Abstract
Innset follows the argument concerning markets as mediators of modernity from the socialist calculation debates into the Walter Lippmann’s Colloquium of 1938. As the threat of communist revolution rescinded, the threat of fascism loomed larger, and self-proclaimed neoliberals conceptualized fascism as a form of socialism. Social liberalism was understood as a step on a slippery slope towards socialism, as the neoliberals claimed that subversion of market mechanisms ultimately led to totalitarian dictatorships. The solution they offered was a new liberalism which could use the power of modern states in the service of markets.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
A precursor to the Cold War era’s KGB and present-day FSB.
- 2.
Duncan Bell argues that the concept of “liberal democracy” also appeared at precisely this moment in time. “Barely visible before 1930, in the ensuing decades it began to supplant existing appellations for Euro-Atlantic states” (Bell 2014, 703).
- 3.
Kings College Cambridge, Modern Archives, John Maynard Keynes Papers, AV1, Box 38.
- 4.
Yale University Library, Walter Lippmann Papers, Selected correspondence 1931–1974, Box 10, Folder 11: Hayek.
- 5.
Yale University Library, Walter Lippmann papers, Selected correspondence 1931–1974, Box 10, Folder 11: Hayek.
- 6.
Yale University Library, Walter Lippmann papers, Selected correspondence 1931–1974, Box 10, Folder 11: Hayek.
- 7.
Yale University Library, Walter Lippmann papers, Selected correspondence 1931–1974, Box 10, Folder 11: Hayek.
- 8.
In Hayek’s list of “true liberals”, sent to Lippmann in 1937, Röpke was categorized not as part of the Freiburg group, but among “those who owed their conversion mainly to Mises”. Yale University Archives, Walter Lippman Papers, Selected Correspondence 1931–1974–77, Box 10, Folder 11: Hayek.
- 9.
Yale University Archives, Walter Lippman Papers, Selected Correspondence 1931–1974–77, Box 10, Folder 11: Hayek.
- 10.
Secondary Literature
Audier, S. (2008). Le Colloque Lippmann: Aux Origines du Néo-Libéralisme. Paris: Le Bord de l’Eau.
Audier, S., & Reinhoudt, J. (2019). The Walter Lippmann Colloquium—the Birth of Neo-Liberalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bell, D. (2014). What is liberalism? Political Theory, 42, 682–715.
Block, F., & Somers, M. R. (2014). The power of market fundamentalism—Karl Polanyi’s critique. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Boaz, D. (2007). Hitler, Mussolini. Cato Institute: Roosevelt.
Borkenau, F. (1937). The spanish cockpit. London: Faber and Faber.
Borkenau, F. (1938). The communist international. London: Faber and Faber.
Borkenau, F. (1940). The totalitarian enemy. London: Faber and Faber.
Borkenau, F. (1981). End and beginning. New York: Columbia University Press.
Burgin, A. (2012). The great persuasion: Reinventing free markets since the depression. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Burns, J. (2009). Goddess of the market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cassel, G. (1934). From protectionism through planned economy to dictatorship. International Conciliation, 307–325.
Centre International d´Études pour la Renovation du Libéralisme. (1938). Compte-rendu des séances du Colloque Walter Lippman. Paris: Libraire de Médicis.
Chivvis, C. S. (2010). The Monetary Conservative—Jacques Rueff and Twentieth-Century Free Market Thought. De Kalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press.
Dale, G. (2010). Karl Polanyi: The limits of the market. Key Contemporary Thinkers. Cambridge: Polity.
Dardot, P., & Laval, C. (2013). the new way of the world: On neoliberal society. Brooklyn, NY: Verso.
D’Eramo, M. (2013). Populism and the new oligarchy. New Left Review, II, 5–28.
Dewey, J. (1935). Liberalism and political action. New York: Prometheus Books.
Djelic, M.-L. (2013). When limited liability was (Still) an issue: Mobilization and politics of signification in 19th-Century England. Organization Studies, 34, 595–621.
Dybedahl, O. (2016). Nyliberalismens sterke stat. Vardøger, 16, 7–22.
Eichengreen, B. (1992). The origins and nature of the Great Slump revisited. The Economic History Review, 45, 213–239.
Fawcett, E. (2014). Liberalism: The life of an idea. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Frieden, M. (2005). Liberal languages. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Friedrich, C. J. (1955). The political thought of Neo-Liberalism. American Political Science Review, 49, 509–525.
Gamble, A. (1996). Hayek: The iron cage of liberty. Key Contemporary Thinkers. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Goodwin, C. D. (2014). Walter lippman: Public economist. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Gordon, D. (2006). Three new deals: Why the nazis and fascists loved FDR. Mises Daily Articles, September 22.
Hartwell, R. M. (1995). A history of the mont Pelerin society. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Hayek, F. (1948). Individualism and economic order. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Hirschman, A. O. (1991). The rhetoric of reaction: Perversity, futility, Jeopardy. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Hobsbawm, E. J. (2000). The age of extremes: A history of the world, 1914–1991. Incorporated: Peter Smith Publisher.
Hoppe, H.-H. (1997). The meaning of the Mises papers. The Free Market 15.
Hornberger, J. G. (2009). The socialism and fascism of the new deal. The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Jackson, B. (2012). Freedom, the common good, and the rule of law: Lippmann and Hayek on economic planning. Journal of the History of Ideas 73.
Jászi, O. (1941). Reviewed works: Man and society in an age of reconstruction by Karl Mannheim; The contempt of freedom; The Russian experiment and After by M. Polanyi. The American Political Science Review, 35, 550–553.
Jones, D. S. (2012). Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jones, W. D. (1999). The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Kershaw, I. (2016). To hell and back—Europe 1914–1949. New York: Viking.
Keynes, J. M. (2004). The End of Laissez-Faire & The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.
Kolev, S. (2010). F.A. Hayek as an Ordo-liberal. HWWI Research Paper 5.
Lippmann, W. (1997). Public opinion. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Lippmann, W. (2004). The good society. New York: Little Brown.
Mazower, M. (1999). Dark continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. London: Penguin.
Micklethwait, J., & Wooldridge, A. (2005). The company—A short history of a revolutionary idea. New York: Modern Library Chronicles.
Mirowski, P. (2014). Polanyi vs. Hayek. In: University of Sydney.
Mirowski, P., & Plehwe, D. (Eds.). (2009). The road from Mont Pèlerin: The making of the neoliberal thought collective. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Mises, L. (2005). Liberalism—The classical tradition. Auburn, Alabama: Liberty Fund.
Neumann, F. L. (1966). Behemoth: The structure and practice of national socialism, 1933–1944. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Pedersen, S. (2016). The guardians: The league of nations and the crisis of empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Polanyi, K. (1971). Primitive, archaic, and modern economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi (1st ed.). Garden City, N.Y.: Beacon Press.
Polanyi, K. (1985). The great transformation. Boston: Beacon Press.
Polanyi, K. (2001). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. 2nd Beacon (Paperback ed.). Boston, Mass: Beacon Press.
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. (2013).
Richardson, J. L. (2001). Contending liberalisms in world politics. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc.
Rodgers, D. T. (1998). Atlantic crossings: Social politics in a progressive age. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Rodrigues, J. (2012). Where to draw the line between state and markets? Journal of Economic Issues, 46, 1007–1033. https://doi.org/10.2753/JEI0021-3624460409.
Röpke, W. (1950). The social crisis of our time. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Schivelbusch, W. (2006). Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Schulz-Forberg, H. (2014). Laying the groundwork: The semantics of neoliberalism in the 1930s. In Re-Inventing Western Civilisation: Transnational Reconstructions of Liberalism in Europe in the Twentieth Century. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Schulz-Forberg, H. (2016). The intellectual and institutional roots of early neoliberalism. In WZB, Berlin.
Simons, H. C. (1934). A positive program for laissez faire. public policy pamphlet 15. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Streit, M. E., & Wolgemuth. (2000). The market economy and the state—Hayekian and Ordoliberal conceptions. In The Theory of Capitalism in the German Economic Tradition. Hanover: Springer.
Slobodian, Q. (2018). Globalists: The end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
de Tocqueville, A. (2007). Democracy in America (1st ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Tribe, K. (1995). Strategies of economic order—german economic discourse, 1750–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trotsky, L. (1972). The revolution betrayed. New York: Pathfinder Press.
Vanberg, V. J. (1998). The Freiburg School—Walter Eucken and Ordoliberalism. Freiburger Diskussionspapiere zur Ordnungsökonomik 4.
Walpen, B. (2004). Der Plan, das Planen zu beenden. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.
Zmirak, J. (2001). Wilhelm Röpke—Swiss Localist, Global Economist. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Innset, O. (2020). The Lippmann Colloquium. In: Reinventing Liberalism. Springer Studies in the History of Economic Thought. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38885-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38885-0_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38884-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-38885-0
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)