The socialist monopoly critique motivated the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society.

Evidence

For MPS members, the issue of monopoly loomed so large primarily because of the way their opponents on the left had framed it. The left had been arguing that since the start of the twentieth century monopoly had been expanding apace throughout the United States and Western Europe, such that the bulk of the economy—owing to this inexorable growth—would inevitably soon be controlled by monopolies. The left predicted that the forces of competition would continue to prove ineffectual in the face of such growth. Consequently, they insisted that the only rational solution was socialist control of the economy. This tenet of the program of the left threatened the very cogency of liberal optimism and was one of the major motivations for the MPS liberals to rethink liberal doctrine. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1074

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core goal — understanding the causal origins of the neoliberal network as a defensive response to the left’s monopoly-inevitability narrative. — connects to: Hayek founded the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947 to rebuild market advocacy networks. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 30; Mont Pèlerin founders deliberately adopted progressive rhetoric to defend markets after the Depression — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 276