The early Mont Pèlerin movement was far less doctrinaire than its conventional reputation suggests.

Evidence

An exploration of the rhetoric of the society’s members in its early years reveals a movement far less doctrinaire than the conventional narrative would indicate. What emerges is a growing awareness of a set of complex tensions confronted by market advocates in the postwar era. Early members of the society desired to establish philosophical foundations for marketplace freedoms but expressed deep skepticism toward the intolerance and irrationality of unsubstantiated po liti cal absolutes. They sought to reach out to the religious believers and the eco nom ical ly disadvantaged individuals whom they believed nineteenthcentury market advocates had mistakenly eschewed but demonstrated hostility toward theological dogmatism and the redistributive state. They glorifi ed the achievements of capitalism but at times expressed dismay at its cultural and moral effects. They valorized liberty but maintained the vital need for collective moral traditions. They defended capitalism as a theory of individual choice but expressed deep suspicion of the implications of po liti cal democracy. Their similarities accentuated, rather than elided, the points of difference that drove them apart. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 32

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the standard origin story of ‘neoliberalism’ as a coherent ideology — connects to broader historiographic debates about neoliberal thought, and to the reader’s Mont Pèlerin milieu study. — connects to: Mont Pèlerin founders rejected laissez-faire and libertarian labels as politically unviable — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 306; Mont Pélerin members shared opposition to planning but disagreed on the positive vision — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 308; The Mont Pèlerin Society contained rival, incompatible conceptions of the market — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2126
• DEEPTHINKING: The catalog of paired tensions (liberty vs. moral tradition, capitalism vs. democracy, reaching out to the poor vs. rejecting redistribution) is a genuinely paradigm-shifting characterization of early neoliberalism as internally riven rather than monolithic.
• SEED: A possible essay: ‘The Heretics Inside Neoliberalism’s Birth Club’ — the internal tensions that the founding generation itself could never resolve, and what that means for those who now caricature the movement as monolithic.

Broader Connections

• Mont Pèlerin founders rejected laissez-faire and libertarian labels as politically unviable #expands (0.85) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 306
• The Mont Pèlerin Society contained rival, incompatible conceptions of the market #complicates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2126
• Mont Pélerin members shared opposition to planning but disagreed on the positive vision #qualifies (0.75) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 308