One index of the MPS's balancing act can be gleaned from comparing the nationalities of the participants in the prewar Colloque Walter Lippmann to those in the society's early postwar conferences. The search to identify scattered intellectuals who could be trusted to advance the neoliberal cause originally concentrated on Western Europe but expanded rapidly to the United States, and eventually beyond the rising superpower. While U.S. participants in the Colloque Walter Lippmann had been a small minority (3 of 84), almost half of the participants in the MPS founding conference in 1947 came from the United States, although three Austrians (Machlup, Haberler, and Mises) reinforced the American numbers (17 of 39).

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 122