Dear Dr Kolev,
Thank you for your comment, but I don't think it satisfies my strictures. The whole point of the MPS was to carry out self-affirming consensual discussions (I would not go as far as calling them debates, and I have read most of the papers delivered at the conferences up to about 1980), but they never invited anybody who did not share their general outlook to participate. IN other words, theirs was not a genuinely open critical inquiry. At the beginning Popper (I think) suggested inviting socialists and other holders of different opinions to the conferences (perhaps in the spirit of 'The Open Society') but this was not welcomed and was not taken up. Maurice Allais refused to sign the first 'Statement of Aims' in 1947 and never came back. The big upheavals in the early sixties seem to have been mostly about personalities, though I recognize the shift in the 1960s from what I call central-european 'apfelstrudel' liberalism to American 'pork-belly' conservatism. With regard to vetting, up to the sixties at least, and I think for a while later, prospective candidates were first invited as guests to a conference for scrutiny, and only then put up as candidates; my understanding is that up to some time in the sixties every new member had to be approved by Hayek himself. Afterwards a formal procedure was adopted, but by that time, as suggested by Emmet, the conferences had lost much of their bite. Members complained about boredom. This is all informed by archival research, but don't press me for box numbers.
Best wishes,
Yours truly, Avner Offer
======================================================
From Avner Offer, Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History, University of Oxford
All Souls College, High St., Oxford OX1 4AL, tel. 44 1865 281404
email: [log in to unmask]
personal website:
http://sites.google.com/site/avoffer/avneroffer
________________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Stefan Kolev [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 01 January 2014 22:51
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] RVW -- Emmett on Burgin, _The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression_
Dear Professor Offer,
please allow me to contradict your brief statement on the Mont Pèlerin Society. From its very beginning, the society has decided not to act itself as an entity in the public discourse; it is instead its members who are free to engage in scientific or political discussions as they wish. As all histories of the MPS show, the last being that by Angus Burgin, this club has united quite a variety of liberalisms, so expecting coherent public reactions from such a group has never been realistic, also bearing in mind the pronounced individualism of its members. Thus in my opinion your remark about the MPS not "condescending to engage in debates with its opponents" misapprehends this very basic discourse constitution which the society has given itself and which has persisted since its founding. As to the individual MPS members, probably no one can accuse them of inactivity as to debates with their opponents in the last six decades.
That Rawls was a MPS member is not a secret, Philip Plickert's 2008 history of the MPS (which, differently structured, is about double the size and the amount of details as Angus Burgin's book) describes this and other affiliations which do not suit the story of the homogeneous "thought collective" (here a review: http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/feuilleton/_buchrezensionen_nichtmehrgueltig/die-macht-der-liberalen-ideen-1.1322861) Which leads me to your point about the "vetting new members for orthodoxy". The MPS has a fully transparent joining procedure (https://www.montpelerin.org/montpelerin/join.html), as any club it requires sharing its statement of aims (also on the website), and as a recent member of the society I assure you that the degree of my "vetting" did not exceed the check necessary to become member of our small Wilhelm Röpke Institute, for which I would certainly claim to be a "critically open" institution.
Best regards and a Happy New Year,
Stefan Kolev
---
Prof. Dr. Stefan Kolev
Wilhelm Röpke Institute e.V.
Gorkistraße 9
99084 Erfurt
Tel +49 (0) 179-125 75 76
Internet: www.hwwi.org
Email: [log in to unmask]
________________________________________
Von: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] im Auftrag von Avner Offer [[log in to unmask]]
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 1. Januar 2014 20:40
An: [log in to unmask]
Betreff: Re: [SHOE] RVW -- Emmett on Burgin, _The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression_
The one thing that the Mont Pelerin Society never ever had was 'critical openness'. It never condescended to engage in debates with its opponents, and always vetted new members for orthodoxy. And did you know that Rawls was a member for a few years?
Avner Offer
======================================================
From Avner Offer, Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History, University of Oxford
All Souls College, High St., Oxford OX1 4AL, tel. 44 1865 281404
email: [log in to unmask]
personal website:
http://sites.google.com/site/avoffer/avneroffer
________________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Humberto Barreto [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 01 January 2014 19:01
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SHOE] RVW -- Emmett on Burgin, _The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression_
Published by EH.Net (December 2013)
Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. v + 303 pp. $30 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-674-05813-2.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Ross B. Emmett. James Madison College, Michigan State University.
Neo-liberalism has had several histories written recently. Daniel Stedman Jones (2012) linked the stories of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman to the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, crossing intellectual history with political history. Phil Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (2009; see also Mirowski, 2013) provided us with the account of a unitary social movement – a “thought collective” as they called it. Stedman Jones’ account fell short because he lacked a clear understanding of how ideas are translated into institutions and rules via political entrepreneurship (see Leighton and López, 2012 for one model of how political entrepreneurship works). His account both underestimated the subtleties of the ideas of theorists in their academic setting, and overestimated the role of political leaders in translating ideas into the political realities. Mirowski and Plehwe brought the social movement emerging from Mont Pelerin to life. But all too often in the essays inc!uded in their volume the ideas and actions of the individuals within the movement were evaluated solely in terms of the outcomes of the movement as a whole – outcomes that were perceived to be threats to all good things; like democracy, human welfare, freedom and the like.
Angus Burgin also sets a lofty objective; but he gives us a much more subtle and nuanced history than either of two accounts mentioned above. “The history of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) can, and to some extent should, be read as an extended plea for the relevance of the history of ideas to the history of politics” (p. 224), he tells us in his conclusion. Agreed. Yet, unlike the one-dimensional, and uni-directional, studies cited above, the historical “relationship between theory and praxis” among members of MPS that he narrates for us reveals the nuanced subtleties of “the dynamic nature of a historical transformation” (p. 224); a transformation in the way we configured the relationship between the state and markets during the latter half of the twentieth century. In Burgin’s account, living, breathing human beings communicate, argue, negotiate, pontificate, and yes, even conspire in their efforts to encourage and preserve “capitalist modes of social organization” (p. 225).
What “capitalism” meant was itself a question. Frank Knight, one of the contributors to the discussion who rightly figures in Burgin’s narrative as a key participant in the early years, never used the word “capitalism” in his little textbook The Economic Organization (2013). Yet Knight’s book did much to revitalize acceptance among the future members of MPS of the benefits of social organization via the price mechanism in an “exchange system” (Knight, 2013, p. 23-24). One of the reasons Knight (in contrast, say, to Ludwig von Mises) figures so prominently in Burgin’s account is that he could never settle on a simple account of the complex relationship among the political, social, economic, and even moral aspects of a society which decided (consciously? or simply as a result of accepting other things like the rule of law, family control of property, certain social customs, etc.) to allow markets to play a central role in social organization (see ! p. 112-122). Knight’s concerns were shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by other MPS members: Bernard de Jouvenel, Wilhelm Röpke, and Albert Hunold (who served as secretary for the Society in its early years, but eventually left it) for example. And even Hayek, whose intellectual leadership is central to Burgin’s account, reconfigured his understanding of the relation between markets, the state, and various forms of social organization several times.
If anyone is the “hero” in Burgin’s narrative, it is Milton Friedman, who took over leadership of the MPS at the moment when conflict over the relation between capitalism defined narrowly in market terms, and capitalism defined in terms of individual liberty, came to a head. It was to Friedman that Jouvenel wrote his famous letter of resignation from the Society, and it was Friedman that wrote the polemicCapitalism and Freedom (2002) that replaced Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1994) as the call-to-arms for the next generation of MPS members. Interestingly, Capitalism and Freedom was originally published in the same year that Hayek left Friedman’s lair in Chicago for retirement back on the continent, at the University of Freiburg. Capitalism and Freedom articulated a liberal social philosophy that was “less conflicted than those of the leading figures in the early Mont Pèlerin Society” (p. 177). Unlike his predecessors, who wr! ote general accounts of the benefits of a liberal society, “Friedman’s consistent preference for unconstrained markets combined with his methodological orientation toward empiricism to inspire him to propose an astonishing range of specific alterations to governmental practice” (p. 178). Among conservative policy-makers in America and Europe, the MPS had been held at arms-length, admired at a distance, and kept away from the practice of policy making. Friedman changed all that. His academic reputation and willingness to engage the public in their own terms “made him a formidable figure in the conservative intellectual world.” But he also possessed a toolbox equipped with novel, explicit ideas “that were clearly derived from and representative of a singular worldview” (p. 184). The combination of these qualities provided him with the means to change the public debate over markets in America, and eventually around the world.
As important as Friedman’s ideas became, and as narrowly focused on the efficiency gains from adopting market-based solutions to social problems the MPS became, there were always those who asked the Society to recall the broader dimensions of social and moral inquiry that had so animated its early members. Burgin spends the penultimate chapter of the book on this debate over the moral capital of the Society, concluding that the Friedman shift – dare I call it a version of the Samuelson’s “F-Twist” (1963)? – may have captured the spirit of an age, but it left a Society that had abandoned the very “questions of value that Hayek had established [it] to address” (p. 213).
Earlier I said that, in Burgin’s account, we see human beings communicating and acting to encourage society’s re-engagement with capitalism. And yet, as I walk away from the book, it is his account of those human beings’ thinking that most captivates me. Thinking in the midst of praxis, I’m tempted to say, because it is not thought leading to action; nor action leading to thoughts. It is both together, and more. Burgin ends by urging modern MPSers to return to the critical openness of the early MPS to engagement with a broader understanding of capitalism in all its dimensions. Can modern proponents of capitalism engage the discontent with liberalism that troubled Knight and Jouvenel, Michael Oakeshott and Röpke? “We have accepted the virtues of markets but failed to determine how to integrate them into life as we wish it to be” (p. 226).
References:
Friedman, M. (2002). Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hayek, F. A. (1994). The Road to Serfdom: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Knight, F. H. (2013). The Economic Organization. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Leighton, W. and López, E. (2012). Madmen, Intellectuals and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Mirowski, P. (2013). Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso.
Mirowski, P. and Plehwe, D. (Editors) (2009). The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Samuelson, P. A. (1963). “Problems of Methodology – Discussion,” American Economic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Papers and Proceedings): 231-36.
Stedman Jones, D. (2012). Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ross B. Emmett’s publications include Frank Knight and the Chicago School in American Economics, Routledge (2009).
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