Friedman’s Survival-Of-The-Fittest Argument: Neoliberalism and Social Darwinism

This article revisits Milton Friedman’s “selection‑of‑the‑fittest” argument as presented in his seminal 1953 essay The Methodology of Positive Economics (hereafter F53), foregrounding its largely neglected role in the intellectual history of neoliberalism. By tracing the genealogy of the selection argument—from Armen Alchian’s probabilistic natural‑selection model (1950) through Stephen Enke’s viability analysis to Friedman’s terse “as‑if” formulation—the paper demonstrates how evolutionary reasoning was mobilised to legitimize profit‑maximisation and competitive equilibrium. The article argues that Friedman’s evolutionary rhetoric, while acknowledging markets as artificial institutions, nevertheless reproduces a neo‑social Darwinist logic that frames competitive survival as evidence of rationality and progress. The concluding assessment contends that the selection argument functions less as a neutral methodological device and more as a covert normative instrument that sustains neoliberal market rationality, echoing the historic intertwining of naturalistic metaphors and political‑economic rationality.