Sublime

Years later Milton Friedman would recount a story about the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, held in 1947. The group was meant to bring together what Europeans would call liberal intellectuals and what Americans would describe as libertarians. As Friedman recalled, “We were discussing the distribution of income, and whether you should

De l’autre, la révolution avait changé de nature en étant désormais portée par une doctrine, le socialisme, dont le culte de l’égalité annihilait la liberté et qui postulait la lutte à mort entre la bourgeoisie et la classe ouvrière, indissociable d’une forme de guerre civile. Dès la chute de la monarchie de Juillet qu’il n’aimait pas mais qu’il

The main thrust of the counter-revolution has been either the elimination or the financialization of social arrangements that had previously supported many kinds of cooperative activity. Through the appropriation of public spaces and resources into the logic of the marketplace, individuals are dispossessed of many collective forms of mutual support

Any questioning or discrediting of what is currently the most efficient means of producing acquiescence and docility, of promoting self-interest as the raison d’être of all social activity, is rigorously marginalized.

Thus state intervention came to be discredited by a value proposition that was no longer aligned with individual aspirations. The laissez-faire approach was never attractive: it deprived the poor and even the middle class of access to affordable essential services. But the interventionist counter-offer ended up looking not that attractive, either: