Mont Pèlerin members shared respect for prices but held fundamentally incompatible worldviews

Evidence

The central mandate the society’s members set for themselves was to provide, in the words of their statement of aims, a “reassertion of valid ideals.” Any attempts to present a compelling alternative to the Communist worldview, to foster a contrary intellectual tradition, or to appropriate the language of progressivism would require a renewed inquiry into the philosophical foundations of capitalism. If not an unrepentant individualism, what social ideal would best justify and represent the social theory they sought to defend? How could they represent their market advocacy as part of a holistic worldview that their compatriots might conceivably share? Answering these questions would require them to reinvent, or at the very least to reground, the morals of capitalism. It was their task to provide a convincing account of the ethical foundations of a marketcentered world. The early members of the Mont Pèlerin Society struggled, however, to arrive at anything resembling consensus in their responses to the problems raised by the project they had assigned to themselves. Although they found some unity in their respect for the price mechanism, they gradually discovered that this shared orientation derived from deeply incongruous worldviews. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 277

Categorization

• XREF: Foreshadows the internal fractures within the neoliberal project that later historians (Burgin, Slobodian) document; connects to MPS’s later splitting between Chicago and Austrian wings. — connects to: 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 Pélerin members shared opposition to planning but disagreed on the positive vision — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 308; Mont Pèlerin Society’s first decade failed to reconcile its competing scientific and ideological visions — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 91 (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies that ‘reassertion of valid ideals’ — not just economic argument — was the society’s self-understood mandate, so the movement was never purely technocratic.

Broader Connections

• The Mont Pèlerin Society contained rival, incompatible conceptions of the market #corroborates (0.98) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2126
• Mont Pélerin members shared opposition to planning but disagreed on the positive vision #expands (0.95) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 308
• Mont Pèlerin Society members disagreed sharply over development policy in the 1950s #exemplifies (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1261
• Mont Pèlerin Society’s first decade failed to reconcile its competing scientific and ideological visions #expands (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 91
• Free-market ideology converged with right-wing religious conservatism at Mont Pèlerin #exemplifies (0.78) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 207