Frank Meyer converted from Communist organizer to conservative after reading Hayek.

Evidence

After growing up in Newark, New Jersey, and briefl y attending Prince ton, Meyer had become a prominent Communist or ga niz er as a student at Oxford. His peripatetic career as a party member took him, ironically, through some of the few remaining centers of freemarket economics in the 1930s: he was expelled from the London School of Economics in 1934 after recruiting over 500 of its 3,000 students, and later worked— with less success— to enlist graduate students at the University of Chicago. … But Meyer began to have doubts about the party while recovering from a foot operation that left him immobilized for eigh teen months in the midst of World War II. The experience of reading Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, he later recalled, “played a decisive part in helping me free myself from Marxist ideology.” By 1955 he had followed the welltrodden midcentury path from Communist activism to conservative dissent, and had assumed his lifelong role of columnist and bookreview editor at the nascent National Review. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 376

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the familiar communist-to-neoliberal conversion trajectory central to Burgin’s broader MPS story; complements Hayek’s Road to Serfdom’s reception narrative. — connects to: Frank Meyer’s fusionism tried to reconcile laissez-faire economics with traditionalist conservatism — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 378
• QUESTION: Meyer’s LSE recruiting success (over 500 of 3,000 students) is striking — worth checking whether the LSE was actually a free-market center in the 1930s or whether Meyer’s presence there is the irony Burgin implies.

Broader Connections

• Frank Meyer’s fusionism tried to reconcile laissez-faire economics with traditionalist conservatism #expands (0.85) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 378