A private fund strategized placement of market advocates inside US academia

Evidence

Although support for this meeting was not inexpensive, it represented a very small subset of the fund’s bottom line. During the late 1940s and 1950s the fund was dispensing over $1 million per year, and its administrators used these resources to provide support to market advocates in a variety of ways. They underwrote the salaries of Mises at New York University and Hayek at the University of Chicago, providing institutional bases in America for the most prominent international opponents of governmental intervention. They supported a series of institutions that were designed to foster communication among academics and students who opposed economic planning, including the Free Market Study at the University of Chicago, a rotating series of summer conferences and academies, and Hayek’s proposed society. Through a committee of four affi liated readers— Murray Rothbard, Frank Meyer, Rose Wilder Lane, and George de Huszar— they also sought out individuals who published arguments that corresponded with their stated ideals. After performing careful analyses of prior publications, they would send unsolicited fi - nancial support as a source of encouragement for further writing and research. Building on Hayek’s insights about the relationship between ideas and po liti cal change, the fund’s administrators designed it to provide an institutional glue that would allow disparate sympathizers to coalesce in support of an unconventional worldview. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 258

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader literature on philanthropic funding of the neoliberal thought collective (e.g., Teles’ ‘The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement,’ O’Connor’s work on the neoliberal donor networks). — connects to: Neoliberal freedom-of-inquiry rhetoric was aimed at promoting their own market views within academia — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 122; Philanthropic funders controlled the political composition of academic advisory committees — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 756; Corporate funders now seek direct control over university faculty hiring. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 698 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle: the Volker Fund as venture capital for ideas — how a small 1940s philanthropy ‘seeded’ later Reaganomics through salary underwriting and unsolicited grants.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal freedom-of-inquiry rhetoric was aimed at promoting their own market views within academia #corroborates (0.88) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 122
• Philanthropic funders controlled the political composition of academic advisory committees #corroborates (0.82) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 756
• Corporate funders now seek direct control over university faculty hiring. #expands (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 698
• Industry groups rent university prestige to launder paid advocacy as academic scholarship #expands (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 573