Mont Pèlerin Society’s first decade failed to reconcile its competing scientific and ideological visions

Evidence

The science of liberalism that neoliberals attempted to mend overlapped with the construction of a liberal view of science as these two strands became intimately conjoined in the shadow of totalitarianism. Through their publications and correspondence, neoliberals fortified their epistemological insights and complementary social theory. This was one in which the method of freedom was bound by conventional rules which had to be adopted as articles of faith, that is, as a constitution. Nonetheless, when neoliberalism started taking institutional shape, many of the latent divergences became manifest and its scientific and ideological turf fissured. The first decades of the Mont Pèlerin Society can be seen retrospectively as the impossible attempt to reconcile these diverging views. Many of the polymaths, including Polanyi, left the Society during the first decade of its existence as it relinquished its role as a multidisciplinary intellectual center for the growth of an alternative theory of liberalism venturing beyond economic freedom. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 91

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of the book fracturing the ‘neoliberalism as monolithic’ caricature — the early MPS was overtly multidisciplinary before becoming narrowed. — connects to: By 1972 the Mont Pèlerin Society had hardened into technical economics and pure libertarianism — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 528; Founding Mont Pèlerin members became alienated by the society’s later trajectory — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 562; Mont Pèlerin members shared respect for prices but held fundamentally incompatible worldviews — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 277 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• The Mont Pèlerin Society contained rival, incompatible conceptions of the market #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2126
• Hayek’s ethical-reconstruction ambition failed within the Mont Pèlerin Society #corroborates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 23