The 1940s
This chapter illustrates how Friedrich Hayek began to develop an intellectual and organizational strategy to protect and maintain “the free society” as World War II drew to an end. His strategy looked to the influence of the early twentieth-century American progressives and British Fabian socialists and argued that defenders of liberty would have to develop a similar organizational and intellectual strategy. The result of Hayek's efforts was that a sympathetic group of intellectuals from Paris, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Manchester, the LSE, and Chicago came together under his leadership to form a kind of neoliberal international. The group called itself the Mont Pelerin Society after the venue of its first meeting, which was held in Vevey, Switzerland.