French businessmen built pro-market advocacy groups with Cold War support.

Evidence

Neoliberalism thus indirectly benefited from the impact of the Cold War on French politics and from the revival of the right, with all the ambiguities it involved. Obviously, neoliberalism found its main supporters among businessmen. They protested against the growth of the state since the Liberation and against “modernization,” whose methods they had been excluded from defining. Neoliberalism constituted a common denominator for many businessmen, whatever their sectors of origin and their divergences of interest. It was thus with the support of the leading authorities of the Centre national du patronat français (CNPF) that the Association de la libre entreprise (ALE) was created in 1947, an organization aiming at “defending and … recommending freedom of enterprise from the economic and social point of view with all its consequences.” Inspired by the Foundation for Economic Education and maintaining relationships to a score of similar organizations disseminated in Europe and in the United States, the ALE distributed “educational” booklets on the market economy. The objective was simple: “to highlight the misdeeds of state intervention … and to denounce it as the cancer of France.” The ALE was directed by Georges Villiers, the president of the CNPF, and led by Georges Morisot, an engineer at Michelin. Both were members of the Mont Pèlerin Society. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 289

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Milgrom law-merchant and social-capital framework readings about how private organizations substitute for formal institutions, here on the advocacy side. — connects to: French employer organizations held radically divergent versions of postwar liberalism — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 290
• SHARE: The detail that the anti-statist ALE was headed by a Michelin engineer and CNPF president, both Mont Pèlerin Society members, would interest anyone following the neoliberal network’s business penetration.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 289

Broader Connections

• French employer organizations held radically divergent versions of postwar liberalism #expands (0.72) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 290