From American Affairs Journal, August 8, 2023:
“Pelerin” means pilgrim in French. I made a pilgrimage—an ironic one—to Mont Pelerin in Switzerland. It was here in 1947 that F. A. Hayek organized the foundational meeting that would effectively launch neoliberalism as an intellectual and policy movement (the term was coined at a predecessor meeting1 held in Paris before the war). The ideas discussed at and disseminated from Mont Pelerin were to reshape the global economy. The conference also led to the institutionalization of the neoliberal movement in the form of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS). I traveled to the holy mountain seventy-five years later to see what relics might remain.
Hayek organized his 1947 conference of neoliberals, or economic liberals, as they mostly called themselves, at the Hôtel du Parc on Mont Pelerin, also known as the Pelerin Palace. There were thirty-nine participants, including Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Karl Popper. The hotel offered a remote, private Alpine setting where they could discuss the dual threats to liberal economies posed by, in broadest terms, “collectivism” and monopoly. The conference was principally funded by the Swiss bank2 later to be known as Credit Suisse.
Mont Pelerin rises above the town of Vevey on Lake Geneva, from which it can be reached by a funicular railway. Vevey is part of the hyper-rich “Swiss Riviera.” It is a highly cultured town with many tourist attractions. Charlie Chaplin’s home and also tomb are here, where, in a bizarre crime, his corpse was disinterred and held for ransom. Vevey is also the location of Anita Brookner’s gloomy novel “Hotel du Lac.” I, however, had no time to visit the local sights because I was dead set on my pilgrimage.
I caught an early morning ferry from Evian, just across the lake. The day of my trip happened to coincide with major local (and to some extent global) news, flashing on the video screens of the ferry: Jean-Luc Godard was dead. The Franco-Swiss film director lived nearby in the lakeside village of Rolle, where he had died from assisted suicide. As the passengers on the ferry read the story, I could see them looking up from their newspapers and glancing towards Rolle further down the lake.
Once we docked, I took the short train ride to Vevey. The funicular to Mont Pelerin departs slightly outside Vevey’s town center, very close to Nestlé’s main office, “Palais Nestlé.” Here, executives in blue suits marched in twos and threes in front the company’s Y-shaped, fantastically sleek, modernist headquarters. Nestlé has done very well indeed from neoliberal globalization.
There were a handful of people waiting for the funicular on the day of my trip, most of them smoking. The funicular itself was built at an angle, with seats arranged off the sides of a very steep central staircase. We began our sharp climb to Mont Pelerin, traveling across vineyards and through layers of mist floating above Lake Geneva.
Most passengers got off at intermediate stops, leaving only two others for the final ascent: a teen wearing a New York Yankees hat and carrying an e-scooter, who looked somehow neater that his American equivalent, and a woman with wild hair gnawing her nails down to the quick who was possibly mad or just driven crazy by the no smoking rule on the funicular.
Let’s Just Skip the Meeting
On the funicular, we were approaching our terminal destination, the village of Mont Pelerin. Though it had been mostly clear below, a thick cloud lay overhead, obscuring views of the top of the mountain. We plunged into the cloud, and after a few minutes of traveling with almost no visibility, we pulled into the Mont Pelerin village station.
My two fellow passengers hopped off, immediately lit up cigarettes, and vanished into the cloud. I walked up the platform. Outside of the station, halos formed around the lights because of the fog. I could make out a sign for the Mirador hotel, my first destination, given that the Pelerin Palace hotel was closed. I could see enough to follow the road markings, and then made my way down the long driveway which led to the hotel itself.
When the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) held a second, special meeting on Mont Pelerin, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first, it took place at Le Mirador hotel. The Pelerin Palace, having fallen into decrepitude, was closed by this time. Milton Friedman was the only original participant to attend.
If the attendees at the original 1947 meeting felt embattled and their ideas obscure, things were very different in 1997. Socialism had been vanquished. Economic planning was now held in ill repute. The desirability of limited government, free trade, and a purely market-driven economy—all neoliberal principles—was unquestionable.
But this moment of triumph for neoliberalism would be short-lived. In the twenty-first century, things would turn out very differently for the neoliberal project. The ideas of 1947 would prove to be maladapted to the problems of the new millennium and exposed countries pursuing them to extreme risks.
Le Mirador Resort and Spa is a five-star Swiss hotel. Its changing ownership mirrors the vicissitudes of the global economic order. For years it was owned by an American entrepreneur from Philadelphia, who founded the Franklin Mint. In the 1990s, it passed into Japanese hands, and still has a highly regarded Japanese restaurant. Today, it is owned by a multimillionaire who is based in China.
The driveway ended in a circle in front of the hotel entrance, which on a non-misty day would have offered a view of the lake. To the side was a sculpture by J. Seward Johnson, the Johnson and Johnson heir, known for his realistic, but essentially artless, bronze sculptures. This one, a life-size rendering of two businessmen, one holding his jacket casually over his shoulder, was titled Let’s Just Skip the Meeting....
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