Paul Krugman recently claimed this:

"Until John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment,
Interest, and Money in 1936, economics -- at least in the English-speaking
world -- was completely dominated by free-market orthodoxy."

The idea that British and American economists prior to Keynes, 1936 were
all essentially advocates of laissez faire ideology doesn't track with
my own understanding of the facts, but I'm not aware of any book or paper
which directly provides an ideological census of the economics profession,
say
in the period between 1890 and 1936.

It seems to me also that "free-market orthodoxy" is not a fixed Platonic
form, but rather is a contested category which has changed through time --
e.g.
the "free market" position on what constitutes a monopoly and how the
problem
of monopoly should be address has not been a fixed thing through time even
among "free market" economists.

In any case, some indication of the falsity of Krugman's claim might be
suggested by David Rockefeller's story about a list -- a short list -- which
Hayek kept in his pocket naming all of the still living believers in
classical
liberalism.  Rockefeller remembers Hayek more than once taking out that list
and striking off another name with the death of yet another "last believers"
in
classical liberalism. This was sometime in the 40s.  The fact that many of
these folks were dying makes it evident that the turn away from "free
market"
classical liberalism came well before the year 1936.

Is there any literature that directly takes on this issue -- the ideological
breakdown of the economics profession in the period between 1890 and 1936,
or the
laissez faire / anti-laissez faire trends among professional economists in
this
period?

Greg Ransom