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Maha Rafi Atal

Dr Maha Rafi Atal is an academic researcher working at the intersection of business and international affairs, focusing on how multinational corporations acquire political power, how they exercise it, and how they can be held accountable. She is the Adam Smith Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Political Economy at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of When Companies Rule: Corporate Power from the East India Company to Silicon Valley (Columbia University Press, 2026). Maha is also an award-winning business journalist, and an advisor to nonprofits and public bodies working to hold corporations accountable.
Democracy

The Chicago School Abandoned the Positive Freedom of Adam Smith and the Founding Fathers

Maha Rafi Atal
Adam Smith’s theory of political economy did not begin with the isolated individual but rather the individual who operates to earn the respect of others. Wealth and freedom grew from these relationships and engaging with others to create a free society, or what 20th century philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s would call positive freedom. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the Chicago School abandoned this aspect of freedom in preference of the isolated individual, which in turn produced a weaker concept of freedom, morality, and society that has stifled the cultivation of all three in the United States, writes Maha Rafi Atal.

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