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The Mont Pelerin Society was founded in Switzerland in 1947 by Friedrich A. von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Frank H. Knight, Karl R. Popper, George J. Stigler, Maurice Allais, Luigi Einaudi and other distinguished economists and philosophers as an international academy rather than a movement. It meets regularly to discuss the problems and prospects of a free society. Hayek invited me to an MPS meeting in Stanford in 1980, and I became a member in 1984. Its meeting in Indianapolis (photo above) on 11–16 October 2026 focused on two events from 250 years ago: the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the American Revolution in 1776. I was invited to speak at the meeting, and in my contribution I made two points. First, that the classical liberalism of John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith diverged thirteen years later, with the French Revolution of 1789. Secondly, that the great Anglo-Saxon ideas of 1776 had been anticipated in the Nordic countries.
Conservative versus Social Liberalism
Edmund Burke, a good friend of Hume and Smith, almost immediately turned against the French Revolution. He saw it not as a defence and extension of traditional liberties, as were the 1688 English Revolution and the 1776 American Revolution, but as an attempt to reconstruct society according to principles dreamt up by philosophers without practical experience or respect for tradition—an attempt bound to end in disaster, as it indeed did: first the Terror, then Napoleon’s military dictatorship. When Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, his compatriot Thomas Paine wrote a rejoinder, Rights of Man, in 1791. Both Burke and Paine believed in liberty. But for Burke it was an achievement of tradition, a skill in mutual adjustment, whereas for Paine it was an abstract ideal to fight for and then to implement. This marked the divergence between the conservative liberalism of Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Carl Menger, Hayek, Michael Oakeshott, and Robert Nozick, and the social liberalism of Paine, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, and John Rawls. The problem with social liberalism, however, is that it is not robust. It praises individual self-expression but ignores social stability. When challenged, it retreats, offering tolerance to the intolerant.
Snorri Before Jefferson
The principles guiding the American revolutionaries of 1776—government by consent and the right of rebellion—had also been expressed in the writings of the Icelandic chronicler Snorri Sturluson in the 1220s and 1230s. They articulated the tradition Tacitus described, and Montesquieu applauded: the popular assemblies of Germanic tribes. The Nordic nations, as well as the Anglo-Saxons, maintained this tradition. Briefly suppressed by the Normans, it reasserted itself in Magna Carta in 1215, the establishment of the English Parliament in 1265, and the Revolution of 1688. Locke’s philosophical defence of the Revolution in the Two Treatises of Government drew on this ancient Germanic tradition. The American revolutionaries were inspired by it as much as by the republican traditions of Ancient Greece and Rome. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson observed, ‘that the difference between the Whig and the Tory of England is that the Whig deduces his rights from the Anglo-Saxon source, and the Tory from the Norman’.
Chydenius Before Smith
In 1865, eleven years before Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations appeared, Anders Chydenius, an obscure priest in Finland, then part of Sweden, published a pamphlet, The National Gain, in which he advanced the same argument: that market forces should be largely left alone, that in a competitive economy private gain was in the public interest, and that all monopolies and privileges should be abolished. In the nineteenth century, the Swedes took his advice and removed most obstacles to economic growth, so that in the early twentieth century Sweden became one of the world’s most prosperous countries, even surviving the Social Democrats’ profligacy. Chydenius was not as profound or systematic a thinker as Smith, but he should nevertheless be remembered.
My message to the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Indianapolis was: While we should certainly discuss and develop the principles of a free society, we may also benefit from the wisdom of our ancestors, not least those unjustly neglected because they were outside the Anglosphere.