The Colloque Lippmann was an exclusionary gathering that seeded Europe’s postwar liberal establishment
Evidence
All the participants in the Colloque Lippmann were hand-picked. The Marxist theorist Rudolf Hilferding and the former socialist minister Charles Spinasse, who wished to attend the discussion, were nimbly excluded because they “were [sic] politicians.” The international forum gathered some of the most influential French corporate managers (Auguste Detoeuf, Louis Marlio, Ernest Mercier), senior civil servants (Jacques Rueff, Roger Auboin), and intellectuals (Raymond Aron) as well as members of a rising new generation of liberal economists (Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, etc.). In retrospect, the participants in the Colloque Lippmann would appear to have constituted a prestigious conclave: its members would later become a Nobel Prize winner in economics (Friedrich Hayek), the general secretary of the Organization for European Economic Co-Operation (Robert Marjolin), the architects of the German social market economy (Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow), the director of the Bank for International Settlements (Roger Auboin), the financial adviser of General Charles de Gaulle (Jacques Rueff), the power behind Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars project (Stephan Possony), and so on. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 277
Categorization
- XREF: Connects directly to the network-formation theme of this book’s overall argument; also resonates with Milgrom’s account of how hand-picked groups sustain trading institutions. — connects to: Within the Colloque Lippmann, uncritical liberal purists were a marginalized minority. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 191; The Colloque Lippmann’s purpose was agenda-setting, not settled doctrine. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 192; The Colloque Walter Lippmann convinced nascent neoliberals to cross disciplinary boundaries — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 116 (+3 more)
- SEED: Article angle: how a single elite convocation of ~26 people prefigured the postwar Western order — the infrastructure of exclusion (who gets barred as ‘politicians’) that built modern economics.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 277
Broader Connections
- A factions split over renewing versus preserving liberalism marked the Colloque’s founding
#expands(0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 280 - The term ‘neoliberalism’ was coined at the 1938 Colloque Walter Lippmann
#expands(0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 775 - Walter Lippmann deliberately withdrew from the neoliberal movement as it institutionalized
#responds-to(0.75) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 216