Keynes, Chicago and Friedman: A review essay

This paper is a review essay of Leeson, R. (Ed.), Keynes, Chicago and Friedman (2 volumes), Pickering and Chatto, London, 2003. These volumes contain a comprehensive collection of previously published papers, and also some interesting new materials, relating to the controversy about the accuracy of Milton Friedman's depiction of the “oral tradition” in monetary economics at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s. As such, the work is a notable addition to the scholarly literature. The broader issue raised by this collection is the precise relationship between Friedman's “monetarism” and the so‐called “Keynesian economics” of the neoclassical synthesis, and specifically, whether there was any real difference between them.