Historians of the conservative intellectual movement in the United States have generally depicted the thinkers who rejected liberalism in the 1940s and 1950s as idiosyncratic and iconoclastic figures on the margins of American life. "What seems, in retrospect, most remarkable about the leaders of this movement in these early years was their tenacity in the face of an often hostile environment," writes historian George H. Nash, in his magisterial 1976 analysis of the rise of conservatism as an intellectual force. This historical judgment largely echoes the beliefs of the participants themselves. Many conservative intellectuals of the early postwar period—a group that includes traditionalist philosophers like Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk as well as the Austrian economists and early libertarians—felt themselves to be sharply at odds with the rest of the modern world, out of step with the commonly accepted faiths of their day. They saw themselves as especially distant from the business world, which they believed had accepted the basic tenets of New Deal liberalism.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1438