Mont Pelerin 1947: Transcripts of the Founding Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society.

• Author: Boettke, Peter J.

* Mont Pelerin 1947: Transcripts of the Founding Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society Edited by Bruce Caldwell Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2022. Pp. xxi, 222. $34.95 hardcover.

In the late 1930s, during the worldwide Great Depression and as the totalitarian threat loomed large, a group of scholars gathered in Paris to discuss the fate of liberalism in a world seemingly going mad. The Lippmann Colloquium was to be the start of an ongoing effort, in which F. A. Hayek and Lionel Robbins (who did not attend but also provided extensive comments on Walter Lippmann's manuscript) would play a significant role along with the now elder statesmen of the liberal cause such as Ludwig von Mises and Frank Knight (who was not there, but who--along with Henry Simons--had provided Lippmann with comments on his manuscript). However, these efforts never got off the ground due to World War II. The fate of liberalism and Western civilization weighed in the balance.

After the allies emerged victorious, the fate of liberalism still was unclear. Much work needed to be done to emerge from the ruins of the Great Depression and World War II, but now attention also needed to be paid to the Cold War and the Soviet superpower. In this context, F. A. Hayek hoped to get the band back together again. The attendees of the Lippmann Colloquium included the following: Raymond Aron, a French philosopher, sociologist, journalist, and political scientist; Auguste Detoeuf, a French economist; Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian and British economist and philosopher; Walter Lippmann, an American writer, reporter, and political commentator; Etienne Mantoux, a French economist; Robert Marjolin, a French economist and politician; Louis Marlio, a French economist; Ernest Mercier, a French industrialist; Ludwig von Mises, an Austro-Hungarian-born economist; Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian-British polymath; Stefan Thomas Possony, an Austro-Hungarian-born economist and military strategist; Wilhelm Ropke, a German economist; Louis Rougier, a French philosopher; Jacques RuefF, a French economist; and Alexander Riistow, a German sociologist and economist. Walter Eucken, a German economist, was invited but could not attend.

The group, which originally met in 1938, was divided between those interested in a full-throated defense of Manchester Liberalism or laissez-faire, and those who thought a middle ground could be steered between the "wooden" conception of laissez-faire and totalitarian control of the economic and political life, a more social market economy perspective. This division, as the transcripts reveal, picked up in 1947 where it left off in 1938.

After World War II, Hayek began efforts to reconvene the ongoing conversation that began in Paris--a conversation that he believed was essential both to the world of ideas and the world of practical affairs. Hayek, it is important to remember, had already written to friends such as Fritz Machlup that his greatest contribution to science, scholarship, and society was his "Abuse of Reason" project, which he started working on during the wartime 1940s. The Road to Serfdom (1944) emerged from that project, but so too did The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952). To say the fate of liberalism was on Hayek's mind would be an extreme understatement. Hayek was concerned that the thirty years of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II had destroyed the intellectual argument for liberalism among academics and intellectuals. Thus, the fate of liberalism, Hayek believed, turned on cultivating a constructive and creative conversation among the leading minds in the social sciences and humanities. It is important to stress that Hayek's original proposal was for this new society to be modeled on the British Academy, where only the elite of the elite were brought together to explore ideas through rigorous and unfettered discussion. Hayek's original list of invitees included only academics and writers, except for the Swiss organizer Albert...