Hayek founded a closed society to repair classical liberalism’s conceptual flaws

Evidence

Second, Hayek and others believed that classical liberalism had failed because of crippling conceptual flaws and that the only way to diagnose and rectify them was to withdraw into an intensive discussion group of similarly minded intellectuals. … Effective endeavors to elaborate the general principles of a liberal order are practicable only among a group of people who are in agreement on fundamentals, and among whom basic conceptions are not questioned at every step… . What we need are people who have faced the arguments from the other side, who have struggled with them and fought themselves through to a position from which they can both critically meet the objections against it and justify their own views … this should be regarded as a private meeting and all that is said here in discussion as “off the record.” … it must remain a closed society, not open to all and sundry. (1967, 149, 151, 153, 158) One can readily appreciate the trickiness of attempting to square the circle of remaining closed and relatively secretive while striving to be cosmopolitan and open to opposing currents, all the while scrutinizing a political doctrine (liberalism) that was at least nominally pitched in favor of diversity, broadmindedness, and open participation. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 120

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s goal of understanding how the neoliberal network formed—the closed-society design explains how a movement crystallized. — connects to: Hayek deliberately designed the society as closed and conviction-bound, neither scholarly nor political. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 242; Hayek designed the Mont Pèlerin Society as a closed ideological academy — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 193; Hayek’s ethical-reconstruction ambition failed within the Mont Pèlerin Society — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 23 (+5 more)
• SEED: Angle: ‘intellectual clubs vs open debate’ — how the closed-discussion design of Mont Pèlerin shaped later think-tank strategy for policy influence.
• DEEPTHINKING: The tension between needing agreement on fundamentals and claiming to be a scientific movement, sealed by an off-the-record ethos, is a genuinely intricate insight about how an intellectual network built itself.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 120

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism’s public rhetoric of open liberalism contradicted its actual closed, hierarchical organization #exemplifies (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 200
• Neoliberalism broke sharply with prewar classical liberalism rather than continuing it #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 778
• Hayek reconciled intellectual credibility with donor accommodation in founding MPS #responds-to (0.75) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 260
• Hayek’s ethical-reconstruction ambition failed within the Mont Pèlerin Society #complicates (0.70) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 23