Early Mont Pèlerin members were willing to abandon popular sovereignty to protect markets

Evidence

In the immediate postwar years the members of the Mont Pèlerin Society faced a pop u lar environment that was deeply hostile to their economic views. In the face of this opposition, they were quick to draw connections between economic freedoms and po liti cal liberalism, but also to distinguish po liti cal liberalism from the advocacy of government by majority rule. The members’ attempts to work through the problematic relationship between capitalism and democracy resulted in some of their richest and most complicated works, but also revealed a willingness to abandon pop u lar sovereignty altogether when the views of the public did not align with their own. As John MacCallum Scott, the secretary general of the Liberal International, invoked Edmund Burke to observe at their gathering in 1956, “Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed.” In practice, this sometimes meant disenfranchising local populations in order to defend the market economy from their control. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 305

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader scholarly literature on ‘democratic deficits’ inherent in neoliberal thought, and to the reader’s adjacent-history interest in how MPS tensions with majoritarian democracy shaped postwar political theory. — connects to: Mont Pèlerin founders framed market advocacy as skepticism against rigid laissez-faire ideals — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 274; Some Mont Pèlerin members openly rejected majority-rule democracy in private — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2147
• QUESTION: Which specific cases of disenfranchising local populations does the author have in mind? Likely colonial contexts or postwar emergency governance — worth chasing in subsequent chapters.

Broader Connections

• Some Mont Pèlerin members openly rejected majority-rule democracy in private #corroborates (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2147