Title: The return of laissez-faire
Description: This dissertation examines the transatlantic history of free-market ideas and institutions in the decades following the onset of the Great Depression. It approaches this narrative through the lens of the Mont Pèlerin Society, a group founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947 to provide an international forum for opponents of government intervention. Drawing on evidence from archival collections in Germany, France, Switzerland, England, and the United States, it follows the society's members as they experienced individual political awakenings, coalesced into a coherent and purposive intellectual community, attempted to create a shared philosophy of capitalism, and collapsed into a state of lasting discord precisely as their efforts appeared to be achieving popular success. The initial chapters focus on the interwar development of a network of economists and intellectuals--including Frank Knight, Walter Lippmann, Wilhelm Röpke, and Louis Rougier--who shared a belief that laissez-faire economics should be replaced by a revised and moderated form of market advocacy. Following the Second World War, Hayek drew on novel forms of institutional and financial support to establish the Mont Pèlerin Society with the goal of supporting the development of such a social philosophy. Over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s, a subset of the society led by Milton Friedman began advocating a return to laissez-faire economic policies, and thereby instigated an enduring schism within the conservative intellectual world. The final chapters provide a critical reconstruction of the divergence of libertarians and traditionalists during the 1960s and 1970s, and examine the contested ideas that helped to precipitate the restoration of laissez-faire economics to a position of influence in American public debate.

Past treatments of the conservative ascendancy have exhibited a range of limitations, including an exclusive focus on American events, an excessive emphasis on social pathologies, an insufficient engagement with the influence of social scientists, and a tendency to distill complex ideas into misleadingly simple formulas. By challenging these modes of analysis, this dissertation provides the established narrative with a needed dynamism: between intellectuals and popular sentiments, between economic and political ideas, and between the domestic and international spheres.