Opening Address to a Conference at Mont Pèlerin

Hayek’s opening address to the April 1947 Mont Pèlerin Conference is a founding statement rather than a finished doctrine. It presents the meeting as an attempt to gather dispersed liberal thinkers after war, nationalism, socialism, and totalitarianism had discredited older formulas and broken international intellectual contact. Its governing claim is that liberalism can be revived only through deliberate theoretical reconstruction, not through nostalgia or party loyalty.

The basic conviction which has guided me in my efforts is that, if the ideals which I believe unite us, and for which, in spite of so much abuse of the term, there is still no better name than liberal, are to have any chance of revival, a great intellectual task must be performed.

That “task” is both critical and constructive. Hayek wants liberalism stripped of accidental inheritances, business apologetics, and complacent slogans, but also strengthened against modern collectivist, historicist, and rationalist objections. The conference is therefore imagined as a workshop of shared fundamentals rather than a public rally. Its members need enough agreement to reason productively together, yet enough seriousness to revise inherited positions.

Hayek’s liberalism is explicitly interdisciplinary. Although economists are prominent, he warns against reducing political philosophy to market analysis. The crisis of freedom is also legal, moral, religious, historical, and educational; anti-liberal assumptions are transmitted through history-writing, theories of social development, public opinion, and conceptions of reason as much as through economic policy.

Of course, a political philosophy can never be based exclusively on economics or expressed mainly in economic terms.

This explains the breadth of the proposed agenda: competitive order and “free enterprise,” the rule of law, historical interpretation, liberalism’s relation to Christianity, Germany’s future, and European federation. Hayek’s phrasing already distances the project from simple laissez-faire. A liberal order must be institutional, legal, and moral, not merely a defense of existing private interests.

The address also defines the kind of participant Hayek believes the moment requires. He does not want conventional conservatives, inherited liberals, or people attached to formulas because they are old. The desired circle consists of thinkers who have confronted opposing doctrines and can reformulate liberal principles after that confrontation.

The old liberal who adheres to a traditional creed merely out of tradition, however admirable his views, is not of much use for our purpose.

This emphasis gives the speech its distinctive tone: anxious but not defeatist, selective but not sectarian, intellectual rather than electoral. Hayek sees isolated scholars across Europe and America working on similar problems without adequate communication. Postwar conditions have made collaboration difficult, especially for those in damaged countries, and the conference is meant to repair that broken circulation of ideas.

The closing organizational reflections anticipate the Mont Pelerin Society as a continuing association, but Hayek is careful about its character. It should not become a propaganda machine, party instrument, or mass organization. Its value depends on candor, common seriousness, and mutual criticism among people who share basic liberal convictions while remaining open to hard theoretical work.

This character can only be preserved if membership can be acquired only by election, and if we treat admission into our circle as seriously as the great learned academies.

The address is therefore important less for any single policy prescription than for its institutional imagination. Hayek frames postwar liberalism as an unfinished scholarly enterprise requiring international collaboration, historical self-criticism, legal principle, economic clarity, and moral renewal. The Mont Pèlerin meeting is presented as the first step in creating the intellectual conditions under which such a liberalism might again become credible.