Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
The Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938 and the precursor meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) in 1947 were critical engagements with the complete failure of liberalism as it was seen in the 1930s. In both cases, people came together full of doubt, wanting to look self-critically at whether liberalism still had a future.
ævum: What is the Mont Pèlerin Society and what was the Walter Lippmann Colloquium?
Stefan Kolev: The Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938 and the precursor meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) in 1947 were critical engagements with the complete failure of liberalism as it was seen in the 1930s. In both cases, people came together full of doubt, wanting to look self-critically at whether liberalism still had a future. And those who thought it had a future were convinced that liberalism had to be translated into the present.
Both times about 40 people came together. That was probably 50 percent of all intellectuals who at the time would still have said that they were prepared to stand up for something like liberalism. At the colloquium it was many French names one no longer knows today, also some industrialists. The first meeting of the MPS was colourful in terms of Europeans, with a few Americans. But some well-known names appear on both attendance lists: Friedrich August von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, or Wilhelm Röpke.
Liberals were back then a vanishing minority, and of this minority a large part was gathered at these two places.
Compared to back then, we are damn well off today. The Prometheus ecosystem alone has so many young people. Back then, on average and given the life expectancy of the time, they were rather old. At the colloquium and the MPS, those present were above all those born around 1900, who had lived through the time before the First World War and who now asked themselves: does liberalism after 1914 make any sense at all? Compared to that, we today, despite all the shattering of liberal institutions, are better off, and the international community of liberals is a thousand times richer than back then.
ævum: How did this impulse to start anew come about?
Stefan Kolev: At the Walter Lippmann Colloquium the following is interesting: Walter Lippmann was a dazzling figure and he had published a remarkable book. To put this in perspective, Lippmann was back then a little like Cass Sunstein today, who suddenly turns from a leftist into a liberal and recognises the Hayekians as his friends. Something similar happened with Lippmann. In the early 1930s, after the Great Depression, he was actually known as an influential mouthpiece for Keynes in the US. And suddenly he writes this book in which, while praising Keynes for making hope possible for people, he also praises the Austrians with their impossibility proofs of socialism. Here someone was finally asking: what could a liberal order concretely look like, even if one searches for answers across the ideological trenches?
From this also grew the MPS spirit: it is not enough to say that socialism and interventionism do not work. We have to spell out our liberalism in order to draft a positive programme. So the early MPS is marked by the attempt to draft an order whose framework and rules of the game make laissez-faire possible inside that framework. At the beginning there was an important debate that should also occupy us today. Popper understood the MPS as a very broad, anti-totalitarian society. Hayek said: no, it will be a liberal society; the anti-authoritarian big tent does not work here. That is why Popper never played an important role and withdrew very early. That is an important question for us liberals also today: should we, as centrists, commit ourselves to anti-totalitarianism, or do we create narrow liberal spaces that shut out other members of the centre?
Back to the MPS: around this time there is an unbelievable parallel between what one says in Chicago, between the Freiburg group, between Hayek, and also between various islands of the neoliberal archipelago that exist elsewhere. Luigi Einaudi in Italy, Jacques Rueff in France. They all say more or less the same: an ordered freedom is needed. The entire history of political economy stands for a constant rethinking of freedom and order. Freedom can only be explained and conveyed if it comes with a promise of order.
ævum: What role did the economists play in the MPS? Who had the say?
Stefan Kolev: The MPS was always shaped by economists, even though Hayek was never quite at ease with this dominance. But over time what the economists were interested in changed. In the first 15 years, economists were in the majority, but they were all order-economists, as I described. So Hayek, Mises, Röpke, or Frank Knight. After that, from the 1960s on, the Friedman generation took over. This generation, with George Stigler and the younger economists, narrows the debate to what to this day passes for economics. With that the society „entgeistigte” itself more and more. Of this generation, Friedman is even the broadest, since he had still experienced the early meetings and so always thinks rules and orders along with everything else. 1947 was his first trip abroad, all of that shaped him until the end. But in the MPS in general there was an Americanisation and an economisation, in the modern sense of US-shaped economics. While the older ones, up to the early 1960s, tried to think the social, the political, the cultural, the historical, along with every economic question.
ævum: How did the ideological rifts within the MPS develop further?
Stefan Kolev: This question was never trivial. The tension ran between the neoliberals and those whom the neoliberals called paleo-liberals. The consensus at the colloquium was still: we have to develop liberalism further in earnest; just copying from the 19th century does not work. This need for renewal of liberalism was discussed more and more controversially. With the Hunold affair in the early 1960s, the neoliberals, that is Röpke, Rüstow, and a few others, left for various reasons, among them the affair. Hayek stayed, but withdrew from the presidency. And there remain: Friedman, Fritz Machlup, and Stigler. One gets used to this, in my view problematic, vocabulary of „classical liberalism”, and with it an increasingly „economistic” version of a rather thin liberalism.
ævum: Was Mont Pèlerin a success story?
Stefan Kolev: Whether the Mont Pèlerin Society was and is a success is open to argument. A great success was surely that Hayek and the Friedman-Stigler generation could exert political influence. When in the 1970s the Keynesian paradigm no longer worked, they had something on offer: a differentiated programme for economic policy and in parts also for social questions. With it they had something to offer Reagan, Thatcher, and others who wanted to come out of crisis mode. That is certainly connected with the MPS meetings and the debates there. But after this generation, the next generation and new ideas were lost sight of to a considerable degree.
ævum: Could something like the MPS work again today? What would it take to create that momentum again?
Stefan Kolev: I believe such an MPS momentum would have two preconditions. On one side: the insight that we obviously did something wrong in the last years. And on the other hand: again a positive programme that addresses our time. We have to be radical in the matter, empathetic in language. Who could do it? The MPS unfortunately neglected the cultivation of the next generation; there is a small lack of momentum, of energy. Students for Liberty does not provide the impulse anymore either. But their first conferences had a lot of energy, whether in Prague or in Berlin, I look back on them with great fondness. Combine this energy with concentrated work on self-critical analysis and positive ideas, and it could work.
Much more is not even needed, because we have a certain historicising tendency to revere all the old meetings and their protagonists. After the first MPS meeting one did not know whether the whole thing would last. There was also chance involved, that money was found, that people organised the individual meetings. We, by contrast, can learn from these models, also to avoid that new institutions become sclerotic.
The Walter Lippmann Colloquium was organised in 1938, when Hitler was already in power. That was late, then. Held in 1928 it could have been much more productive. It would be wrong to say that we have today again conditions like 1938. But perhaps like 1928, already. With the second term of Donald Trump we are already late. Everything we experience as fragility, we already experience without a macroeconomic shock. We have so far been spared a great macroeconomic crisis, and we would do well, in the short time that remains before its outbreak, to work as intensively as possible on the renewal of our liberalism and of the centre.
The interview was conducted by Sven Gerst, edited by Marius Drozdzewski.
