Mont Pèlerin founders deliberately adopted progressive rhetoric to defend markets after the Depression

Evidence

Knight, who had himself straddled the boundaries between a liberal sensibility and an explicitly “radical” worldview, urged the society’s founding members to align their market advocacy with support for religious toleration and the mantle of humanitarianism. Perhaps the most vociferous advocate of the adoption of the language of progressivism, however, was Milton Friedman. He assailed the tendency of liberals to represent their ideas as a “defence of the status quo” and urged his colleagues to rely instead on rhetoric that was “dynamic and progressive.” It was essential, he said, to relay the fact that their or ga ni za tion was “concerned in the progress of man’s welfare.” In the wake of the Great Depression, no demo cratic polity would be compelled by the cold language of nineteenthcentury market advocates. The remorseless social Darwinism associated with theorists like Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner had little place in a pop u lar conversation in which so many perceived themselves as helpless victims, or potential victims, of an unhindered market. It would be necessary to soften the price mechanism’s sometimes rough edges and to shift its rhetorical logic of market advocacy away from an adversarial ethic and toward an emphasis on the benefi ts it could bestow on all. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 276

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on neoliberalism’s strategic repackaging (Mirowski’s ‘neoliberal thought collective’), and to the reader’s adjacent history of the Mont Pèlerin milieu. — connects to: Mont Pèlerin’s economic focus attracted libertarian over traditionalist members — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 529; Mont Pèlerin founders framed market advocacy as skepticism against rigid laissez-faire ideals — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 274; The socialist monopoly critique motivated the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1074 (+5 more)
• SEED: Angle on how Friedman, usually remembered as the champion of laissez-faire, was the key architect of progressivist framing of markets — the rhetorical strategy behind modern ‘market populism’.

Broader Connections

• Mont Pèlerin founders rejected laissez-faire and libertarian labels as politically unviable #corroborates (0.85) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 306
• The socialist monopoly critique motivated the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society. #complicates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1074