Hayek was crossing the Atlantic, under radio silence, when the Reader’s Digest article appeared. He had been anticipating a relaxed promotional tour of a handful of American universities, but when he landed in New York he found that he was suddenly famous, and his publishers had booked him for a string of town hall meetings and radio shows. He didn’t like being ‘pressed into public lecturing’, but soon grew accustomed to people who, as he put it, ‘were enthusiastic about the book but never read it’. When he told them about the dangers of state intervention they responded with warm applause, but when he went on to argue that governments should ‘step in where competition cannot possibly do the job’ (financing hydroelectric power for example) and implement a ‘plan for competition’ (including ‘unemployment insurance’ and a ‘minimum-wage law’), he noticed that ‘the temperature of the room went down at least ten degrees.’
When Hayek returned to Britain he set about raising money for an international conference to carry on the work of the prewar Paris symposium on neoliberalism. The conference took place in the spring of 1947 at a hotel in the Swiss village of Mont Pèlerin, with Hayek guiding some forty participants – including an ambitious young American called Milton Friedman – through a long agenda, under the wary gaze of Ludwig von Mises. They agreed to create a permanent organisation called the Mont Pelerin Society, dedicated to the proposition that a ‘free society’ depends on ‘market-oriented economic systems’; but they stopped short of committing themselves to pure laissez-faire capitalism, which led Mises to storm out, denouncing them all as ‘a bunch of socialists’.
The fact that the Mont Pelerin Society is still going after 75 years testifies to Hayek’s organisational skill.
