A private donor’s veto shaped the Mont Pèlerin Society’s founding membership

Evidence

Many of Hayek’s colleagues expressed concerns about the sources of funding for his proposed endeavor, and he was quick to reassure them that “no strings of any kind have been attached.” In return for the fi - nancial support, however, Luhnow did expect to have some say over who would be invited to make the transatlantic journey. When he saw the list of prospective invitees, he was quick to express his dis plea sure over names that he thought were insuffi ciently forceful in their defense of the market mechanism. “Frankly,” he wrote to Hayek in January 1947, “some of the reactions that I have had on one or two of your suggestions are such that I know the Directors of the Volker Charities Fund would not be interested in paying their travelling expenses anywhere.” Hayek quietly excised the most offensive names from a subsequent version of the list. The Volker Fund had successfully leveraged its fi nancial support to narrow the ideological horizons of the society Hayek was hoping to found. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 259

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the donor-ideological-filter dynamics described in ‘The Social Control of Impersonal Trust’ and in Milgrom’s show that institutions solve information problems — here the fund solves its own screening problem. — connects to: Corporate funding made the first Mont Pèlerin meeting financially possible — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 117; Big-business funders backing anticommunist causes also funded the Mont Pèlerin Society — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 972
• SEED: Contrarian angle: the ‘no strings attached’ founding myth of MPS vs. the Volker Fund’s actual vetting power over the invite list.

Broader Connections

• Corporate funding made the first Mont Pèlerin meeting financially possible #complicates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 117
• Big-business funders backing anticommunist causes also funded the Mont Pèlerin Society #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 972