The Mont Pelerin Society deliberately bypassed academia for closed debate

Evidence

The Neoliberal Thought Collective was structured very differently from the other “invisible colleges” that sought to change people’s minds in the latter half of the twentieth century. Unlike most intellectuals in the 1950s, the early protagonists of the MPS did not look to the universities or the academic “professions” or to interest-group mobilizations as the appropriate primary instruments to achieve their goals. Those entities were held too in thrall to the state, from the neoliberal perspective. The early neoliberals felt, at that juncture with some justification, that they were excluded from most high-profile intellectual venues in the West. Hence the MPS was constituted as a closed, private members-only debating society whose participants were hand-picked (originally primarily by Hayek, but later through a closed nomination procedure) and which consciously sought to remain out of the public eye. The purpose was to create a special space where people of like-minded political ideals could gather together to debate the outlines of a future movement diverging from classical liberalism, without having to suffer the indignities of ridicule for their often blue-sky proposals, but also to evade the fifth-column reputation of a society closely aligned with powerful but dubious postwar interests. Even the name of the society was itself chosen to be relatively anodyne, signaling little in the way of substantive content to outsiders. Many members would indeed hold academic posts in a range of academic disciplines, but this was not a precondition of MPS membership. The MPS could thus also be expanded to encompass various powerful capitalists, and not just intellectuals. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 123

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on the recurring ‘thought collective’ theme from earlier chapters and Doern/Wiley and other sources on the MPS as a designed institution. — connects to: Hayek designed the Mont Pèlerin Society as a closed ideological academy — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 193; Both the Mont Pèlerin Society and its leftist critics obscured what neoliberalism is — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 77
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 123

Broader Connections

• Hayek designed the Mont Pèlerin Society as a closed ideological academy #corroborates (0.88) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 193
• Both the Mont Pèlerin Society and its leftist critics obscured what neoliberalism is #complicates (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 77