I Moss on Stigler as a Historical Subject GEORGE JOSEPH STIGLER is an obvious subject target for historians of 20th-century economic thought. His Theory of Competitive Price (1942) helped shape development of microeconomics after World War II and his remarkable topics for analysis produced seminal contributions to important and rapidly growing fields such as economics of industrial organization, economics of regulation, public choice economics and economics of information. He was recognized for his contributions to economics, economics of information, by award of Nobel Prize in economics in 1982. Since Nobel Prize there has been an abundance of biographical and historical material about Stigler, including his own brief autobiography, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist (Stigler 1988a) and entry in Blaug's Who's Who in Economics (Blaug 1986). A useful bibliography of Stigler's writings has been prepared by Ms. Vicky M. Longawa and published in Journal of Political Economy (Longawa 1993). In this article we shall not try to reproduce all of this information. Also, we shall not try to touch on all aspects of his life and intellectual contribution. We must cover just a few of biographer's subject areas, hopefully in a novel way. Still, something extra does need to be introduced into any conversation about Stigler and his legacy. In 1989, Professor D. N. McCloskey recalled a conversation with Stigler that was especially eye opening to an associate professor [who was] beginning at last in 1978 to doubt epistemological claims of (McCloskey 2001:160). McCloskey (the colleague) recalled incident as follows: George was holding forth on merits of behaviorist theories of voting in which people are said to vote their pocketbooks. His younger colleague, who had just read Brian Barry's devastating attack on such models [1978] and for ten had been teaching first-year graduate students about small man in large market, following George's exposition in The Theory of Price, noted that people would be irrational to go to polls in any case. Since people were nuts to begin with, it would be strange if they voted their pocketbooks when they got inside booth. The argument struck a nerve, and Stigler became as was his custom abusively positivistic, declaring loudly that all that mattered were observable implications. (McCloskey 2001:160). As a result of this encounter and others with school economists in residence circa 1980, McCloskey concluded that Chicago's version of positivism had become a negative element in economics. Stigler was catalyst in purging McCloskey of his Chicago school methodology (McCloskey 2001). The McCloskey anecdote is a disturbing one and image it portrays of a stern, humorless taskmaster is not memory many others have of Stigler. I suppose some of material in this article can be said to set record straight and offer a more balanced and nuanced portrait of Stigler. Still, Warren Samuels recalls a Stigler who was the principal, but by no means sole, author of absolutist formulations of neoclassical doctrine (see below, section VIII). The collaborators on this piece include a family member, a Ph.D. candidate who wrote under Stigler, colleagues, co-authors and several of younger generation of historians of economic thought who offer appraisals of Stigler's influence both on profession and professional literature. But purpose of this article is not hagiography but to offer evidence for deeper interpretation and understanding. What emerges here is a much more interesting portrait of a justly famous economist. This is not to deny McCloskey's perception of a dogmatic school headed by a closed-minded Stigler, but against this perception we have Claire Friedland's recollection that in his later years Stigler began to consider possibility of legitimacy of gains obtained by special interest group legislation. …