American business money funded even the insular, anti-policy Mont Pèlerin Society.

Evidence

The Mont Pèlerin Society differed in important ways from the FEE and AEA, which sought to popularize free market economic ideas and to intervene in policy debates. By contrast, Friedrich Hayek, the founder of the MPS, wanted to create an organization that would serve as a space of free intellectual inquiry, where social scientists and expert thinkers devoted to the idea of the free market could meet to discuss and refine their thought. The remove of the MPS from the rough-and-tumble world of policy debate, as well as the central roles played by European, non-American intellectuals in the organization, might have seemed to make it an unlikely candidate for support from American businessmen. But the Society, along with the domestically oriented, partisan political think tanks, benefited from the active participation of the network of American business conservatives. This was most evident in the fund-raising drive for the first American meeting of the MPS in Princeton in 1958, which the Society pursued almost entirely at the behest of Jasper Crane, a former executive of the DuPont Chemical Company who did the brunt of the fund raising from other businessmen to raise money for the meeting. Crane’s enthusiastic commitment to building the American meeting, as well as the participation of the other businessmen whom he sought to involve in the group, suggests a different view of the Society’s history, and in turn, of the intellectual history of the postwar right—one in which the lines between business conservatism and the world of intellectual life cannot be so neatly drawn. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1441

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the standard historiography (e.g., Mirowski/Plehwe) that treats MPS as pure academic network versus the think tanks; a Jasper Crane–shaped history crosses those lines. — connects to: 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; Corporate and family money funded the Mont Pelerin Society’s American meeting — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1464; Corporate money shaped Mont Pèlerin debates by steering theory toward practical business problems — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 955 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Why did Jasper Crane, a chemical executive, invest so heavily in a European-dominated intellectual society far removed from policy? What did ‘free inquiry’ serve for him that the policy fights did not?

Broader Connections

• Corporate and family money funded the Mont Pelerin Society’s American meeting #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1464
• Corporate funding made the first Mont Pèlerin meeting financially possible #corroborates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 117
• Corporate money shaped Mont Pèlerin debates by steering theory toward practical business problems #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 955
• Early Mont Pèlerin Society activity depended on small ideological think tanks for funding #contradicts (0.70) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1454