Mont Pelerin 1947: Transcripts of the Founding Meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society Edited by Bruce Caldwell

The book is record of the "very first meeting held by a group of economists and other scholars at the Hôtel du Parc in the village of Mont-Pèlerin, Switzerland, during the first ten days of April 1947".

The people who attended the first Mont Pèlerin Society meeting were worried about the move of many countries toward socialist or collectivist policies. As we read this volume, we worry about the same tendency today.

Bad economic policies destroy people’s prosperity. Lesson for Sikhs and all people is to get together with committed people and work towards the common objective. We are in a similar situation of confusion, isolation, irrelevance, and decline in prosperity.

Planning the meeting

Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek was crucial in organizing the meeting and in the founding of the society.

Friedrich Hayek first proposed the idea of a postwar international society of liberals in a lecture in February 1944 before the Political Society at King’s College, Cambridge. Hayek was worried about the direction—political, social, economic, intellectual, cultural, and moral—of Central Europe after the war and envisaged an organization that would put the few remaining liberals there in contact with peers in other countries as the rebuilding process began.

After he met Harold Luhnow, then president of the Kansas City foundation the William Volker Charities Fund, he followed up with a cable: "If you could provide travel expenses for the following eleven American members Brandt Director Friedman Gideonse Graham Hazlitt Knight Kohn Machlup Mises Stigler." Luhnow agreed.

Hayek also made clear to Luhnow that he should not expect any quick payoffs from the meeting.

The conference took place over ten days to allow for much informal discussion beyond the formal sessions.

Objective of the meeting

An important goal of the conference was to introduce European liberals—those who saw the advantages of limited government and a reliance on markets—to other liberals from Europe and from the United States. The first week focused on presentations and group discussion of five topics chosen by Hayek.

Some of the topics discussed were:
"Free" enterprise or competitive order
Future of Germany
Liberalism and Christianity: Hayek thought the topic was essential in order to resolve a potential conflict in which liberalism seemed antagonist toward Christianity.

Most topics were about economics, including contra-cyclical measures, full employment, monetary reform, wage policy, trade unions, taxation, poverty, income distribution, and agricultural policy.

Milton Friedman argued for monetary policy rules and for a tax system that responds automatically rather than by discretion.

He spoke about "attempts to time public investment" and said there was a "great chance that they will end up making the system more unstable than before."

He said, "I think it a fallacy that a free market is something that rich nations can afford, but that poor nations must do without."

He argued for a rules-based monetary system, but that "if we go beyond, we get the problem of rules versus regulations."

Background

Friedrich Hayek’s attention turned increasingly toward the fate of liberalism. Its prospects seemed grim. The Great Depression had undermined people’s faith in markets, and on the continent totalitarian systems of various unpalatable sorts were vying for power. For many in England, socialist planning seemed to provide a promising middle path between a discredited free-enterprise system and its communist and fascist alternatives.

Hayek’s goal was to articulate a renewed version of liberalism, one more suited to the twentieth century, that in economics went beyond the simple nostrums of laissez-faire, and that could more effectively counter the collectivist alternatives… his was very much a minority viewpoint.

A little book called The Road to Serfdom. Published only a month after his Cambridge lecture, the British edition made him, to his surprise, instantly famous. The fame spread further following the publication of an American edition in September and a subsequent condensation the next year by Max Eastman for Reader’s Digest. That began a sequence of events that ultimately made possible the meeting at Mont Pèlerin.

He would find a handful of individuals working in isolation who thought as he did and who were eager to interact with like-minded scholars.

The past thirty years of war and depression had everywhere undermined confidence in foundational Western values and principles, and that the world was turning for solutions to collectivism, a trend that in his view posed a lethal threat to Europe's cultural inheritance.

Outcome

The outcome of the meeting was that the group decided to work together to have their libertarian policies for prosperity established in the government.










Tweet

Related articles

The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

External Links