Mont Pèlerin’s founders saw later market advocacy as betraying their original ideals

Evidence

The narrative of the Mont Pèlerin Society is one of interrelated failure and success. Its members established for themselves an extraordinarily ambitious philosophical program that they proved unable to achieve. What began in a grand gesture of unity soon broke apart into factions with differences that its internal dialogues served to exacerbate rather than resolve. At the same time, the society’s attempt to rehabilitate free markets in the public sphere yielded, in part through the concerted actions of its members, spectacular results. … As they grew older, many of its found ers came to view the emboldened market advocacy of its later members as a violation of its original ideals. They looked with mingled admiration and disapprobation at the world that Milton Friedman had wrought. The story of the Mont Pèlerin Society is sometimes cited as an exemplar of that rare phenomenon: a group of intellectuals who managed to have a palpable impact on the politics of their time. It is told less often as a parable of the perils, in the exercise of ideological infl uence, of success. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 37

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that success in ideological influence distorts the original philosophy is a rich, sit-with-it thesis about intellectual movements — the failure/success interrelation defies simple summary.
• XREF: connects to: Mont Pèlerin founders framed market advocacy as skepticism against rigid laissez-faire ideals — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 274; The Mont Pèlerin Society contained rival, incompatible conceptions of the market — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2126; Mont Pèlerin’s success in spreading market ideas fatally undermined its own moderated vision — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 468 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Founding Mont Pèlerin members became alienated by the society’s later trajectory #corroborates (0.90) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 562
• Mont Pèlerin founders framed market advocacy as skepticism against rigid laissez-faire ideals #corroborates (0.80) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 274
• Mont Pèlerin’s success in spreading market ideas fatally undermined its own moderated vision #expands (0.80) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 468
• The Mont Pèlerin Society contained rival, incompatible conceptions of the market #qualifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2126
• Mont Pèlerin Society’s first decade failed to reconcile its competing scientific and ideological visions #expands (0.75) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 91