The science of liberalism that neoliberals attempted to mend overlapped with the construction of a liberal view of science as these two strands became intimately conjoined in the shadow of totalitarianism. Through their publications and correspondence, neoliberals fortified their epistemological insights and complementary social theory. This was one in which the method of freedom was bound by conventional rules which had to be adopted as articles of faith, that is, as a constitution. Nonetheless, when neoliberalism started taking institutional shape, many of the latent divergences became manifest and its scientific and ideological turf fissured. The first decades of the Mont Pèlerin Society can be seen retrospectively as the impossible attempt to reconcile these diverging views. Many of the polymaths, including Polanyi, left the Society during the first decade of its existence as it relinquished its role as a multidisciplinary intellectual center for the growth of an alternative theory of liberalism venturing beyond economic freedom.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 91