Friedman’s media omnipresence broke the MPS’s elite-only public reserve

Evidence

The early Mont Pèlerin Society was so dubious about public interaction that it risked attaining, as Hayek regretfully acknowledged, the reputation of a “secret society.” The public reserve of freemarket advocates provided implicit support for the notion that it was a philosophy cultivated by and for elites, in contradiction to the compassion of their redistributionist foes. In contrast, Friedman’s extraordinary skills as a rhetorician were augmented by his unfl agging energy and constant willingness to expound his public policy suggestions to anyone who was willing to listen. After the publication of Capitalism and Freedom he used every available media venue to try to pop u lar ize his ideas, including university lectures, po liti cal stump speeches, newspaper editorials, magazine columns, audiotaped discussions, massmarket paperbacks, and even a Public Broadcasting System documentary. Between the early 1960s and the end of the Reagan presidency, he was an omnipresent generator of ideas in the American public sphere. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 497

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s interest in how MPS ideas reached policy — Friedman as the movement’s popularizer contrasts directly with the earlier MPS ‘secret society’ chapters. — connects to: Friedman rejected the MPS’s deliberate-moderation rhetoric for confrontation — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 472; Media access structurally favors elites against out-groups whose problems get defined for them — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 851; Neoliberal political success hollowed out the MPS into a status symbol — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 508
• SEED: Angle: the ‘secret society’ label as an elite liability — how public reserve was reframed as contemptuous elitism, and the strategic necessity of popularization for an ideas-based policy movement.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal political success hollowed out the MPS into a status symbol #expands (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 508
• Media access structurally favors elites against out-groups whose problems get defined for them #contradicts (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 851