By the time Feulner assumed the mantle at Heritage, he could boast of an impressive resume as a conservative activist. Together with William Buckley, Milton Friedman, and Donald Lipsett, he helped establish the Philadelphia Society in 1964—an effort that grew out of deep disappointment among conservatives over Republican candidate Barry Goldwater's defeat in the U.S. presidential election. The founders of the Philadelphia Society envisioned it as "an American version of the Mont Pèlerin Society, begun by F. A. Hayek in Europe twenty years before" (Edwards 1997, 186). A decade later, at the age of 32, Feulner himself would be made a member of MPS, and two decades after that, in 1996, he would be elected president of that organization.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1804