This is the second in a two-part post.  Part 1 is here. • • • • • The 1981 Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) meeting at Viña del Mar was “one of the largest and most successful regional meetings” (p. 1) the MPS had ever held, claimed Eric Brodin, author of an eye-opening report for the MPS newsletter. Two hundred and thirty men and women from 23 countries attended, making it a veritable International of the free-market counterrevolution. It featured such luminaries, as I reported, as James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Milton and Rose Friedman, and Reed Irvine. (For a complete list of attendees, which included higher-ups in the Pinochet regime, corporate heads and bankers, and US officials, see pp. 16ff of […]

Who decided to hold the November 1981 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) in Viña del Mar, the Chilean seaside resort city by the sea where the 1973 coup against Allende was planned? Was it Friedrich von Hayek, as I claimed in The Nation and The Reactionary Mind? The short answer is: it’s complicated. And in that complexity we get a glimpse of Hayek’s intimate involvement in the Pinochet experiment and the deep affinities he and his associates saw between his ideas and the regime’s actions. That, at any rate, is what I discovered after a week of digging in the archives of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where the Hayek and the MPS papers are held. This post is Part […]