During the early years of the Mont Pèlerin Society, the very existence of a conservative intellectual world was a source of skepticism. Scholars in the 1950s, observing the atmosphere of consensus that pervaded American politics, were quick to deride the intellectual credibility of their conservative contemporaries. Lionel Trilling referred in The Liberal Imagination to the "plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation." To the extent that there was an orientation toward conservatism, it was attributable to "impulses," or "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." Richard Hofstadter appropriated Theodor Adorno's term "pseudoconservative" to describe the most vocal dissenters from the postwar liberal consensus, citing "clinical evidence" of their "profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways."

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 309