Haunted by 1930s rhetorical failures, market advocates built institutions that later amplified their influence

Evidence

In the years surrounding World War II, the dispersion that had characterized market advocacy after the onset of the Great Depression gave way to an incipient period of network formation and institution building. Small groups of entrepreneurial intellectuals responded to the failures of the early 1930s by initiating the development of or gan i za tion al structures, philosophical programs, and rhetorical frameworks in support of their views. Hayek, Simons, and their colleagues came to realize that an absence of institutional assistance constrained their capacity to support and learn from one another, hobbled their ability to build a movement culture, and left their voices scattered and disconsonant. They were acutely aware of the rhetorical defeats of the preceding years: the most vociferous defenders of the market mechanism had done little to explain how it could provide an acceptable solution to the pressing problems posed by the economic crisis, and its more moderate advocates had couched their arguments in too many qualifi cations to offer a coherent alternative. An unwillingness to connect their ideas to a broader worldview had consigned them to technocratic impotence in a po liti cal environment characterized by passionate ideological contestation. In attempting to develop a new approach, they began to lay the groundwork for an era in which market advocates achieved rapidly growing infl uence in both pop u lar politics and the academic world. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 140

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader project on the Mont Pèlerin milieu: this is the founding problem-set that the MPS later addressed. — connects to: Mont Pèlerin founders deliberately adopted progressive rhetoric to defend markets after the Depression — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 276; Economic theories serve as blueprints for institutions, and faulty theories produce fragile ones — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 120

Broader Connections

• Mont Pèlerin founders deliberately adopted progressive rhetoric to defend markets after the Depression #expands (0.85) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 276
• Economic theories serve as blueprints for institutions, and faulty theories produce fragile ones #corroborates (0.75) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 120