Maurice Allais and the Mont-Pèlerin Society: an inevitable clash?
Along with the Colloque Walter Lippmann in Paris in 1938, the inaugural meeting of the Mont-Pèlerin Society in Vevey in 1947, organized by Hayek, is widely regarded as a founding moment for the neoliberal movement (see Mirowski and Plehwe 2015). Maurice Allais, a French economist and future Nobel Prize winner in economic sciences, was one of the 39 participants of the latter. A lot is known now about the tenor and content of the discussions which took place during the conference, especially thanks to the publication of the transcripts of the different sessions, held by the Hoover Institution Archives (see Caldwell 2022). What they reveal is a series of disagreements among the participants not only on the name to be given to the Society, but more fundamentally on the aims of the Society and on the core principles of a good liberal society. Despite dissenting voices, the participants eventually adopted a Statement of Aims, much shorter than the first draft, which is still the Statement of Aims of the Mont-Pèlerin Society today. Maurice Allais is remembered for being the only participant to have refused to sign it, because of a disagreement on private property. In this paper, I try to explain why he held such a position and how he justified it to Hayek, and more generally in what ways his view of liberalism was singular among the participants of the inaugural conference of the Mont-Pèlerin Society. To do this and building on published and unpublished materials, I study first his correspondence with Hayek on his refusal to sign the Statement of Aims and his recommendations for an alternative Statement, closer to the first draft. Then, I examine his different interventions during the conference on class conflicts, the international aspect of liberalism, federalism, and taxation and inequality, as well as his presentation titled “La rénovation du libéralisme” (The renovation of liberalism), and put them in parallel with his numerous works and initiatives in the 1940s and 1950s to rethink liberalism and to find a third way between laissez-faire and state planning, or liberalism and socialism. As we shall see, Allais’s defense of “competitive planning” was more in the spirit of the Colloque Walter Lippmann than the Mont-Pèlerin Society.
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Keywords: Allais; Neoliberalism; Mont Pèlerin Society