1. Deirdre McCloskey treated him as an adversary.
2. I cannot think of any other Nobel Laureate who produced anything as significant after winning the Nobel Prize as Violence and Social Orders (My most recent essay about that book is here, and more links to my use of his framework can be Googled), or even come close.
Tyler Cowen has more.
Do you know if North had a reaction to that essay?
It seems to me that North, filtered through McCloskey is a most powerful and accurately descriptive paradigm through which to approach the modern world.
Dear Tyler:
I did not treat Doug, whom I have known and have loved since 1967, as an “enemy.” That is a strange way to characterize my scientific criticism of his views on so-called “institutions.” I merely think Doug was, and the many folk who accept his views, mistaken. Briefly, the new orthodoxy about institutions “mattering” (as people usually put it) ignores human ethics and language, reverts without admitting it to a conventional Samuelsonian Max U framework, is strikingly inconsistent with historical evidence, mixes static efficiency with dynamic discovery, never offers quantitative oomph, and retreats to tautology and personal abuse when challenged. It shares such features with psychoanalysis and Marxism and the more dogmatic expressions of Samuelsonian economics. I don’t make such arguments against the new dogma out of some strange animus against one of the most amiable members of our profession, no more than did, say, the rare American geologist before 1965 who advocated for moving continents. I make arguments, as I know you do in your own work, because I believe them to be (probably, with an open mind) true. One can assess my reasons for thinking so by reading pp. 296-354 of Bourgeois Dignity (2010), or earlier this year a paper in the Journal of Institutional Economics and a subsequent debate with Greif, Mokyr, Langlois, and others in reaction, or in the forthcoming volume 3 of the trilogy, out in April: Bourgeois Equality. It is silly and unfair to characterize a serious scientific disagreement as “treating Doug like an enemy.” Doug would never have done so.
Regards,
Deirdre
“Adversary” does not necessarily equal “enemy.” In fact, if two “intellectual adversaries” feel that their arguments are in good faith (especially, if they think that in “the free market of ideas,” the truth eventually wins out), they may even be friends.