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that greeted my wife's and my book Free to Choose, a direct lineal descendant of Capitalism and Freedom presenting the same basic philosophy and published in 1980. That book was reviewed by every major publication, frequently in a featured, lengthy review. It was not only partly reprinted in Book Digest, but also featured on the cover. Free to Choose sold some 400,000 hardcover copies in the U.S. in its first year, has been translated into twelve foreign languages, and was issued in early 1981 as a mass-market paperback. |
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The difference in reception of the two books cannot, we believe, be explained by a difference in quality. Indeed, the earlier book is the more philosophical and abstract, and hence more fundamental. Free to Choose, as we said in its Preface, has "more nuts and bolts, less theoretical framework." It complements, rather than replaces, Capitalism and Freedom. On a superficial level, the difference in reception can be attributed to the power of television. Free to Choose was based on and designed to accompany our PBS series of the same name, and there can be little doubt that the success of the TV series gave prominence to the book. |
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That explanation is superficial because the existence and success of the TV program itself is testimony to the change in the intellectual climate. We were never approached in the 1960s to do a TV series like Free to Choose. There would have been few if any sponsors for such a program. If, by any chance, such a program had been produced, there would have been no significant audience receptive to its views. No, the different reception of the later book and the success of the TV series are common consequences of the change in the climate of opinion. The ideas in our two books are still far from being in the intellectual mainstream, but they are now, at least, respectable in the intellectual community and very likely almost conventional among the broader public. |
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The change in the climate of opinion was not produced by this book or the many others, such as Hayek's Road to Serfdom and Constitution of Liberty, in the same philosophical tradition. For evidence of that, it is enough to point to the call for contributions to the symposium Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy issued by the editors of Commentary in |
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