Europe was slowly, painfully recovering from WWII. Liberalism—which had seemingly won the day against fascism in the West—was seeking to revitalize itself. It had tried before the war—through the Walter Lippmann colloquium—to moderate itself back into relevance. Many of the figures from the colloquium were intent to try again, with lessons learned from the war. One attendee—Ludwig von Mises—had no intentions of moderating, and was even more convinced that such a road led to destruction.In late 1946, Friedrich von Hayek was offered money from the Volcker Fund (the generous sponsors of Mises’s stay in America) to host a summit of the prominent liberals of the world. After much careful thought, invitations were sent out to dozens of liberal thinkers, mostly economists, but also historians and

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

August 26, 1938: Austria was under Nazi rule, and Czechoslovakia was feared to be next. The world was on the brink of a new war. In Paris, a room full of famed economists met to discuss the future of liberalism, the ideology that had shaped the West for the previous hundred years. Held in Europe and attended mostly by Europeans, it was at the behest of an American journalist.Walter Lippman was a co-founder of the New Republic magazine and widely seen as the intellectual bedrock of the New Deal. “Liberal” as an adjective was only beginning to refer to the soft social democratic reformism of Roosevelt, and Lippman was feted as the augur of a new era. However, his ideological underpinning continued to evolve, as he identified less with the Progressives and more with a small core of what were