Mont Pèlerin 1947

Overview

Marking the 75th anniversary of the first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, in 1947, this volume presents for the first time the original transcripts from this landmark event. The society was created by Friedrich Hayek as a forum for leading economists and intellectuals to discuss and debate classical liberal values in the face of a rapidly changing world and political trends toward socialism. Bruce Caldwell, a major scholar of Hayek, provides an informative introduction and explanatory notes to the source documents, drawn from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, where they have been available to scholars. Now accessible to all, the transcripts reveal what was said on a wide range of topics, including free markets, monetary reform, wage policy, taxation, agricultural policy, the future of Germany, Christianity and liberalism, and more. They provide insights into the thinking of men such as Hayek, Milton Friedman, Aaron Director, Frank Knight, Walter Eucken, Karl Popper, and other leading figures in the classical liberalism movement, illuminating not only their ideas but also their distinctive personalities. A photo section shows rarely seen images from the meeting.

Reviews

"Imagine eavesdropping on one of the most revered and reviled conferences of the twentieth century." —Douglas Irwin, professor of economics, Dartmouth College

"The intellectual foundations of free-market thinking for the remainder of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century." —George S. Tavlas, alternate to the governor, Bank of Greece and distinguished visiting fellow, Hoover Institution 

"This record of debates and deliberations is well worth reading amid the challenges of today." —Jennifer Burns, associate professor of history, Stanford University

Author Biography

Bruce Caldwell teaches economics at Duke University, where he is director of the Center for the History of Political Economy. He is a leading scholar on the life and ideas of the Nobel laureate and social theorist F. A. Hayek. John B. Taylor is the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution and the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He was president of the Mont Pèlerin Society from 2018 to 2