The Mont Pèlerin Society deliberately networked academia, media, business, and politics from its founding.

Evidence

The founding conference reflected the mix of academic and professional backgrounds that would come to characterize the Mont Pèlerin Society. A majority of university professors mingled with journalists (like Fortune’s John Davenport, Henry Hazlitt from Newsweek, and Cicely V. Wedgwood of Time and Tide), foundation/think tank executives (Floyd A. Harper and Vernon Watts of the Foundation for Economic Education, Herbert Corneulle from Volker), and business executives (Albert Hunold heading the Swiss watch manufacturing association) and publishing houses (George Révay from Reader’s Digest). … By 1951 several leading political figures, including Ludwig Erhard and Luigi Einaudi, were accepted, contradicting Hayek’s claims of a rather draconian renunciation of political activism. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 128

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ and hegemony contestation literature — nodes connecting to Peacock/Koch’s broader historiography and the reader’s intermediate study of network formation. — connects to: Hayek founded the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947 to rebuild market advocacy networks. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 30; The Mont Pèlerin Society pioneered a novel hierarchy for incubating political theory and action. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 122; Mont Pèlerin entrepreneurship scholarship was co-financed and steered by corporate interests. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 281 (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the infrastructure/network theme: the Society as a coordinating knowledge apparatus spanning spheres, parallel to how the Grafting piece treats trees as connective infrastructure.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 128

Broader Connections

• Mont Pelerin Society networks seeded think tanks across Latin America #exemplifies (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 561
• The Mont Pèlerin Society cultivated client relations with West Germany’s economics ministry #exemplifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 680
• Wartime government service recruited many future Mont Pelerin Society founders. #expands (0.72) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 404