Yet there abided a closed subset of MPS insiders who recognized the force of the paradoxes of tolerance and democracy; and consequently they ran their thought collective as an exclusive hierarchical organization, consisting of members preselected for conformity, which encountered opposed conceptions of the world only in highly caricatured versions produced by their own true believers. Esoteric knowledge was transgressive: a liberalism for the twenty-first century could be incubated and sustained only by an irredeemably illiberal organization. Part of the price of admission was initiation into the double truth of the “minimum philosophy”: insiders could learn to live with this esoteric doctrine after a long period of apprenticeship. Outsiders need never know anything about it, and could persist snug in their belief that liberalism meant the tolerant dialogue of the open society; of course, they need never apply to actually enter the MPS.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 200