Hillsdale, Michigan—At the concluding dinner, a mood of sheer bliss descended on some 235 members and guests of the Mont Pelerin Society, as if an Invisible Hand had prankishly arranged a sneak preview of Utopia for this gathering of professed anti-utopians and individualists. During the week, old friends had been reunited in most agreeable surroundings, and a fellowship of the mind flowered as it has each year since the Society was founded in 1947. Business had been concluded, a seven-course French dinner was at hand, and the wines and champagne were excellent. One after another, members rose to offer toasts: to Hillsdale President George C. Roche III, host to the gathering; to the Society; to the Queen; to Milton Friedman, Bill Hutt, Shirley Letwin, humanism and scientism, Don Lipsett, Don Houghton, the accommodations, the service, the staff, the Austrians, the “Friedmaniacs,” and to MPS founder Friedrich A. Hayek. One fellow disappeared into the service regions with a bottle of champagne for the staffers, and almost instantly a fresh bottle appeared on his table. It was magic. Finally the hour of parting came, and the good society became clusters of individuals once again, wandering out, as somebody put it, to find the best “committee meeting.” Tomorrow we diet.
The regional Mont Pelerin meeting at Hillsdale College August 24-28 was only the third held on American soil (the others were at Princeton, 1958, and Rockford College, 1971). Even at that, the Society is rapidly exhausting our supply of private colleges with libertarian instincts. Hillsdale, like Rockford, is a small, fiercely independent liberal arts school with a well-earned reputation for resisting federal funding and intrusions. It has an enrollment of about a thousand, is modestly equipped, and is set in a decaying lumber and rail hamlet of the same name.
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