Friedrich August von Hayek, Closing Speech to the 1984 Mont Pèlerin Society Meeting

Delivered in Paris on March 3, 1984, Hayek’s closing speech combines institutional recollection with an assessment of liberalism’s prospects and a statement of its philosophical foundations. The 2022 edited English text incorporates handwritten amendments and supplies historical annotations, including corrections to Hayek’s memories. Its central argument distinguishes limited immediate political achievement from a profound transformation of intellectual opinion. The Mont Pèlerin Society’s continuing purpose, Hayek maintains, is to renew the philosophy of freedom rather than intervene collectively in everyday politics.

The opening reconstructs the Society’s origins through the experience of intellectual isolation. Hayek recalls proposing an international association of independent thinkers in 1944, provisionally named after Acton and Tocqueville. The circulation of The Road to Serfdom, particularly through its American edition and Reader’s Digest condensation, brought him into contact with scattered sympathizers who believed themselves alone. He also credits Orwell’s contribution to opposition to totalitarianism, resisting an exclusively self-centered account of liberalism’s revival. His organizing impulse emerges from these encounters:

I think it was a result of that experience that I came to the conclusion that it was essential to bring these people together.

Association therefore answers a practical problem: convictions held privately need sustained international communication to become an intellectual movement. Hayek locates a precedent in Louis Rougier’s 1938 Walter Lippmann colloquium, interrupted by war. The founding meeting in 1947 then depended on a contingent financial opportunity: Albert Hunold had raised money for a proposed liberal journal under Wilhelm Röpke, but disagreements over the journal allowed the funds to be redirected. Intellectual commitment required personal mediation and material support, not merely agreement about principles.

The edition’s annotations qualify this retrospective narrative. They correct Hayek’s attendance figures and the interval between the Lippmann colloquium and the founding meeting, and identify St. Moritz in 1957, rather than Beauvallon, as the occasion of his address “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” Such corrections matter because the speech offers a founder’s interpretation of institutional purpose, not an independently verified chronology. His reference to that address nevertheless establishes how he understands the Society’s identity: an evolving liberal philosophy whose task exceeds either preservation of existing arrangements or tactical political advocacy.

The MPS has never taken positions on political matters.

Hayek distinguishes the Society’s collective vocation from its members’ responsibilities as citizens. Individuals should participate in politics, but the association should address the underlying principles through which opinion-makers eventually influence political development. Its work is to revive and adapt the philosophy of a free society. This distinction supplies the criterion for judging its achievements:

I have to admit that the effects on practical politics have been very small. But the effects on the movement of ideas have been absolutely fundamental.

The claim is deliberately asymmetrical. Hayek remains discouraged by governmental conduct while finding grounds for confidence in generational change. Where classical liberalism once seemed the residual belief of aging thinkers, younger people now recognize both freedom’s material advantages and its moral justification. The younger French economists hosting the Paris meeting are especially significant to him. France had seemed resistant because, in his diagnosis, Cartesian confidence in reason encouraged the belief that society could be deliberately reconstructed. Liberal renewal there consequently represents a challenge to an intellectual obstacle, not simply an increase in membership. His optimism remains conditional on politicians not destroying the world before the emerging generation can exert influence.

The final section explains why changing opinion takes precedence over immediate political action. Hayek attributes socialism’s ascendancy to intellectuals rather than the proletariat, acknowledging that many acted with excellent intentions. Their mistake was factual and philosophical: they exaggerated reason’s capacity to organize society around known purposes. He connects this diagnosis with the book he was then preparing:

It's the intellectuals who have really created socialism, who have spread socialism, out of the best intentions, because of a factual mistake, out of what in a book on which I am working, I call a fatal conceit, the idea that human reason is strong enough to reorganise society deliberately in the service of known, foreseen ends and purposes.

His alternative does not dispense with intelligence. It treats inherited morality as a second endowment, equally necessary to the extensive social order. Property, honesty, and the family sustain cooperation even though, he argues, their value has never been adequately justified intellectually. Rules selected through their contribution to societies’ growth embody an inheritance that deliberate reasoning did not create. Calling such beliefs “symbolic truths” rather than “superstitions” gives them a positive status without assimilating them to rationally demonstrated propositions.

The conclusion thus joins intellectual renewal to moral inheritance. Hayek calls for reason and morals to govern as equal partners, while identifying the Christian West’s moral tradition as the source of modern civilization. This historically specific claim makes his defense of freedom more than an argument for economic efficiency: it rests on the dependence of rational activity upon inherited practices. The speech’s significance lies in this connection between institutional strategy and philosophical substance. A society devoted to changing ideas must challenge reason’s claims to mastery while explaining why freedom depends on rules whose civilizational importance exceeds deliberate design.