Not a man but a movement. The ideas behind politics

Last week I posted a blog titled "The Next Ronald Reagan?  We're not ready yet?"  The premise of the article is that what is happening in the halls of government is a result of what is happening in the collective mind of the nation.  Abraham Lincoln put it this way: "the philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."

My post talked about rebuilding the dike of intellectual thought in the Conservative Movement.  I made the point that before we can think about the next Ronald Reagan, we need to identify and support the next Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Thomas Sowell, and scores of others.

In a follow up comment, I mentioned the importance of F.A. Hayek and his leadership in transitioning from mere intellectual inquiry to activism.  The following article appeared in a 1997 issue of National Review.

The plan to end planning - the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society
National Review,  June 16, 1997  by Ralph Harris

IN the aftermath of World War II, when Friedrich Hayek assembled some three dozen like-minded American and European scholars on the slopes of Mont Pelerin above Lake Geneva, the outlook for freedom could hardly have been more bleak. Churchill had coined the phrase "Iron Curtain" to mark the apparently permanent division of Europe between East and West. Some of the German participants at this first Mont Pelerin Society meeting had difficulty getting travel passes to Switzerland. Marshall aid had yet to be launched for the reconstruction of shattered economies. In April 1947 the new Deutsche Mark was more than a year away, and cigarettes still served as the general medium of exchange. As a grim omen for the future, Hayek's new classic The Road to Serfdom (1944) was banned throughout Germany, not only in the Soviet zone, but also by the three Western powers of occupation.

Exactly 50 years later, some eighty of the now five hundred members of the society gathered at Mont Pelerin, a few hundred yards from the smaller hotel at which the first meeting was held, to mark the anniversary and review progress. On the face of it, the world around had been transformed in a direction that would have rejoiced our anxious founders. How far can we conclude, therefore, that the objectives of the Society are well on their way to being fulfilled?

An objective observer at that first gathering in 1947 must surely have marveled at Hayek's dream and mocked his tiny band of economists, philosophers, and historians cocooned in Switzerland, remote from the ugly realities throughout the rest of Europe. After all, their purpose was to launch an intellectual crusade aimed at reversing the rising tide of postwar collectivism already signaled by the swamping Labour majority that had swept Churchill aside in Britain -- Hayek's chosen home since he quit Vienna in 1931.

Read the rest here.

Comments

[Craig Ladwig]

Rather than wait for the next personality, e.g., Ronald Reagan or even F.A. Hayek (who was surprised by his fame because it was "just common sense"), we should work to make better known the principles of the free-market systems being developed in the Public Choice school of economics. We have in Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. Eric Schansberg ready and living apologists here in Indiana willing to speak to Christian groups.