The Depression forced postwar conservatives to rebuild capitalism’s foundations, not defend them

Evidence

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. … 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: Connects to the reader’s broader austerity/neoliberalism research and to standard accounts of postwar conservatism as a strategic, coordinated project (e.g., Phillips-Fein’s work on business anti-statism). — connects to: Austrian fatalism made Hayek’s side politically unsalable in the Depression — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 490; Business conservatives funding the postwar right were not cleanly neoliberal — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1478; 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)
• DEEPTHINKING: The framing of the neoliberal project as born from a collapsed rather than rigidified worldview — a genuinely destabilized, uncertain community rebuilt from scratch — complicates both left and right origin narratives in a way worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Post-Depression isolation made conservatives unusually open to rethinking laissez-faire. #corroborates (0.85) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 264
• Business conservatives funding the postwar right were not cleanly neoliberal #expands (0.82) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1478
• Neoliberalism emerged from the Great Depression, not from Viennese interwar thought alone #corroborates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 101
• Lippmann’s 1937 Good Society launched the neoliberal program against Depression-era orthodoxy #corroborates (0.78) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 105
• Early conservative intellectuals felt isolated from business, which they believed embraced New Deal liberalism #complicates (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1438
• Ordoliberalism developed across three stages from the Depression through Nazi rule to 1950s reconstruction. #qualifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 519