The Mont Pèlerin Society differed in important ways from the FEE and AEA, which sought to popularize free market economic ideas and to intervene in policy debates. By contrast, Friedrich Hayek, the founder of the MPS, wanted to create an organization that would serve as a space of free intellectual inquiry, where social scientists and expert thinkers devoted to the idea of the free market could meet to discuss and refine their thought. The remove of the MPS from the rough-and-tumble world of policy debate, as well as the central roles played by European, non-American intellectuals in the organization, might have seemed to make it an unlikely candidate for support from American businessmen. But the Society, along with the domestically oriented, partisan political think tanks, benefited from the active participation of the network of American business conservatives. This was most evident in the fund-raising drive for the first American meeting of the MPS in Princeton in 1958, which the Society pursued almost entirely at the behest of Jasper Crane, a former executive of the DuPont Chemical Company who did the brunt of the fund raising from other businessmen to raise money for the meeting. Crane's enthusiastic commitment to building the American meeting, as well as the participation of the other businessmen whom he sought to involve in the group, suggests a different view of the Society's history, and in turn, of the intellectual history of the postwar right—one in which the lines between business conservatism and the world of intellectual life cannot be so neatly drawn.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1441