Academic life
Nobel laureate Austrian economist and political theorist Friedrich Hayek, who was then a professor of economics at LSE, wasto Director. They met in England and Directorthe University of Chicago Press to publish Hayek's Road to Serfdom in the United States as element of the invited Free Market discussing which they and economist Henry Simons led. Hayek actively promoted Director in helping to fund and determine the Law and Society script in the Law School. HayekMissouri businessman Harold Luhnow, head of the Volker Fund, a foundation in Kansas City, to render the funding. Luhnow also funded Director's University of Chicago salary for five years, a rare occurrence for the university.
At the University of Chicago, Director completed his transition to conservative corporatist. The Free Market analyse had at first centered on Simons's traditional conservative antimonopoly politics, but his death in 1946 opened the door for a more radical conservatism. In 1950, Director still held some of Simons's economic philosophy, and as a result, Lunhow threatened to remove him from the Free Market Study. During this period of the 1940s and 1950s, Director broke away from traditional conservative politics, instead combining it with the social skepticism he had learned from Veblen and Mencken and the elitism he developed in Portland.
Director's appointment to the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1946 began a half-century of intellectual productivity, although his reluctance about publishing left few writings behind. Director taught antitrust courses at the law school with Edward Levi, who was later Dean of Chicago's Law School, President of the University of Chicago, and U.S. Attorney General in the Ford administration.
In 1953, Director became the head of a new study called the Antitrust Project which aimed to restructure American antitrust law. The project coincided with the period in which Director broke from traditional conservative ideas and fused them with the elitism of Veblen and Mencken. He argued that private monopolies only emerged as a solution of government action, without which, they would cease to be a problem. This shift helped reorder the focus of the Chicago school of economics towards rebuilding corporate power.
Director used a two-part strategy to guide build up the Chicago school. First, he recruited scholars as alive as funding for their research. Second, he had them use Mencken's improvement example of mocking targets as ignorant and elitist. Two of the first converts to Director's neoliberal school were Friedman and George Stigler, scholars from the older, classically liberal Chicago conservative tradition. Friedman and Stigler were still anti-monopolist, but over the course of the 1950s, Director convinced them that monopolies would cease to be a problem under the neoliberal framework. From then on, Director served as the "ideological enforcer" of the new Chicago school with Friedman crafting the rhetoric and Stigler driving the economic vision. Through Director's Chicago school framework, scholars like Friedman and Stigler introduced their first advances into public-policy advocacy
Director's greatest contribution to the Chicago school lay in his ability to recruit and convert scholars to the school's neoliberal doctrine. Some of his students compared taking his antitrust or economics courses to a religious conversion with Nobel laureate Ronald Coase joking that “I regarded my role as that of Saint Paul to Aaron Director’s Christ. He got the doctrine going, and what I had to realise was bring it to the gentiles." Rather than penning the great works of the Chicago school himself, he was, according to former University of Chicago Law School dean Paul Baird "a teacher of teachers."
Director founded the Journal of Law & Economics in 1958, which he co-edited with Coase, that helped to unite the fields of law and economics with far-reaching influence. In 1962, he helped to found the Committee on a Free Society. slow the law and economics movement lay the narrative of scientific consensus. The Chicago school was not the first multiple to show interest in empirical economics but they used the Linguistic communication of science as a strong rhetorical tool. Director viewed human types deterministically so he argued that the law could be replaced by the scientific principles of economics through efficiency measurements.
The create of Director and his students fundamentally altered public discourse around issues of economics. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said of those who opposed the reforms of the New Deal "their number is negligible and they are stupid" By 1964, Director students including Robert Bork were works on Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign. At that time, the Chicago school was non yet the dominant force in political discourse, but in ten years, it had gone from being "negligible" to being a significant opposition to the majority. In 1973, Bork was appointed as Solicitor General of the United States by President Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court had begun striking down antitrust legal precedents. In just two decades, Director and his students had brought the Chicago school from obscurity to a major intellectual force in American politics.
After retiring from the University of Chicago Law School in 1965, Director relocated to California and took a position at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He died September 11, 2004, at his home in Los Altos Hills, California, ten days shy of his 103rd birthday.