Contemporary classical liberals like Viner saw the Chicago conferences as ideologically rigid and loaded

Evidence

As the FMS wound down, in 1951, Jacob Viner—a classical liberal and renowned economist who left Chicago for Princeton in 1946—recollected his experience at a Volker-funded conference headed by Director and Levi at the Chicago Law School: “[Everything] about the conference except the unscheduled statements and protests from individual participants were so patently rigidly structured, so loaded, that I got more amusement from the conference than from any other I ever attended … even the source of the financing of the Conference, as I found out later, was ideologically loaded.” — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1084

Categorization

• XREF: Viner’s disquiet prefigures later splits between older classical liberalism and the postwar neoliberal/interventionist turn; relates to the reader’s wider intellectual-history goals. — connects to: Knight and Viner’s philosophical split over economic theory’s foundations poisoned their collegiality at Chicago — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 111