The question that animates Angus Burgin’s book is how the ideas of free-market advocates came to play a central role in American politics during the past three decades (p. 5). Burgin’s “subnarrative” makes a significant contribution to our understanding of this ideological transformation (p. 223). The Great Persuasion is a lively and informative intellectual history focused on the project of “reinventing free markets” by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and, institutionally, the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS). Burgin’s account, read with Kim Phillip-Fein’s Invisible Hands (2009) reveals the symbiotic relationship between advocates of free markets and their ideas, on the one hand, and the institutions and business interests that nurtured and bankrolled them, on the other—a formula that ultimately led to the ideological triumph of free-market capitalism.

The narrative begins in 1924 with John Maynard Keynes proclaiming “The End of Laissez-Faire,” which the Great Depression made a reality as faith in the inevitable market correction did not resonate with millions suffering from unemployment and impoverishment. Government intervention in the economy was popular, and Hayek’s decision not to respond to Keynes’s General Theory in 1936 proved Keynes’s prediction about the end of laissez-faire correct, at least for a time. With the free market out of fashion in the economics profession, Hayek reinvented himself as a philosopher of the free market tasked with crafting both its normative concerns and a positive program. With the publication of The Road to Serfdom in 1945, and its growing popularity, especially in the United States, Hayek’s influence expanded. Free-market advocates were still a small and much maligned group, yet with his newfound fame, Hayek endeavored to create an institution where critics of economic planning could meet and “develop a comprehensive revision of liberalism” (p. 103). With funding from the Volker Fund and others, he organized the first meeting of the MPS in 1947. Although its members could not agree on an alternative to New Deal liberalism, the society was an incubator for economists, one that would have great influence over the trajectory of the discipline, including seven recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics and the ideas that would “reinvent free markets” in the political discourse in the United States and in Europe (p. 204).

In Burgin’s account, no member other than Hayek was more important than Milton Friedman. Friedman was an early member of the society, but in its first decade not a key participant. With the publication of Capitalism and Freedom in 1962, he became the leading light in the advocacy of the free market. But his idea of the free market was distinct from that of Hayek and other early members of the society. By the 1960s Friedman was decidedly an advocate of laissez-faire and rejected much of the role of the state that Hayek found acceptable. His framing of laissez-faire prescriptions in rhetoric that was “populist” and “progressive” and emphasized choice, together with his relationships with elected officials including Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, among others, precipitated the ideological triumph of laissez-faire. By 1970 he was the leader of the MPS.

Among the most fascinating parts of the book is Burgin’s discussion of the early years of the MPS. In his account, the members failed to agree on much, including a social philosophy and a positive program. They even disagreed on what they ought to call themselves, “neoliberal” or “libertarians” or something else. Instead, that which held them together was not what they agreed on but what they opposed: a planned economy. Most interesting of all were their debates concerning the ethics of capitalism, the free market’s compatibility with tradition, the danger of big business and monopoly, and the desirability of laissez-faire. As Burgin expertly demonstrates, Hayek and other early members of the MPS held nuanced views about the appropriate role of the state in the economy. Indeed, as the author explains, Hayek “condoned a vigorous role for the state” (p. 90). Ludwig von Mises and other advocates of laissez-faire were decidedly in the minority in the early years. In sum, in the early years of the society, free-market advocates could not abandon themselves to the unrestrained market as the economic basis for their alternative liberal vision.

It is interesting to note that American conservatives tasked with crafting a conservative alternative could not do so either. The debates over the compatibility of the free market with social tradition that took place in the MPS were simultaneously occurring among postwar “New Conservatives” in their attempt to define the meaning of American conservatism. The influence of Frank Meyer’s “conservative fusion,” though never completely satisfactory to traditionalists such as Russell Kirk, led to the expulsion of Peter Viereck from the conservative movement and pulled conservatism toward economic laissez-faire. The MPS, perhaps more organically, did the same to skeptics of laissez-faire, as key early members of the society were no longer participating, in disapproval of of the society’s increasing turn to economic laissez-faire in the early 1960s (p. 150).

While the book focuses on Hayek and Friedman, Burgin seamlessly incorporates a discussion of others, including Walter Lippmann, Frank Knight, and Wilhelm Ropke. Burgin’s clear approach and accessible writing reveals the complexity, tension, and the richness of ideas among skeptics of economic planning, especially in the 1930s and in the early years of the MPS. Yet that complexity diminishes as Friedman comes to the fore in Burgin’s narrative. With Friedman, the triumph of laissez-faire seems assured. The rich intellectual debate, so interesting in Burgin’s approach in the early chapters, recedes in the latter part of the book. Whereas the author situates Hayek in a milieu of intellectual debate, Friedman’s ideas seemed to have few rivals, either from the Left or Right or among other free-market advocates. Even the MPS, the institution that helped “invent” Milton Friedman, as one of the chapter titles is cleverly worded, recedes from the narrative. The final two chapters read more like a biography of Friedman than the institutional approach of the earlier chapters.

If there is a weakness in The Great Persuasion it emerges in the conclusion. There, Burgin argues that the global financial crisis of 2008 precipitated a “generational shift” and reevaluation of laissez-faire by conservatives. Yet, throughout the book, with the exception of the Great Depression and the elevation of Keynesianism, Burgin pays little attention to “external events,” political or economic. For instance, he suggests that free-market ideas gained greater currency in the 1950s, but does not explain why beyond pointing to the importance of the “static dualisms of the Cold War” (p. 223). Furthermore, by the late 1970s, the seismic ideological shift toward free markets could not be attributable solely to Friedman’s rhetorical style and institutional support, however important they were. Perhaps situating Friedman’s ideas in the context of greater structural changes in the economy, along with the politics of the white backlash against the Civil Rights movement and the Great Society, would have married “the relevance of the history of ideas to the history of politics” with “anxieties about the changing structure of the social environment” (p. 224). Each has much to offer in explaining the centrality of free-market ideas in contemporary political discourse.

Despite these criticisms The Great Persuasion makes an important contribution. It is carefully researched and well written, and it makes for a compelling narrative of ideological transformation. The general reader as well as students in the fields of intellectual history and political science will find reading this book a rewarding experience.