The perception that a unique opportunity was at hand inspired the pivotal question of how best to take advantage of it. Hayek, Röpke, and their peers faced the fundamental challenge of attempting to transform a felt consonance of opinion among a small network of individuals— in some cases separated, as Röpke noted in his letter to Stanford economist Karl Brandt, by “a continent and an ocean”— into a coherent movement. This was further complicated by per sis tent ambiguities about what the goals of such a community would be. As the reviews of Lippmann’s The Good Society had revealed, dual criticisms of laissezfaire and creeping collectivism had yet to yield a clear repre sen ta tion of what fi scal and social policies one could advocate. And as a community consisting primarily of academics, they remained committed to ideological change but deeply uncertain about how to transform their isolated theoretical ideas into effective po liti cal praxis.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 167