The Depression-era collapse, not settled doctrine, produced postwar free-market thought.

Evidence

As a result of the retrenchment that accompanied the onset of the Depression and persisted through World War II, all the assumptions that this community ostensibly shared were subject to reconsideration. The fi nancial crisis and subsequent po liti cal instability left them broadly convinced of the need for a social philosophy that transcended the abstract dictates of laissezfaire: they agreed that if capitalism was going to be saved from the pressures that were continuously eroding its foundations, its core assumptions would need to be rebuilt. But they disagreed sharply and continuously when the conversation turned to identifying those aspects of the capitalist order that were sacred and those that could be revised, or those morals that might be coded as absolute and the mechanisms of enforcement that would make them so. The postwar conservative intellectual world, with all its points of implicit unanimity and internecine discord, developed out of this atmosphere of uncertainty. That these problems were posed by cosmopolitan intellectuals from around the Atlantic world, engaging together in earnest inquiry into the philosophical foundations of their social order, complicates the common assumption that the conservative project was parochial in its origins and strategic in its intent. It was the product of a collapsed rather than a rigidifi ed worldview. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 33

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the strategic-parochial reading of the neoliberal project; connects to the Mirowski/Plehwe network histories and to the question of how MPS ideas later became policy. — connects to: Early postwar free-market advocates were riddled with internal tensions, not doctrinaire ideologues. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 32; The Depression forced postwar conservatives to rebuild capitalism’s foundations, not defend them — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 33; Neoliberalism emerged from the Great Depression, not from Viennese interwar thought alone — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 101 (+6 more)
• QUESTION: If postwar conservatism grew from intellectual collapse rather than strategy, what does that imply for the causal story of how MPS ideas reached policy power in the 1970s-80s?

Broader Connections

• The Depression forced postwar conservatives to rebuild capitalism’s foundations, not defend them #corroborates (0.90) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 33
• Neoliberalism emerged from the Great Depression, not from Viennese interwar thought alone #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 101
• The neoliberal thought collective was founded to redeem itself from Depression-era defeat by Keynesians #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 20
• Austrian fatalism made Hayek’s side politically unsalable in the Depression #corroborates (0.80) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 490
• Hayek’s economics failed because it offered no remedy during the Depression #corroborates (0.80) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 81
• The early 1930s radicalized governments and isolated free-market economists. #qualifies (0.75) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 41
• Even Friedman rejected Hayek’s do-nothing policy as harmful in the Depression #corroborates (0.75) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 82
• Hoover’s treasury secretary Mellon urged liquidating labor and assets during the Depression #exemplifies (0.75) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 319