History-Making by the US Neoliberal: The Chicago School and the past and present of the ‘Ramseyer Affair’

• This paper examines the political and intellectual origins of “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War” by J. M. Ramseyer. The controversial article, which reduces the complex issues of colonialism and gender into a market efficiency, shares the assumption of the Law and Economics, a by-product of US neoliberalism. The movement to re-configure the relations between state and economy against the “New Deal” government introduced a dual strategy to persuade the public of its free-market ideology. First, following the idea of F. Hayek, it sought to lure intellectuals, or “secondhand dealers in idea”. The attempt resulted in the establishment of the Law and Economics, which evaluated not only economic institutions but also social ones in terms of economic efficiency. Second, led by M. Friedman, it constructed a revisionist history to validate the gospel of the free market. The campaign to capture the intellectuals and discourses on history was successful by the late 1970s. In the following decade, with the rise of the neoliberal movement, Law and Economics attracted promising graduate students to succeed in the tradition of the discipline. In this regard, Ramseyer applied the contention of the free market to Japan to challenge the traditional notion of the country’s economic growth. Then he expanded the assumption into the non-economic realm to contest the existing discourses regarding the sex slave during World War II.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Historia och arkeologi -- Historia (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- History and Archaeology -- History (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Idé- och lärdomshistoria

History of Sciences and Ideas

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)