The Knight-Ayres Correspondence: The Grounds of Knowledge and Social Action

Clarence Edwin Ayres (1891–1972) and Frank Hyneman Knight (1885–1972) were personal friends and professional adversaries during their entire adult lives. Their friendship enabled and survived their deep mutual criticism which, because directed at the jugular, had it been effective would have entailed the destruction of the intellectual basis of the other’s work. Each man had both abilities and inabilities to communicate with, not to say convince, the other. For most of their colleagues, their intellectual conflict was manifest in a celebrated exchange of views in Ethics in 1935.1 In part because of his great respect for the quality and stature of Knight’s work as a neoclassicist, Ayres frequently used the latter’s writings as a foil for his own ideas. For his part, Knight was sympathetic to the study of the problems which the institutionalists took as their province — although he was not certain that either he or they fully understood them — but was wary lest certain tendencies of institutionalism work to the disadvantage of his values and beliefs, which included those he felt necessary for a free society.2 Each man tended somewhat to respond to the other on the basis of stylized perceptions based in part upon fear or distrust of certain ideas, yet each endeavoured to understand the other’s intellectual system while trying primarily to convince the other of the greater sense of his own ideas.