Early conservative intellectuals felt isolated from business, which they believed embraced New Deal liberalism

Evidence

Historians of the conservative intellectual movement in the United States have generally depicted the thinkers who rejected liberalism in the 1940s and 1950s as idiosyncratic and iconoclastic figures on the margins of American life. “What seems, in retrospect, most remarkable about the leaders of this movement in these early years was their tenacity in the face of an often hostile environment,” writes historian George H. Nash, in his magisterial 1976 analysis of the rise of conservatism as an intellectual force. This historical judgment largely echoes the beliefs of the participants themselves. Many conservative intellectuals of the early postwar period—a group that includes traditionalist philosophers like Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk as well as the Austrian economists and early libertarians—felt themselves to be sharply at odds with the rest of the modern world, out of step with the commonly accepted faiths of their day. They saw themselves as especially distant from the business world, which they believed had accepted the basic tenets of New Deal liberalism. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1438

Categorization

• XREF: Establishes the myth of intellectual marginality that the following paragraph will overturn — classic pivot structure worth remembering. — connects to: The Depression forced postwar conservatives to rebuild capitalism’s foundations, not defend them — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 33; Free-market liberalism and traditionalist conservatism were irreconcilable uneasy allies — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 375; In the 1930s pro-business thinkers themselves rejected free markets and laissez-faire. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 66