Milton Friedman. Eamonn Butler

asked how he would wish to be remembered, Friedman said he hoped that his professional insights – permanent income, the natural rate of unemployment, the restatement of the quantity theory – would still be considered useful in years to come. “The true test of any scholar’s work”, he told Chitester, “is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the textbooks long after I am gone.”

      No doubt it will be. But Friedman will be remembered even more for taking on, almost alone, the overwhelming consensus of his times and spreading the ideas and institutions of personal and economic freedom across the greater part of the globe.