Reading the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in the context of its time shows that it did not fall from the sky in the summer of 1938 as the first seed of a robust and unchanging worldview of what would later become an ever-growing ideological flora in the Mont Pèlerin Society. It shows that neoliberalism was entrenched from the beginning in transnational elite networks whose goal was (and still is) to define ideas of normative statehood and liberal governance able to keep politics within its "proper limits" while making sure that nation-states share an ideological DNA without being identical.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 401