeconomics, economic history, and public policy issues. His books and essays were widely read, and have had an international influence, including in Communist countries.^{[12][13][14][15]}

Early life[link]

Friedman was born in Brooklyn, New York, to recent Jewish immigrants Jenő Friedman and Sára Landau from Beregszász in Austria-Hungary (now Berehove in Ukraine), both of whom worked as dry goods merchants. Shortly after Milton's birth, the family relocated to Rahway, New Jersey. A talented student, Friedman graduated from Rahway High School in 1928, just before his 16th birthday.^[16][17]

Friedman graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he specialized in mathematics and initially intended to become an actuary. During his time at Rutgers, Friedman became influenced by two economics professors, Arthur F. Burns and Homer Jones, who convinced him that modern economics could help end the Great Depression. After graduating from Rutgers in 1932, Friedman was offered two scholarships to do graduate work; one being Mathematics at Brown University and the other being Economics at the University of Chicago.^[18]Friedman chose the latter, thus earning an M.A. in 1933. He was strongly influenced by Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, and Henry Simons. It was at Chicago that Friedman met his future wife, economist Rose Director. During 1933–34 he had a fellowship at Columbia University, where he studied statistics with renowned statistician and economist Harold Hotelling. He was back in Chicago for 1934–35, spending the year working as a research assistant for Henry Schultz, who was then working on Theory and Measurement of Demand. That year, Friedman formed what would prove to be lifelong friendships with George Stigler and W. Allen Wallis.^[19]

Public service[link]

Friedman was initially unable to find academic employment, so during 1935, he followed his friend W. Allen Wallis to Washington, where Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was "a lifesaver" for many young economists.^[20] At this stage, Friedman said that he and his wife "regarded the job-creation programs such as the WPA, CCC, and PWA appropriate responses to the critical situation," but not "the price- and wage-fixing measures of the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration."^[21] Foreshadowing his later ideas, he believed price controls interfered with an essential signaling mechanism to help resources be used where they were most valued. Indeed, Friedman later concluded that all government intervention associated with the New Deal was "the wrong cure for the wrong disease," arguing that the money supply should simply have been expanded, instead of contracted.^[22] In the publication Monetary History of the United States by Friedman and Anna Schwartz, they argue that the Great Depression was caused by monetary contraction, which was the consequence of poor policymaking by the Federal reserve and the continuous crises of the banking system.^[23]

During 1935, he began work for the National Resources Committee, which was then working on a large consumer budget survey. Ideas from this project later became a part of his Theory of the Consumption Function. Friedman began employment with the National Bureau of Economic Research during autumn 1937 to assist Simon Kuznets in his work on professional income. This work resulted in their jointly authored publication Incomes from Independent Professional Practice, which introduced the concepts of permanent and transitory income, a major component of the Permanent Income Hypothesis that Friedman worked out in greater detail in the 1950s. The book hypothesizes that professional licensing artificially restricts the supply of services and raises prices.

During 1940, Friedman was appointed an assistant professor teaching Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but encountered antisemitism in the Economics department and decided to return to government service.^[24][25] Friedman spent 1941–43 working on wartime tax policy for the Federal Government, as an advisor to senior officials of the United States Department of the Treasury. As a Treasury spokesman during 1942 he advocated a Keynesian policy of taxation. He helped to invent the payroll withholding tax system, since the federal government badly needed money in order to fight the war.^[26] He later said, "I have no apologies for it, but I really wish we hadn't found it necessary and I wish there were some way of abolishing withholding now."^[27]

Academic career[link]

Early years[link]

In 1943, Friedman joined the Division of War Research at Columbia University (headed by W. Allen Wallis and Harold Hotelling), where he spent the rest of World War II working as a mathematical statistician, focusing on problems of weapons design.^[28]

During 1945, Friedman submitted Incomes from Independent Professional Practice (co-authored with Kuznets and completed during 1940) to Columbia as his doctoral dissertation. The university awarded him a Ph.D. during 1946. Friedman spent the 1945–46 academic year teaching at the University of Minnesota (where his friend George Stigler was employed). On February 12, 1945, his son, David D. Friedman was born.

University of Chicago[link]

University of Chicago

During 1946, Friedman accepted an offer to teach economic theory at the University of Chicago (a position opened by departure of his former professor Jacob Viner to Princeton University). Friedman would work for the University of Chicago for the next 30 years. There he helped build an intellectual community that produced a number of Nobel Prize winners, known collectively as the Chicago School of Economics.

At that time, Arthur Burns, who was then the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, asked Friedman to rejoin the Bureau's staff. He accepted the invitation, and assumed responsibility for the Bureau's inquiry into the role of money in the business cycle. As a result, he initiated the "Workshop in Money and Banking" (the "Chicago Workshop"), which promoted a revival of monetary studies. During the latter half of the 1940s, Friedman began a collaboration with Anna Schwartz, an economic historian at the Bureau, that would ultimately result in the 1963 publication of a book co-authored by Friedman and Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960.

Friedman spent the 1954–55 academic year as a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. At the time, the Cambridge economics faculty was divided into a Keynesian majority (including Joan Robinson and Richard Kahn) and an anti-Keynesian minority (headed by Dennis Robertson). Friedman speculates that he was invited to the fellowship because his views were unacceptable to both of the Cambridge factions. Later his weekly columns for Newsweek magazine (1966–84) were well read and increasingly influential among political and business people.^[29] From 1968 to 1978, he and Paul Samuelson participated in the Economics Cassette Series, a biweekly subscription series where the economist would discuss the days' issues for about a half hour at a time.^[30]

Friedman was an economic adviser to Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater during 1964.

Nobel memorial prize and retirement[link]

In 1976 Friedman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy."^[1] During the banquet speech he made a reference to “the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. In that he was the first recipient to do so, and it wasn’t until 2006 that a recipient of the prize called it by its proper name.^[31] During 1977, at age 65, Friedman retired from the University of Chicago after teaching there for 30 years. He and his wife moved to San Francisco where he became a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. From 1977 on, he was affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. During the same year, Friedman was approached by the Free To Choose Network and asked to create a television program presenting his economic and social philosophy. The Friedmans worked on this project for the next three years, and during 1980, the ten-part series, titled Free to Choose, was broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The companion book to the series (co-authored by Milton and his wife, Rose Friedman), also titled Free To Choose, was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1980 and has since been translated into 14 foreign languages.

Friedman served as an unofficial adviser to Ronald Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign, and then served on the President's Economic Policy Advisory Board for the rest of the Reagan Administration. During 1988, he received the National Medal of Science and Reagan honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Milton Friedman is known now as one of the most influential economists of the 20th century.^[32][33] Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Friedman continued to write editorials and appear on television. He made several visits to Eastern Europe and to China, where he also advised governments. He was also for many years a Trustee of the Philadelphia Society.^[34][35][36]

Scholarly contributions[link]

Economics[link]

Friedman was best known for reviving interest in the money supply as a determinant of the nominal value of output, that is, the quantity theory of money. Monetarism is the set of views associated with modern quantity theory. Its origins can be traced back to the 16th-century School of Salamanca or even further; however, Friedman's contribution is largely responsible for its modern popularization. He co-authored, with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States (1963), which was an examination of the role of the money supply and economic activity in U.S. history. A striking conclusion of their research was one regarding the role of money supply fluctuations as contributing to economic fluctuations. Several regression studies with David Meiselman during the 1960s suggested the primacy of the money supply over investment and government spending in determining consumption and output. These challenged a prevailing but largely untested view on their relative importance. Friedman's empirical research and some theory supported the conclusion that the short-run effect of a change of the money supply was primarily on output but that the longer-run effect was primarily on the price level.

Friedman was the main proponent of the monetarist school of economics. He maintained that there is a close and stable association between price inflation and the money supply, mainly that price inflation should be regulated with monetary deflation and price deflation with monetary inflation. He famously quipped that price deflation can be fought by "dropping money out of a helicopter."^[37]

Friedman's arguments were designed to counter popular claims that price inflation at the time was the result of increases in the price of oil, or increases in wages: as he wrote,

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

—Milton Friedman, 1963.^[38]

Friedman rejected the use of fiscal policy as a tool of demand management; and he held that the government's role in the guidance of the economy should be restricted severely. Friedman wrote extensively on the Great Depression, which he termed the Great Contraction, arguing that it had been caused by an ordinary financial shock whose duration and seriousness were greatly increased by the subsequent contraction of the money supply caused by the misguided policies of the directors of the Federal Reserve.

The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.

—Milton Friedman, Two Lucky People, 233

Friedman also argued for the cessation of government intervention in currency markets, thereby spawning an enormous literature on the subject, as well as promoting the practice of freely floating exchange rates. His close friend George Stigler explained, "As is customary in science, he did not win a full victory, in part because research was directed along different lines by the theory of rational expectations, a newer approach developed by Robert Lucas, also at the University of Chicago."^[39]

Friedman was also known for his work on the consumption function, the permanent income hypothesis (1957), which Friedman himself referred to as his best scientific work.^[40] This work contended that rational consumers would spend a proportional amount of what they perceived to be their permanent income. Windfall gains would mostly be saved. Tax reductions likewise, as rational consumers would predict that taxes would have to increase later to balance public finances. Other important contributions include his critique of the Phillips curve and the concept of the natural rate of unemployment (1968). This critique associated his name, together with that of Edmund Phelps, with the insight that a government that brings about greater inflation cannot permanently reduce unemployment by doing so. Unemployment may be temporarily lower, if the inflation is a surprise, but in the long run unemployment will be determined by the frictions and imperfections of the labor market.

Friedman's essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953) provided the epistemological pattern for his own subsequent research and to a degree that of the Chicago School. There he argued that economics as science should be free of value judgments for it to be objective. Moreover, a useful economic theory should be judged not by its descriptive realism but by its simplicity and fruitfulness as an engine of prediction. That is, students should measure the accuracy of its predictions, rather than the "soundness of its assumptions. His argument was part of an ongoing debate among such statisticians as Jerzy Neyman, Leonard Savage, and Ronald Fisher.^[41]

Statistics[link]

One of his most famous contributions to statistics is sequential sampling. "Friedman did statistical work at the Division of War Research at Columbia. He and his colleagues came up with a sampling technique, known as sequential sampling, which became, in the words of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 'the standard analysis of quality control inspection.' The dictionary adds: 'Like many of Friedman’s contributions, in retrospect it seems remarkably simple and obvious to apply basic economic ideas to quality control; that however is a measure of his genius.'"^[42]

Public policy positions[link]

Federal reserve[link]

Friedman believed that if the money supply was to be centrally controlled (as by the Federal Reserve) that the preferable way to do it would be with a mechanical system that would keep the quantity of money increasing at a steady rate. However, instead of government involvement at all, he was open to a "real," non-government, gold standard where money is produced by the private market: "A real gold standard is thoroughly consistent with [classical] liberal principles and I, for one, am entirely in favor of measures promoting its development." He did however add this caveat, "Let me emphasize that this note is not a plea for a return to a gold standard.... I regard a return to a gold standard as neither desirable nor feasible—with the one exception that it might become feasible if the doomsday predictions of hyperinflation under our present system should prove correct."^[43] He said the reason that it was not feasible was because "there is essentially no government in the world that is willing to surrender control over its domestic monetary policy." However, it could be done if "you could re-establish a world in which government's budget accounted for 10 percent of the national income, in which laissez-faire reigned, in which governments did not interfere with economic activities and in which full employment policies had been relegated to the dustbin..."^[43]

He was critical of the Federal Reserve's influence on the economics profession. In a 1993 letter to University of Texas economics professor and former House Banking Committee investigator Robert Auerbach, Friedman wrote:

I cannot disagree with you that having something like 500 economists is extremely unhealthy. As you say, it is not conducive to independent, objective research. You and I know there has been censorship of the material published. Equally important, the location of the economists in the Federal Reserve has had a significant influence on the kind of research they do, biasing that research toward noncontroversial technical papers on method as opposed to substantive papers on policy and results.^[44]

School choice[link]

In his 1955 article "The Role of Government in Education" Friedman proposed supplementing publicly operated schools with privately run but publicly funded schools through a system of school vouchers.^[45] Reforms similar to those proposed in the article were implemented in, for example, Chile in 1981 and Sweden in 1992.^[46] In 1996 Friedman, together with his wife, founded the The Foundation for Educational Choice to advocate school choice and vouchers.

Conscription[link]

Milton Friedman was a major proponent of a volunteer military, stating that the draft was "inconsistent with a free society."^[47][48] In Capitalism and Freedom, he argued that conscription is inequitable and arbitrary, preventing young men from shaping their lives as they see fit.^[49] During the Nixon administration he headed the committee to research a conversion to paid/volunteer armed force. He would later state that his role in eliminating the conscription in the United States was his proudest accomplishment.^[9] Friedman did, however, believe a nation could compel military training as a reserve in case of war time.^[49]

Libertarianism and the Republican party[link]

He served as a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board during 1981. During 1988, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science. He said that he was a libertarian philosophically, but a member of the U.S. Republican Party for the sake of "expediency" ("I am a libertarian with a small 'l' and a Republican with a capital 'R.' And I am a Republican with a capital 'R' on grounds of expediency, not on principle.") But, he said, "I think the term classical liberal is also equally applicable. I don't really care very much what I'm called. I'm much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas, rather than the person."^[50]

Public goods and monopoly[link]

Friedman was supportive of the state provision of some public goods that private businesses are not considered as being able to provide. However, he argued that many of the services performed by government could be performed better by the private sector. Above all, if some public goods are provided by the state, he believed that they should not be a legal monopoly where private competition is prohibited; for example, he wrote:

There is no way to justify our present public monopoly of the post office. It may be argued that the carrying of mail is a technical monopoly and that a government monopoly is the least of evils. Along these lines, one could perhaps justify a government post office, but not the present law, which makes it illegal for anybody else to carry the mail. If the delivery of mail is a technical monopoly, no one else will be able to succeed in competition with the government. If it is not, there is no reason why the government should be engaged in it. The only way to find out is to leave other people free to enter.

—Milton Friedman, Friedman, Milton & Rose D. Capitalism and Freedom, University of Chicago Press, 1982, 29

Welfare[link]

Friedman made newspaper headlines by proposing a negative income tax to replace the existing welfare system, and then opposing a bill to implement it because the bill proposed to supplement the existing system rather than replace it.

Drugs[link]

Friedman also supported libertarian policies such as legalization of drugs and prostitution. During 2005, Friedman and more than 500 other economists advocated discussions regarding the economic benefits of the legalization of marijuana.^[51]

Economic freedom[link]

Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute and Friedman hosted a series of conferences from 1986 to 1994. The goal was to create a clear definition of economic freedom and a method for measuring it. Eventually this resulted in the first report on worldwide economic freedom, Economic Freedom in the World. This annual report has since provided data for numerous peer-reviewed studies and has influenced policy in several nations.

Along with sixteen other distinguished economists he opposed the Copyright Term Extension Act and filed an amicus brief in Eldred v. Ashcroft.^[52] He supported the inclusion of the word "no-brainer" in the brief.^[53]

Friedman argued for stronger basic legal (constitutional) protection of economic rights and freedoms in order to further promote industrial-commercial growth and prosperity and buttress democracy and freedom and the rule of law generally in society.^[54]

Honors, recognition, and influence[link]

Friedman allowed the Cato Institute to use his name for its biannual Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty beginning in 2001. A Friedman Prize was given to the late British economist Peter Bauer during 2002, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto during 2004, Mart Laar, former Estonian Prime Minister during 2006 and a young Venezuelan student Yon Goicoechea during 2008. His wife Rose, sister of Aaron Director, with whom he initiated the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, served on the international selection committee. Friedman was also a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Hong Kong[link]

Friedman once said, "If you want to see capitalism in action, go to Hong Kong."^[55] He wrote in 1990 that the Hong Kong economy was perhaps the best example of a free market economy.^[56]

One month before his death, he wrote the article "Hong Kong Wrong – What would Cowperthwaite say?" in the Wall Street Journal, criticizing Donald Tsang, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, for abandoning "positive noninterventionism."^[57] Tsang later said he was merely changing the slogan to "big market, small government," where small government is defined as less than 20% of GDP. In a debate between Tsang and his rival, Alan Leong, before the 2007 Chief Executive election, Leong introduced the topic and jokingly accused Tsang of angering Friedman to death.

Chile[link]

During 1975, two years after the military coup that ended the government of Salvador Allende, the economy of Chile experienced a severe crisis. Friedman accepted the invitation of a private foundation to visit Chile and speak on principles of economic freedom. He spent seven days in Chile giving a series of lectures. One of the lectures was entitled "The Fragility of Freedom," and according to Friedman, "dealt with precisely the threat to freedom from a centralized military government."^[58] Friedman encapsulated his philosophy in a lecture at Universidad Católica de Chile, saying: "free markets would undermine political centralization and political control."^[59]

Friedman also met with military dictator President Augusto Pinochet during his visit. He never served as an adviser to the Chilean government, but did write a letter to Pinochet outlining what Friedman considered the two key economic problems of Chile. The letter listed a series of monetary and fiscal measures deemed a "shock program" to end hyperinflation and promote a market economy.^[60] His letter suggested (among other, more specific prescriptions) that a brief period of cutting government spending would reduce its fiscal deficit and thus reduce the rate of increase of the quantity of money in the country that was driving inflation. The economist did however admit his knowledge of Chile was "too limited to enable [him] to be precise or comprehensive" and that the measures he outlined were "to be taken as illustrative."^[60] Friedman felt that there might be a brief period ("measured in months") of higher unemployment, followed by recovery once inflation was tamed. His letter also suggested that cutting spending to reduce the fiscal deficit would result in less transitional unemployment than raising taxes to do so. Later, Friedman said he believed that market reforms would undermine Pinochet.^[61] Chilean graduates of the Chicago School of Economics and its new local chapters had been appointed to important positions in the new government soon after the coup, which allowed them to advise Pinochet on economic policies in accord with the School's economic doctrine.

According to his critics, Friedman did not criticize Pinochet's dictatorship at the time, nor the assassinations, illegal imprisonments, torture, or other atrocities that were well known by then.^[62] In his 1980 documentary Free to Choose, he said the following: "Chile is not a politically free system, and I do not condone the system. But the people there are freer than the people in Communist societies because government plays a smaller role. ... The conditions of the people in the past few years has been getting better and not worse. They would be still better to get rid of the junta and to be able to have a free democratic system."^[63][64] In 1984 Friedman stated that he has "never refrained from criticizing the political system in Chile."^[58]

Friedman defended his activity in Chile on the grounds that, in his opinion, the adoption of free market policies not only improved the economic situation of Chile but also contributed to the amelioration of Pinochet's rule and to the eventual transition to a democratic government during 1990. That idea is included in Capitalism and Freedom, in which he declared that economic freedom is not only desirable in itself but is also a necessary condition for political freedom. He stressed that the lectures he gave in Chile were the same lectures he later gave in China and other socialist states.^[65] During the 2000 PBS documentary The Commanding Heights (based on the book), Friedman continued to argue that criticism over his role in Chile missed his main contention that freer markets resulted in freer people, and that Chile's unfree economy had caused the military government. Friedman suggested that the economic liberalization he advocated caused the end of military rule and a free Chile.^[66]

Iceland[link]

Friedman visited Iceland during the autumn of 1984, met with important Icelanders and gave a lecture at the University of Iceland on the "tyranny of the status quo." He participated in a lively television debate on August 31, 1984 with socialist intellectuals, including Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who later became the president of Iceland.^[67] When they complained that a fee was charged for attending his lecture at the University and that hitherto, lectures by visiting scholars had been free-of-charge, Friedman replied that previous lectures had not been free-of-charge in a meaningful sense: Lectures always have related costs. What mattered was whether attendees or non-attendees covered those costs. Friedman thought that it was fairer that only those who attended paid. In this discussion Friedman also stated that he did not receive any money for delivering that lecture.

Estonia[link]

Although Friedman never visited Estonia, his book Free to Choose exercised a great influence on that nation's then 32-year-old prime minister, Mart Laar, who has claimed that it was the only book on economics he had read before taking office. Laar's reforms are often credited with responsibility for transforming Estonia from an impoverished Soviet Republic to the "Baltic Tiger." A prime element of Laar's program was introduction of the flat tax. Laar won the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, awarded by the Cato Institute.^[68]

United Kingdom[link]

Milton Friedman influenced the thinking of Alan Walters and Patrick Minford, two of Margaret Thatcher's main macroeconomic advisers. See the book Margaret Thatcher's Revolution: How it Happened and What it Meant, edited by Subroto Roy & John Clarke, Continuum 2005

Criticism[link]

Keynesian criticism[link]

During the financial crisis of 2007–2010, several Keynesian economists such as James Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz blamed the free market philosophy of Friedman and the Chicago school for the economic turmoil.^[69]

After Friedman's death in 2006, Keynesian Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, praised Friedman as a "great economist and a great man," but criticized him by writing that "he slipped all too easily into claiming both that markets always work and that only markets work. It's extremely hard to find cases in which Friedman acknowledged the possibility that markets could go wrong, or that government intervention could serve a useful purpose."^[70]

Austrian school criticism[link]

In 1971, libertarian economist Murray Rothbard criticized Friedman's efforts to make the government more efficient as detrimental to individual liberty, concluding "...as we examine Milton Friedman’s credentials to be the leader of free-market economics, we arrive at the chilling conclusion that it is difficult to consider him a free-market economist at all."^[71] Friedman's position on governmental control of money changed since 1971 when this criticism was made.^[72] In a 1995 interview in Reason magazine he said the "difference between me and people like Murray Rothbard is that, though I want to know what my ideal is, I think I also have to be willing to discuss changes that are less than ideal so long as they point me in that direction." He said he actually would "like to abolish the Fed," and points out that when he has written about the Fed it is simply his recommendations of how it should be run given that it exists.^[9]

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Other criticism[link]

In her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, journalist and author Naomi Klein criticized Friedman's ideology and the principles that guided the economic restructuring that followed the military coups in countries such as Chile and Indonesia, drawing analogies between the way that Friedman proposed using the social "shock" of the coups to create an economic "blank slate" with Ewen Cameron's controversial medical experiments that used electroshock therapy to create a mental "blank slate" in patients with mental disorders.^[73] Based on the extent to which the application of neoliberal policies has contributed to income disparities and inequality,^[74] both Klein and Noam Chomsky have suggested that the primary role of neoliberalism was as an ideological cover for capital accumulation by multinational corporations.^[75] Chilean economist Orlando Letelier asserted that Pinochet's dictatorship resorted to oppression because of popular opposition to Chicago School policies in Chile.^[76] Klein's book has been criticized. In the October 2008 issue of Reason magazine, Swedish historian Johan Norberg called her book a "disastrous ... polemic" and criticized the book as exaggerating some facts and ignoring others, subjecting Friedman to "the most malevolent distortions of a thinker's ideas in recent history." Norberg states that "Friedman's view was the opposite of what Klein claims" and "twists [the] relationship [between Friedman and Pinochet's regime] beyond recognition," concluding that "Klein is dead wrong about Friedman."^[77] Tom Redburn wrote that Klein "accuses Friedman of being the godfather of a Mafia-like gang", stated that "her argument constantly overreaches because her goal is not really to tame capitalism so much as to taunt it", and that Klein is "blind to the necessary role of entrepreneurial capitalism in overcoming the inherent tendency of any established social system to lapse into stagnation."^[78]

Personal life[link]

According to a 2007 article in Commentary magazine, his "parents were moderately observant [Jews], but Friedman, after an intense burst of childhood piety, rejected religion altogether."^[79] He described himself as an agnostic.^[80]

Friedman wrote extensively of his life and experiences, especially in 1998 in his memoirs with his wife Rose, titled Two Lucky People. He died of heart failure at the age of 94 years in San Francisco on November 16, 2006.^[81][82] He was survived by his wife (who died on August 18, 2009) and their two children, David, who is a philosopher and anarcho-capitalist economist, and Janet. David's son, Patri Friedman, is the executive director of the Seasteading Institute.^[83]

See also[link]

liberalism portal

• Works of Milton Friedman
• Friedman–Savage utility function
• Friedman rule
• Friedman's k-percent rule
• Friedman test
• List of economists
• List of Jewish Nobel laureates
• List of notable Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
• History of economic thought

Notes[link]

Bibliography[link]

References[link]

• Bernanke, Ben (2004), Essays on the Great Depression, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-11820-5 
• Butler, Eamonn. Milton Friedman (Harriman Economic Essentials) (2011)
• Ebenstein, Alan O. Milton Friedman: a biography (2007)
• Friedman, Milton (1999), Two Lucky People: Memoirs, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-26415-7 
• Wood, John Cunningham, and Ronald N. Wood, ed. (1990) Milton Friedman: Critical Assessments, v. 3. Scroll to chapter-preview links. Routledge.

Further reading[link]

• Friedman, Milton (1948). "A Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability," American Economic Review, 38(3), pp. 245-264. Also in Friedman (1953), pp. 133–56.
• Friedman, Milton (1953). Essays in Positive Economics, University of Chicago Press. Chapter- preview links.
• Friedman, Milton (1959). A Program for Monetary Stability. Fordham University Press. New York. TOC chapter-preview links.
• Friedman, Milton (1963). A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00354-8. 
• "The Role of Monetary Policy." American Economic Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Mar., 1968), pp. 1–17 JSTOR presidential address to American Economics Association
• Ebenstein, Lanny (January 23, 2007). Milton Friedman: A Biography. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-7627-9. 
• Enlow, Robert (September 25, 2006). Liberty & Learning: Milton Friedman's Voucher Idea at Fifty. Cato Institute. ISBN 1-930865-86-4. 
• Friedman, Milton (November 15, 2002). Capitalism and Freedom. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-26421-1. 
• Friedman, Milton (November 26, 1990). Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. Harvest Books. ISBN 0-15-633460-7. 
• Friedman, Milton (February 1, 2008). Milton Friedman on Economics: Selected Papers. University of Chicago Press Journals. ISBN 0-226-26349-5. 

External links[link]