Mont Pelerin Society Organized Classical Liberalism Against Postwar Planning
Hoover Senior Fellow John Taylor recounts the Mont Pelerin Society’s 1947 founding as an organized response to the postwar rise of socialist planning and state intervention. In Taylor’s telling, Friedrich Hayek and the society’s first members were not simply defending markets in economic terms; they were trying to rebuild classical liberalism as an intellectual program for freedom, aimed at the practical policy questions that had made collectivism newly credible.
Hayek treated postwar collectivism as a problem for liberalism, not just for economics
John Taylor describes the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 as “a pivotal moment in the revival of classical liberalism and the cause of freedom.” The point, in his telling, was not merely to assemble economists. It was to rebuild an intellectual defense of classical liberalism at a moment when free market capitalism had lost standing.
Taylor places that loss of standing in two shocks. The Great Depression of the 1930s had shaken confidence in markets, and wartime economies had normalized far greater government intervention. By the end of the Second World War, he says, collectivist policies were “very much in vogue across Europe.” A visual sequence reinforces that setting: a photograph of men queued outdoors, newspaper front pages announcing the British election result — “British Oust Churchill; Labor Sweeps Election” and “SOCIALISTS IN” — and documents from the period.
Friedrich Hayek’s response, as Taylor presents it, was institutional. Hayek, then based at the London School of Economics, saw socialist planning gaining support among British politicians, academics, and the public. He decided to form a society of scholars and thinkers who could “rally to the defense of classical liberalism.” The aim was to “energize liberalism,” and to supply it with ideas capable of addressing the postwar world rather than simply restating older doctrines.
Taylor ties that effort directly to Hayek’s broader intellectual project. In 1944, Hayek had published The Road to Serfdom, the book Taylor says made him world famous. Taylor summarizes the book as an argument about “the dangers of socialism and state planning,” the “economic advantages” of a free market, and what Hayek saw as its “moral superiority.” Beneath those claims, Taylor says, was Hayek’s “underlying concern”: the defense of freedom.
The society began as a deliberate network of aligned but varied thinkers
Hayek did not move immediately from concern to organization. Taylor says that late in 1946 Hayek began sounding out leading thinkers in writing, including Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, about a possible gathering of people who shared his view that liberalism needed to be revitalized. The source shows letters on London School of Economics letterhead addressed to Popper, dated December 28, 1946, and January 21, 1947.
Once Hayek judged that there was sufficient interest, invitations went out for a conference in Switzerland in April 1947. The location was intentionally remote: the village of Mont Pelerin. The source shows black-and-white images of a lakeside village with mountains behind it and a large hotel building, situating the meeting away from the major political and academic capitals where the postwar arguments over planning were already underway.
The founding record appears in the source as a handwritten “Memorandum of Association,” whose visible text states that “the members of the Mont-Pelerin Conference agree” to form a society “to be called The Mont Pelerin Society.” Taylor’s emphasis is on the move from a conference to a standing association: Hayek was not simply convening a discussion, but creating an institutional vehicle for the defense and renewal of classical liberalism.
The first meeting brought together 39 participants from Europe and the United States. Taylor notes that about half were professional economists, but the group also included historians, legal experts, political philosophers, and journalists. That composition matters to his account. The society was born around economic liberalism, but not confined to technical economics; it was framed as an intellectual coalition concerned with markets, law, politics, public argument, and the conditions of freedom.
The founding agenda treated freedom as a practical postwar program
The agenda Taylor describes was broad and concrete. The first Mont Pelerin conference ran from April 1 to April 10, 1947, and included 13 substantive sessions. The source shows a typewritten conference agenda and a list of participants under the heading “Mont Pelerin Conference. 1st-10th April 1947.”
Taylor lists topics that show how the society’s founders understood the challenge before them. They discussed free enterprise, the future of Germany, and the dangers of Soviet communism. They also took up economic questions central to postwar policy: full employment, monetary reform, wage policy, taxation, and income distribution.
That range is important because Taylor does not present the Mont Pelerin Society as a nostalgic return to prewar laissez-faire slogans. In his telling, Hayek wanted liberalism “reinvigorated” with ideas adequate to the problems of the postwar era. The founders were confronting the policy terrain on which collectivism had gained credibility: employment, reconstruction, money, wages, taxes, distribution, and the geopolitical pressure of Soviet communism.
The source’s archival materials support that picture: the memorandum, invitation-era correspondence, participant lists, and agenda all point to a project that was formal from the start. Hayek’s concern about socialist planning became a society, with members, a name, a defined meeting, and a program of sessions. Taylor’s account treats that institutionalization as the turning point: classical liberalism was not merely defended in books, but organized through a durable transatlantic network.