Mont Pélerin members shared opposition to planning but disagreed on the positive vision

Evidence

Once Hayek managed to create such a venue, the debates failed to unfold as he had hoped. He discovered that he had assembled colleagues who were largely united in what they opposed but shared little agreement in their attempts to construct an alternative vision. Some of the participants regarded capitalism and tradition as twin elements of an antirationalist critique of planning, while others perceived them as at best an antagonistic pair. A number of them warned that the logic of the market would need to be restrained in order to avoid wreaking havoc on ethics, religion, agriculture, or the arts, but others believed that a desire to avoid such restrictions was precisely the goal that had brought them together. All of them struggled to explain how the free market could be implemented and protected in the midst of a hostile public without the adoption of some form of authoritarian control (a prospect that, in certain cases, several of them seemed to embrace). — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 308

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the standard narrative of the Mont Pèlerin Society as a coherent ‘neoliberal’ project — this passage destabilizes that coherence. — connects to: The early Mont Pèlerin movement was far less doctrinaire than its conventional reputation suggests. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 32; Mont Pèlerin members shared respect for prices but held fundamentally incompatible worldviews — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 277; Mont Pèlerin Society members disagreed sharply over development policy in the 1950s — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1261 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Which members seemed to embrace authoritarian control, and how did that reconcile with their market liberalism? Worth tracing.

Broader Connections

• Mont Pèlerin Society members disagreed sharply over development policy in the 1950s #corroborates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1261
• The Mont Pèlerin Society contained rival, incompatible conceptions of the market #corroborates (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 #corroborates (0.70) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 91