The Road from Mont Pèlerin

Although modern neoliberalism was born at the Colloque Walter Lippmann in 1938, it only came into its own with the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, a partisan thought collective, in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1947. Its original membership was made up of transnational economists and intellectuals, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, and Luigi Einaudi. From this small beginning, their ideas spread throughout the world, fostering, among other things, the political platforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the Washington Consensus. Road from Mont Pelerin presents the key debates and conflicts that occurred among neoliberal scholars and their…