Mont Pelerin Society Founded with Volker Fund Support, Launching International Free-Market Network

Friedrich Hayek organizes the founding conference of the Mont Pelerin Society in Switzerland, establishing an international network of free-market economists and intellectuals that becomes the intellectual foundation for neoliberal economic policy worldwide. The William Volker Fund provides crucial financing, with Harold Luhnow’s foundation covering travel costs that allow 17 American economists to attend, including Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, George Stigler, and Leonard Read. The conference demonstrates early corporate-funded coordination to build free-market intellectual infrastructure transcending national borders, creating sustained relationships among scholars who would reshape economic policy globally. Works including Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, Leoni’s Freedom and the Law, and Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty all evolve from Mont Pelerin meetings funded by Volker. The Society becomes the premier international forum for developing and disseminating free-market economic theory opposing government regulation and social welfare programs, with funding from the Volker Fund, Foundation for Economic Education, Bank of England, and Swiss banks. This 1947 gathering precedes the Powell Memo by 24 years but establishes the international network and ideological framework that Powell later systematizes, demonstrating that corporate-funded free-market intellectual infrastructure existed decades before Powell’s 1971 blueprint called for business to “assiduously cultivate” political power through coordinated institutional capture.