Marshall Sahlins, an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, shows you how not to argue your case. Let’s take it slowly, line by line.

“The University of Chicago has announced the establishment of a multimillion-dollar Milton Friedman Institute for the study of economy and society on prime real estate it has acquired for that purpose adjacent to the central campus. The projected cost of the institute is $140- to $200-million, to be financed largely and directly by private donations — indeed, donors who contribute a million or more will thereby be qualified to participate in its academic deliberations. Why not also a Louis Farrakhan Center for Religious Studies? Or a Friedrich Engels Institute for Political Science? [What's the problem with this opening paragraph? Well, there are many, and SOS will point them out. But the underlying problem is emotionality. From his retirement heath, Lear rages. Wants to be in the thick of things; wants to regain the throne. Passion's still there, but no perch... You don't want, in your first paragraph, to be dismissed as a pissed ex-potentate. But look what he's done. He's decided that a very clever way to start is to compare a Jewish Nobel prize winning economist to an anti-semitic crank. And then to a Marxist. Marxist? Why not Marx himself? Why make it the Engels Institute? Because like Farrakhan, Engels wasn't only an extremist; he was a second-rate intellect. Marx was the first-rater. Similarly, Friedman's a second-rate intellect, suggests the writer, plus an extremist.... As for big donors having something to do with its intellectual direction -- note the vague language here. Everything depends on precisely what that involvement entails.]

Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who died in 2006 after a long career at the university, was known for his radical laissez-faire approach to society and the economy. Of course, to many observers at home and abroad, the establishment of a monumental institute named after Friedman and directly subsidized by private funds, [SOS has cautioned you before about the use of Of course. You want to be careful with it, since in many contexts -- like this one -- it comes across haughty, nonchalant, lazy: Of course all right-thinking people think... The writer hopes his reader will be intimidated by this move... That his reader will think Oh! Well, if it's that obvious, I guess I'm an idiot for thinking otherwise... ] will brand the University of Chicago as an academic instrument of a certain ideology. It will make the university party to an extremist version of liberal capitalism that has proven to serve the welfare of the ruling elite in a number of countries at the cost of whom it may concern — notably the society in general and the poor in particular. [Horrible, horrible writing. Put aside the polemical content -- the question of why a venerable university with a broad and deep intellectual mandate will be "party" to extremism because of an institute on its campus -- and just look at how his vague words - society, ideology, elite - muddy rather than clarify things. Where's his argument?]

Does the university expect us to “disappear” the memory of the Friedman-trained Chicago Boys, who supplied the economic programs for the draconian regimes of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the generals in Argentina? The sacrificial reduction of social values to monetary calculations is the essence of Friedman economics, and helps explain its historic taint as the complement of state terror. Not long before he was assassinated in Washington by Pinochet’s agents, Orlando Letelier, ambassador of the deposed Salvador Allende government, wrote that the Chicago Boys “convinced the generals that they were prepared to supplement the brutality which the military possessed, with the intellectual assets it lacked.” [Note the classy argumentative style which pretty much accuses Chicago-trained economists of throwing dissidents out of airplanes.]

Hence the many ironies in the promoters’ defense of the Milton Friedman Institute on the grounds of freedom — whether academic freedom, individual freedom, or free enterprise. Their brand of academic freedom is likewise a recipe for tyranny, since it would consist mainly of their ability to dominate the academy by virtue of the assets in cash and clout they command in the larger society. [Larger society a vile cliche. And right-wing money for sure dominates the academy. That's why there are so many right-wing professors. Plus right-wing means tyranny... If a freshman writing student at GW offered this level of prose and analysis, SOS would be surprised.] The Milton Friedman Institute will provide the rich and powerful with the best self-promoting ideas their money can buy. For its part, the university will be compromised by this commodification of knowledge in which a certain orthodoxy about free markets and self-serving individualism easily proves to be the highest bidder. [The final clause - easily proves to be the highest bidder - is rather confusing, but put that aside. This is cliche-ridden political blahblah. What's needed is a much cooler head, and much more description and analysis of Chicago-school ideas in themselves.]

In fact, neither markets nor individualism of this sort are present in the majority of societies known to history and anthropology — even as the study of these societies provides an understanding of our own family existence, where the relations between goods are likewise governed by the relations between persons. Yet along with much else, such understandings of economy and society are destined to be buried by the behemoth Friedman Institute, whose so-called scientific work, in the tradition of the Chicago Boys, is committed to the elimination of all such alternative forms of the human condition. [Very ugly and confusing writing. Since he hasn't specified what sort of markets and individualism Friedman-inspired economics champions, it's difficult for us to understand, let alone agree, when the writer tells us how weirdly unknown such arrangements are. The logic of the first sentence, furthermore, isn't clear. What's the function of the phrase "even as" in it? How does the second element of the sentence it introduces relate to the first? The introduction of the word "Yet" compounds our confusion. Where are we going here? Why these transitional words and phrases? And never -- almost never? -- use so-called. Unless sneering juvenility is what you're aiming for.] As the founding proposal of the institute reads:

“Following Friedman’s lead, the design and evaluation of economic policy requires analyses that respect the incentives of individuals and the essential role of markets in allocating goods and services. As Friedman and others continually demonstrated, design of public policy without regard to market alternatives has adverse social consequences.” Such is the argument for privatizing the school system, Social Security, national parks, and electrical contracting on U.S. military bases in Iraq. [See how the writer has revealed himself as having rather, er, uncompromising views? Many forms of privatization strike many reasonable Americans as, well, reasonable. But from the beginning of this essay, in which the writer complains repeatedly about private money as a factor of any significance in American universities, it's been clear that we've got a distinctly un-mainstream enemy of capitalism on our hands. No wonder he's so angry.]

So why not outsource the university as well by submitting its research to the care of private, profit-driven interests? [He's in full-cry now. No one bitches more than UD about the corrupting influences of some forms of private money in the university; but Sahlins brings no nuance to the subject at all.] Edward A. Snyder, dean of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, which will participate in the Friedman institute, predicts it will prove highly attractive to donors as well as scholars because of its association with libertarian theories that have helped spread governments based on capitalism. Friedman’s name on the institution will be critical because “when you think about the battle between socialism and free markets — he led the charge on behalf of the University of Chicago,” Snyder said. “There will be a lot of people who will give back because of his name and effort and legacy.” Especially donors of $1-million or $2-million, whose membership in the Milton Friedman Society will entitle them to participate in workshops, seminars, and lectures on what the university terms “fundamental questions” of economics, business, and law, as well as the implications for related disciplines such as medicine and public policy. [So that's the big scary involvement of donors -- They can go to seminars.]

The Friedman institute will thus include an exclusive rich-man’s club of millionaire members entitled to special academic privileges. [What a whopping thus! And aren't there any evil women involved? But that would block his rich-man cliche.] That sort of participation of the wealthy is discriminatory, and perhaps the most obvious clue to the ideology behind the promoters’ assurances of free empirical inquiry. Note, too, that in covering so much disciplinary ground, the project of putting the intellectual order of the university on a sound footing of capitalist theory is as hegemonic as the military takeover of some Latin American republic. [Goddamn them for covering so much disciplinary ground! Why don't they specialize in their own little evil... And did anyone say hyperbole? This institute is the first step in a campaign that won't end until Hyde Park is Paraguay!... No. Not Paraguay. They just elected a democratic president... Lemme think... ]

Indeed, given its aims and scope, the Milton Friedman Institute would be the vanguard of an intellectual coup d’état in the academy of the same nature as the one the Chicago Boys helped pull off in Latin America. [Last paragraph. Lets it all out.] The two projects come down to one and the same, insofar as the Friedman institute is analogously devoted to making the university safe for free enterprise. [Really needs to work on his writing. The phrase safe for free enterprise is unlikely to upset, let alone mobilize, many people.] By rendering the production of knowledge dependent on the highest financial bidders, the institute would literally transform the university into a free market in ideas [Again, I see what he's getting at, but he needs to come up with a scarier formulation than free market in ideas, doesn't he?] — wherein those ideas backed by the most capital will be the most true. That is not intellectual diversity but academic perversity because it fundamentally subverts the disinterested pursuit and dissemination of knowledge for which universities were founded. [Note the pretentious, jargon-ridden mode of address.] Nor are such objections relevant only to the Milton Friedman Institute. They would apply equally to a George Soros Institute for the Study of Economy and Society, and as much to a Rabbi Schneerson as to a Louis Farrakhan Center for Religious Studies. [Really likes that Farrakhan thing. Forgot he already did it.... And the man has quite the, what, political imaginary... A place where all sorts of people -- Friedman, Engels, Farrakhan, Schneerson, Soros, are jumbled up... He's not exactly modeling intellectual clarity for his side. But, again, this is happening because he's so emotional. He's just furious. Displaying your fury hurts your case stylistically, as I've tried to show; but, coupled with a snobbish approach to the reader, it suggests that you cannot think straight because you're arrogantly outraged. And that is death to any argument. ] If we allow the university to be outsourced to extra-academic, partisan interests, it will become a money-based political economy of truth values.” [Final line, and, once again, his fondness for a narrow academic jargon weakens his case. Why write truth values? For most readers, this sounds like a good thing. This is a man wrapped up in his own world, unable or unwilling to grant reality, much less a modicum of legitimacy, to others.]

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Update: Jonathan Rees at More or Less Bunk has a thoughtful response to this scathe, and to the Sahlins piece. In it, he quotes Naomi Klein, object of a recent New Republic scathe. An excerpt from Jonathan Chait’s NR article about Klein:

Her ignorance of the American right is on bright display in one breathtaking sentence [in her recent book]:

‘Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think-tanks with which [Milton] Friedman had long associations–Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute–called itself “neoconservative,” a worldview that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda.’

Where to begin? First, neoconservative ideology dates not from the 1990s but from the 1960s, and the label came into widespread use in the 1970s. Second, while neoconservatism is highly congenial to corporate interests, it is distinctly less so than other forms of conservatism. The original neocons, unlike traditional conservatives, did not reject the New Deal. They favor what they now call “national greatness” over small government. And their foreign policy often collides head-on with corporate interests: neoconservatives favor saber-rattling in places such as China or the Middle East, where American corporations frown on political risk, and favor open relations and increased trade. Moreover, the Heritage Foundation has always had an uneasy relationship with neoconservatism. (Russell Kirk delivered a famous speech at the Heritage Foundation in which he declared that “not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.”) And the Cato Institute is not neoconservative at all. It was virulently opposed to the Iraq war in particular, and it opposes interventionism in foreign policy in general.

Finally, there is the central role that Klein imputes to her villain Friedman, both in this one glorious passage and throughout her book. In her telling, he is the intellectual guru of the shock doctrine, whose minions have carried out his corporatist agenda from Santiago to Baghdad. Klein calls the neocon movement “Friedmanite to the core,” and identifies the Iraq war as a “careful and faithful application of unrestrained Chicago School ideology” over which Friedman presided. What she does not mention–not once, not anywhere, in her book–is that Friedman argued against the Iraq war from the beginning, calling it an act of ‘aggression.’

It ought to be morbidly embarrassing for a writer to discover that the central character of her narrative turns out to oppose what she identifies as the apotheosis of his own movement. And Klein’s mistake exposes the deeper flaw of her thesis. Friedman opposed the war because he was a libertarian, and libertarian conservatism is not the same thing as neoconservatism. Nor are the interests of corporations always, or even usually, served by war…

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Another Update: Commentary and comments worth a look at Brad DeLong’s blog.