I thank Joe Salerno for his lengthy and thoughtful reply (posted in the comments section to my earlier entry commenting on his review of Brian Doherty's book.

Joe and I agree that Doherty should not have treated Pete Boettke’s account of the Austrian revival as authoritative. Joe has another account, as do I, as do other participants. I haven’t taken a position on the accuracy of Pete’s account, nor have I objected to Joe’s substantive critique of it. I would have to study the history more closely first.

Now to our disagreements. In his comment, Joe writes: “I do however have two objections to White's second comment, regarding my alleged suggestion ‘that a change in Boettke’s perspective has been driven by the changing agenda of his department’s chief soft-money source.’ White completely misses the point of the second part of my review. I never suggested such a thing.”

Never suggested such a thing? Joe in his review wrote that, if one assembles facts scattered about Doherty’s account, “one can reasonably surmise that Boettke's intellectual volte-face was a rational and deliberate response to the shift in the strategic vision of the Kochs. As the orbit of "Planet Koch" goes, so go its satellites.” Silly me: I took these two sentences to be suggesting just such a thing. I took “one can reasonably surmise” to mean “I, Joe Salerno, offer as a reasonable surmise”. Joe now says that he himself “clearly remained agnostic on the accuracy of this interpretation.” I fear that Joe’s agnosticism was far from clear in his review. At least, I missed it.

So I’m glad that Joe has clarified his meaning. He’s not saying that Pete is a puppet of Kochthink. He really meant: “As a journalist, Doherty should have tried to explain Boettke’s intellectual volte-face, and in particular examined the hypothesis that it was a rational and deliberate response to a shift in the strategic vision of the Kochs. It is beyond the scope of this book review to take any position on this hypothesis.” (I would have no objection to such a statement being a “low blow”.)

Here’s an alternative hypothesis. The hermeneutic diversion (led by Don Lavoie) turned out to be a waste of time. (I voiced my concern that it would while it was going on. Pete used to refer my concern as “the White critique”: for graduate students in economics the opportunity cost of studying Gadamer exceeds the benefits.) That it failed to produce useful output gave Boettke (and the Kochs) good reason to decide to change course.

As a matter of Pete’s personal biography, my guess from talking to Pete would have been that the change in his outlook came from his year at the Hoover Institution, which awoke him to interesting debates going on among mainstream economists. The influence of Tyler Cowen on both Boettke and the GMU program more generally probably also figures in the story.

Finally, Joe says that, given that he “carefully engaged every one of Boettke's arguments,” he is “truly baffled by White's rhetorical question: ‘Does Salerno want a reader of his review to judge the argument on its merits, or does he want the reader to feel compelled to ask: who’s supporting Salerno, and what’s their agenda?’” Let me clarify: I wasn’t denying that Joe had substantively engaged Pete’s arguments. I was wondering why he had added what I took to be a low blow, namely calling Pete an intellectual “satellite” of the funders.