Mont Pèlerin Society

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) is an association of academics, business people and journalists founded in 1947 by Friedrich August von Hayek with the aim of convincing future generations of liberal business ideas. It acts as a central hub of neoliberal networks.

history

The association was founded in April 1947 at a meeting at Mont Pèlerin (near Vevey on Lake Geneva , between Lausanne and Montreux ) in Switzerland, to which Friedrich Hayek had invited 36 scholars close to liberalism - economists as well as some philosophers, historians and politicians. Originally, Hayek had intended the historian Lord Acton and the political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville as patrons. However, because of their connection to the Catholic denomination, both met resistance from Frank Knight , so that the place of the meeting eventually became the name of the society. Fifteen participants at this first meeting had already met in 1938 as part of the Colloque Walter Lippmann . Hayek's intention was to discuss the future of liberalism after World War II . At the meeting, the participants rejected planned economy and state interventionist efforts and described the restoration of political freedom and a free market economy as an indispensable prerequisite for a sustainable future.

Among the participants in the first conference from April 1 to 10, 1947 were Maurice Allais , Walter Eucken , Milton Friedman , Friedrich August von Hayek , Frank Knight , Fritz Machlup , Ludwig von Mises , Karl Popper , Wilhelm Röpke and George Stigler . Albert Hunold and von Hayek took the lead in the Mont Pèlerin Society .

Popper differed from the others insofar as he wanted to soften the "common basic assumptions" demanded by Hayek for the members of the association in order to counter a homogeneity of opinion among the members (he regarded homogeneity as fundamentally problematic in his philosophy) and to seek reconciliation between Work towards socialists and liberals. Even before the foundation and also at the first meetings of the MPS, he made this demand. He suggested that some socialists or members close to socialism should also be admitted; At the same time, he asserted that this should not soften the emphasis on the dangers of socialism (dangers to freedom), and that he himself did not know any suitable candidates for admission to the association. Whether it was the lack of candidates or Hayek's attitude - Popper's request was not implemented. Popper stuck to his humanitarian instead of market-oriented attitude and emphasized shortly before his death that he considered it nonsense to idolize the principle of free markets.

At a meeting of the MPS, Walter Eucken declared a currency reform in connection with a price release as a condition for an economic upswing in Germany. In the 1950s and 1960s there were clashes between the American wing around von Hayek, von Mises and Milton Friedman on the one hand and the German wing on the other. The German wing, mainly represented by Rustow, Röpke and Müller-Armack, defended the social market economy against the “adjective-free” market economy preferred by the American wing and advocated more active responsibility for the state within the framework of a comprehensive social, vital and societal policy . They accused the American wing of betraying the real goals of neoliberalism and stressed the dangers of a morally “jaded and naked economism ”. Mises wrote in a letter in the mid-1950s: I have more and more doubts whether it is possible to cooperate with Ordo-interventionism in the Mont Pelerin Society (translated: “I have growing doubts that it is possible with Ordo-interventionism to cooperate in the Mont Pelerin Society ”). The disputes escalated in the Hunold affair, as a result of which Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rustow left the company. At the same time, neoliberal thinking became radicalized. "The less state, the better the market," was the motto of Milton Friedman's younger Chicago school . Hayek, too, has meanwhile demanded that the “competition as a discovery process” should not be disrupted by any state intervention. Neoliberalism turned back to laissez-faire .

Since the MPS was founded, eight MPS members have received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics donated by the Swedish Reichsbank : von Hayek (1974), Friedman (1976), Stigler (1982), James M. Buchanan (1986 ), Allais (1988), Gary Becker (1992), Ronald Coase (1991) and Vernon Smith (2002). Only the latter (* 1927) is still alive.

American participants were clearly in the minority at Colloque Walter Lippmann ; on the other hand, they made up about half of the members of the MPS from the start.

organization

The Society has (usually) met once a year since 1949. In addition to the main meetings, there are regional and extraordinary meetings of members. The membership is now over 1000. The Mont Pèlerin Society, unlike other think tanks, has no permanent employees; Publications are not available.

President

Members

Networking

The Atlas Network , founded by MPS member Antony Fisher in 1981, comprises 451 free-market organizations in 95 countries after 35 years.

In 2004, Dieter Plehwe and Bernhard Walpen gave a list of 93 think tanks in direct relationship with MPS members, whereby “direct relationship” means that at least one MPS member is active in an official position and / or the think tank ( with). For the German-speaking area they named:

Germany

Switzerland

Austria

Reception and criticism

In 1999, the social researcher Bernhard Walpen described the open enemies and their society in his book . A hegemonic study on the Mont Pelerin Society calls this “a hegemonic project”. According to Hayek, the broad goal of the MPS is to help establish liberalism as the dominant principle of social organization. For this it is necessary to develop a "consistent worldview" (Hayek) of liberalism. MPS member Detmar Doering criticized the analysis in the FAZ as inadequate and incomplete from the point of view of dogmatic Marxism, but calls the book rich in facts. Friedrich August von Hayek assumed that even in a democracy political decisions would only be made remotely through elections . The direction is given by the dominant intellectual currents, which could build their publicity for example through journalists and teachers. The producers of the theories are said to be the "original thinkers", while the "second hand dealers" can make the results of ideology production effective in society. Hayek assigned the role of “second hand dealers” to the think tanks .

In 2008, the contemporary historians Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael , together with the Institute of Economic Affairs, described the MPS as the “core of a network of pronounced anti-socialist and sometimes radical liberal economic and social theorists”. After 1970 these think tanks acted as “influential agencies for the dissemination of Hayek's radical market freedom ideology ” and Milton Friedman's economic theories .

On the occasion of their conference in Prague in 2012, the political scientist Jürgen Nordmann outlined the range of their political positioning in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as follows: “Who but insiders knows the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), some for the grail of freedom, others for hold the ideological North Korea of ​​global capitalism? "

In 2012, Angus Burgin saw in the “dominance and [the] dogmatic effect” with which some “radicalized” members exerted their influence on politics, the cornerstone for what he believed to be a unleashing capitalism and the related upheavals and economic crises of the recent past . Society would have moved away from its original goal of renewing liberalism in the face of the failure of free markets.

Stephan Schulmeister distinguishes three schools of neoliberalism that emerged from the MPS: an “Austrian” (Hayek, von Mises and Machlup ), a “neoclassical” (University of Chicago) and an “ordoliberal” (limited to Germany).

The cabaret show “ Die Anstalt ” on November 7, 2017 dealt with the networking of the Mont-Pèlerin Society and its influence on the economy and society.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. u. a. Angus Burgin: The Great Persuasion. Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2012; Daniel Stedman Jones: Masters of the Universe. Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2012; Philip Mirowski , Dieter Plehwe (eds.): The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2009, ISBN 978-0-674-03318-4 ; Dieter Plehwe, Matthias Schmelzer: Marketing Marketization. The Power of Neoliberal Expert, Consulting, and Lobby Networks. In: Contemporary historical research . 12 (2015), pp. 488-499; Philip Plickert : Changes in Neoliberalism. A study on the development and charisma of the “Mont Pèlerin Society”. Lucius & Lucius Verlag, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-8282-0441-6 ; Bernhard Walpen: The open enemies and their society. A hegemonic study on the Mont Pelerin Society. VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-89965-097-2 .
  2. ^ Claus Noppeney: Between Chicago School and Neoliberalism. Bern / Stuttgart 1998. ISBN 3-258-05836-9 , p. 64.
  3. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from June 27, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.liberaalarchief.be
  4. ^ Philip Mirowski, Dieter Plehwe: The Road From Mont Pelerin. 2009, ISBN 978-0-674-03318-4 , p. 15
  5. ^ Philip Mirowski: Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown . Verso, 2013, ISBN 978-1-78168-303-3 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search). Here in particular pages 70-71.
  6. ^ Daniel Stedman Jones: Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. University Press Group, 2012, ISBN 978-0-691-15157-1 , pp. 40f.
  7. ↑ a b FAZ.net / Philip Plickert : Neoliberalism is turning seventy. FAZ.net.
  8. ↑ Friedrich Kießling , Bernhard Rieger (ed.): Living with change: Reorientation and tradition in the Federal Republic of the 1950s and 60s. Verlag Böhlau, Cologne 2011, ISBN 978-3-412-20649-9 , p. 57.
  9. ↑ One of the points of conflict was the radical rejection of trade unions by American members. The Chicago School also enjoyed growing popularity, which viewed the concentration of economic and political power much less critically than the (German) Ordoliberals . See: Philip Mirowski, Dieter Plehwe: The Road From Mont Pelerin. 2009, ISBN 978-0-674-03318-4 , p. 30.
  10. ^ Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises - The Last Knight of Liberalism. Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, 2007, ISBN 978-1-933550-18-3 , pp. 879f.
  11. ^ Philip Mirowski, Dieter Plehwe: The Road From Mont Pelerin. 2009, ISBN 978-0-674-03318-4 , p. 19.
  12. ↑ MPS homepage
  13. ^ Philip Mirowski, Dieter Plehwe: The Road From Mont Pelerin. 2009, ISBN 978-0-674-03318-4 , p. 16.
  14. ^ Plehwe / Walpen / Neunhöffer (eds.): Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique , Routledge, New York 2006, p. 35.
  15. ↑ Stephan Schulmeister : From the Enlightenment to the Counter-Enlightenment. In: Die Presse , Vienna on August 30, 2016.
  16. ^ Dieter Plehwe, Bernhard Walpen: Buena Vista Neoliberal? In: Klaus-Gerd Giesen (Ed.): Ideologies in world politics. VS-Verlag, 2004, pp. 49-88.
  17. ↑ Bernhard Walpen: The open enemies and their society. A hegemonic study on the Mont Pelerin Society. P. 112 f. Quoted from Klöckner 2007, p. 71.
  18. ↑ Am Mont Pèlerin, Liberal Thinkers - A Marxist Enemy Observation. In: FAZ of March 29, 2005.
  19. ↑ Dieter Plehwe and Bernhard Walpen: Scientific and science-political modes of production in neoliberalism . In: PROKLA . tape 115 , 1999, pp. 203-235 .
  20. ↑ Doering-Manteuffel / Raphael: After the Boom - Perspectives on Contemporary History after 1970 , Göttingen, V&R, 2008, p. 32.
  21. ↑ CV Dr. Jürgen Nordmann at the ICAE
  22. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 7, 2012 ( Memento of November 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 2.5 MB)
  23. ↑ The hostile takeover | NZZ . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . May 7, 2013, ISSN  0376-6829 ( nzz.ch [accessed November 8, 2017]).
  24. ↑ Stephan Schulmeister: The way to prosperity. Ecowin, Munich 2018, p. 84.
  25. ↑ https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Die-transnationalen-Machteliten-haben-sowohl-kosmopolitische-als-auch-neo-nationalistische-Kraefte-3896376.html?seite=all accessed November 30, 2019