Perhaps most important, the meetings of the society were no longer refl ective of a broad atmosphere of consensus within the conservative academic world. Economists who supported free markets were not so eager as in former years— at both the "Colloque Lippmann" in 1938 and the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society nearly a de cade later— to validate certain modes of government intervention and to emphasize the need for philosophical justifi cations for free markets that extended beyond the material abundance they ostensibly produced. As a result, they no longer appeared to be drawing on a common tradition, or at times even engaging in direct dialogue, with colleagues and peers who remained suspicious toward the application of an unyielding economism.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 375