Wartime government service recruited many future Mont Pelerin Society founders.

Evidence

In early 1941 the functions of the Service were divided between a new Central Statistical Office, headed by Harry Campion and Ely Devons, and an Economic Section, headed by Jewkes. When Jewkes left for the Ministry of Aircraft Production in September 1941, Robbins succeeded him as head of the Section. Key British members of the MPS like Jewkes and Robbins—Robbins would draft the statement of aims, for example (see Introduction in this volume)—thus had extensive first-hand experience in government. Furthermore, any list of British economists working for the government during the war contains a significant proportion of those who, after the war, would be associated with the MPS; but any such list would have contained very few of the younger generation of economists who became senior academics in the 1950s and 1960s. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 404

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s core question of how the neoliberal network formed from shared wartime planning experience. — connects to: The Mont Pèlerin Society deliberately networked academia, media, business, and politics from its founding. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 128
• QUESTION: What did Robbins and others make of their wartime dirigiste experience - did it reshape or reinforce their liberal convictions?