All the participants in the Colloque Lippmann were hand-picked. The Marxist theorist Rudolf Hilferding and the former socialist minister Charles Spinasse, who wished to attend the discussion, were nimbly excluded because they “were [sic] politicians.” The international forum gathered some of the most influential French corporate managers (Auguste Detoeuf, Louis Marlio, Ernest Mercier), senior civil servants (Jacques Rueff, Roger Auboin), and intellectuals (Raymond Aron) as well as members of a rising new generation of liberal economists (Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, etc.). In retrospect, the participants in the Colloque Lippmann would appear to have constituted a prestigious conclave: its members would later become a Nobel Prize winner in economics (Friedrich Hayek), the general secretary of the Organization for European Economic Co-Operation (Robert Marjolin), the architects of the German social market economy (Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow), the director of the Bank for International Settlements (Roger Auboin), the financial adviser of General Charles de Gaulle (Jacques Rueff), the power behind Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars project (Stephan Possony), and so on.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 277