Reinventing Liberalism by Ola Innset

Author:Ola Innset
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030388850
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Attendees

The following section will show that the attendees of the first Mont Pèlerin conference were indeed people very much like William Rappard : male, white, middle-aged, highly educated and materially comfortable. In a treatise arguing against one or more aspects of neoliberal philosophy, this sort of observation could be considered an argumentum ad hominem. As emphasized in the introduction, however, this book is not meant as a work of social theory in itself, and I make no normative arguments relating to the content of neoliberal doctrine. This is a work of intellectual history, meant to untangle and explain the arguments made by the actors, and to use the benefit of hindsight and historical analysis to show patterns and commonalities hitherto unnoticed. An important aspect of the task of contextualizing these utterings is to understand the homines who made the utterings, in order to gain a further appreciation of who they were and the intentions they might have had in saying what they did. Before moving on to the content of Rappard’s introduction, we will therefore take a brief look at the biographies of the thirty-seven attendees, and then break down some of the key demographics of the group gathered at Mont Pèlerin in 1947. This will be done in the main body of the text and not in a separate annex, since this information is important in achieving the goal of contextualizing early neoliberalism. It is my contention that the class, gender and racial background of these thinkers have to be taken into account when we analyse both their ideas and the culture out of which they grew. This is not to suggest that their ideas can be easily discarded as merely a reflection of their social standing; only that when attempting to understand their ideas and where they came from, we will do well to not discard the social background of the thinkers in question either. It is perhaps unlikely that, for instance, a group of underprivileged women of colour from the same countries would have gotten together to discuss economic theory at this point in time; but it is likely that people from different cultural and economic backgrounds than the neoliberals would have seen recent economic developments in a very different light. The neoliberals argued intellectually against socialism , organized labour and most forms of social programmes, and it would be sloppy to not also consider their social backgrounds when contextualizing their arguments. As we will see, their view of the world was from a position of great privilege, from which they were mainly able to see “economic planning ” as inefficient, and the rise of mass democracy as a threat to freedom.

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