Abstract
In March of 1947, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek gathered a group of 39 participants from 10 different countries together at Mont Pèlerin, near Vevey in Switzerland. The idea was to create an informal network of scholars and politicians, who all shared a belief in liberalism and who all believed that freedom was under serious threat, either from socialism or from Keynesian ideas. The participants, who had been exclusively selected by Hayek, believed that not only had faith in the forces of a free-market economy been dealt a severe blow during the economic crises of the 1930s, but equally troubling, the wartime experiences of many Western countries had also convinced the political elites that central planning was a viable option. Democracies not only faced an external threat from communism, these liberals would argue, but also an existential one from the collectivist ideas of their own governing elites.1
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Notes
The Papers of the Mont Pèlerin Society are located at the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University (hereafter MPS Papers). On the Mont Pèlerin Society’s history, see R.M. Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pèlerin Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995);
Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion; Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012);
Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands; The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009);
Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009);
Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010);
Bernhard Walpen, Die offenen Feinde und ihre Gesellschaft: Eine hegemonietheoretische Studie zur Mont Pèlerin Society (Hamburg: VSA Verlag, 2004).
F.A. Hayek, “Address to the Mont Pèlerin Conference”, 1 April 1947, MPS Papers.
Jamie Peck, “Remaking laissez-faire”, Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008), p. 25.
Many of the participants had been the leading critics of John M. Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).
Milton Friedman’s expression, quoted from R.M. Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pèlerin Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), p. 203.
On Hayek’s view of the Fabian Society, see Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983 (London: Fontana Press, 1995), pp. 111–12.
F.A. Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism”, in George B. de Huszar (ed.), The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960), pp. 371–84.
F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1972 [1944]), pp. xiff. In this respect Hayek’s analysis was building upon his mentor, Ludwig von Mises.
Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2004 [1937]).
Carlo Mötteli, “The Regeneration of Liberalism”, Swiss Review of World Affairs 1 (November 1951), p. 29.
For a discussion of the role of neoliberal ideas in the larger conservative intellectual movement in the United States, see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, pp. 137ff., and Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement 1945–65 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002), pp. 39–54.
Quoted from R.M. Hartwell, A History of The Mont Pèlerin Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), p. 28.
See James C. van Hook, Rebuilding Germany; The Creation of the Social Market Economy, 1945–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
The ideas of the Social Market Economy are described by Alfred Müller-Armack himself in “The Social Market Economy as an Economic and Social Order”, Review of Social Economy 36.3 (1978), pp. 325–31.
See also Ralf Ptak, Vom Ordoliberalismus zur Sozialen Marktwirtschaft. Stationen des Neoliberalismus in Deutschland (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 2004),
Alan Peacock and Hans Willgerodt (eds), Germany’s Social Market Economy: Origins and Evolution (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989),
and Mark E. Spicka, Selling the Economic Miracle: Economic Reconstruction and Politics in West Germany, 1949–1957 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007).
Quoted from Alfred C. Mierzejewski, “Water in the desert? The Influence of Wilhelm Röpke on Ludwig Erhard and the Social Market Economy”, Review of Austrian Economy 19 (2006), pp. 275–87.
By 2005, The Mont Pèlerin Society had close personal ties to more than a hundred neoliberal think tanks across the globe. For a list of these, see Dieter Plehwe, Bernhard Walpen and Gisela Neunhöffer (eds), Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 48ff.
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Bjerre-Poulsen, N. (2014). The Mont Pèlerin Society and the Rise of a Postwar Classical Liberal Counter-Establishment. In: van Dongen, L., Roulin, S., Scott-Smith, G. (eds) Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388803_14
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