Jennifer Burns is an associate professor of History at Stanford University. She is an historian of the twentieth century United States working at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history, with a particular interest in ideas about the state, markets, and capitalism and how these play out in policy and politics. Her most recent book, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), is the first full biography of the influential economist and political figure. Her first book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford, 2009), was an intellectual biography of the libertarian novelist Ayn Rand. In this lecture, Milton the last Conservative, Burns examines three lenses through which to understand Friedman: as a philosopher, an economist, and lastly as a person active in politics. Burns delves into each of these lenses, elucidating Friedman’s identity as a classical liberal who developed a new method of policy design that is compatible with classical liberal principles, his pivotal role in economics as the founder of monetarism and his reinterpretation of the Great Depression; and, finally, his work in the political sector serving as a critic and analyst of the Federal Reserve.