Faith & Spirit Quote by George Stigler

Stigler slips a small bomb into a polite sentence: curiosity is born not from textbooks but from having your “faith” broken. The key move is that he treats cliches not as harmless shortcuts but as something you can believe in - a kind of secular doctrine. “Destroyed” is the tell. It’s not the gentle disillusionment of learning nuance; it’s a deliberate demolition job carried out through conversation, with a named accomplice: Aaron Director, the famously catalytic figure around the University of Chicago’s mid-century intellectual scene.

The intent is partly autobiographical, but it’s also a manifesto for a certain style of economics. Stigler is framing serious inquiry as a process that begins when you stop repeating the profession’s comforting phrases about competition, regulation, monopoly, or “public interest,” and start noticing how those phrases function as moral cover. Director, an architect of law-and-economics thinking and a central node in Chicago’s network, stands in for the adversarial friend who refuses to let an argument rest on received wisdom.

The subtext is status as well as method. By crediting “discussions,” Stigler elevates the seminar and the back-and-forth over solitary genius; by naming Director, he signals lineage. This is how schools of thought reproduce themselves: not by slogans, but by training people to hear slogans as alarms. It also carries a quiet polemic: economics advances when it treats its own commonplaces with suspicion, even - especially - when they arrive wearing the respectable mask of “the subject.”