In the immediate postwar years the members of the Mont Pèlerin Society faced a pop u lar environment that was deeply hostile to their economic views. In the face of this opposition, they were quick to draw connections between economic freedoms and po liti cal liberalism, but also to distinguish po liti cal liberalism from the advocacy of government by majority rule. The members' attempts to work through the problematic relationship between capitalism and democracy resulted in some of their richest and most complicated works, but also revealed a willingness to abandon pop u lar sovereignty altogether when the views of the public did not align with their own. As John MacCallum Scott, the secretary general of the Liberal International, invoked Edmund Burke to observe at their gathering in 1956, "Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed." In practice, this sometimes meant disenfranchising local populations in order to defend the market economy from their control.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 305