John Maynard Keynes has famously commented at the end of The General Theory that "practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." And he went on to remark: "I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas." Angus Burgin's book is the history of the gradual encroachment of a particular idea: the notion of laissez-faire, or the belief in the power of the market to allocate resources efficiently and to achieve optimal outcomes, without any form of state intervention.In another famous essay published in 1924, Keynes had proclaimed The End of Laissez-Faire. Indeed, this French expression best characterizes the context of 19th century liberalism, and more particularly the works of French authors like Jean-Baptiste Say or Frédéric Bastiat. Their brand of liberalism or libéralisme à la française ("laissez faire, laissez passer les marchandises") exerted only limited traction over the history of economic ideas, but the expression stayed as a rallying cry for liberals and their modern neoliberal epigones. How this idea of laissez-faire was reappraised by a cadre of economists and public intellectuals, first grudgingly in the midst of the Great Depression, then wholeheartedly in the postwar era, forms the story of The Great Persuasion.Labeling this great persuasion, putting a name on these ideas, has always been an issue. In his 1924 lecture, Keynes noted that "the phrase laissez-faire is not to be found in the works of Adam Smith, of Ricardo, or of Malthus." Friedrich Hayek, who stood at the other end of the economics spectrum, pointed out that terms like 'liberalism' or 'democracy', 'capitalism' or 'socialism', hold a different meaning today than in the pre-war or immediate post-war period. The word 'libertarian' was unfamiliar to most founders of the Mont Pèlerin Society, and they were almost unanimous in their rejection of 'conservatism', which they associated with the preservation of the status quo they sought to overcome. The term 'neoconservatism' didn't appear on the map until the late twentieth century, and designated a political current rather than an economic persuasion. Perhaps the term that best characterizes Hayek, Friedman, and their epigones is 'neoliberal'. First used as a derogatory label, it was adopted as a self-description by some, but not all, proponents of unhindered free markets.The reason the main figures of the neoliberal creed could not agree on a label is that they disagreed on the content of their doctrine. The `neoliberalism' that became paradigmatic in the Anglo-American policy arena in the 1970s and 1980s looked very different from the `neoliberalism' of the late 1930s and 1940s. The founders who gathered for the initial meeting at Mont Pèlerin in 1947 held diverse views. Most, if not all, repudiated historical laissez-faire and called for an organized and constructive liberalism that validated certain modes of government intervention. In The Road to Serfdom, which he dedicated to "socialists of all parties", Friedrich Hayek supported a role for the government in counteracting the business cycle, constructing new infrastructure, regulating a broad range of business activities, and administering extensive social insurance guarantees. Some of his colleagues delivered an assault on large corporations or formulated a critique of abstract and unhindered competition. Moral philosophers believed that capitalism was living off the accumulated moral capital of social doctrines that it had since supplanted, and called for a liberalism that emphasized the ethical rather than merely the economic satisfaction of the citizen.By contrast, the second decade of the Mont Pèlerin Society was marked by a narrowing of horizons and the accretion of certainties. Individuals whose methodologies, assumptions, and goals diverged most explicitely from the emerging paradigm were cast off or took their distances. In Bertrand de Jouvenel's terms, the organization had succumbed to "ideological passion," and as a result had transitioned from "a free company of people who think together with some initial basis of agreement" into "a team of fighters." Milton Friedman was the chief fighter and he emerged as the leading advocate of free-market economics on the public scene. As Burgin notes, "Friedman built his professional and public career on the advocacy of positions that ran contrary to received opinion, and he endured the resulting controversies to find himself regaled with private wealth, academic honors, and lasting political recognition." The universality of Friedman's belief in the efficacy of free markets exceeded even that of the nineteenth-century theorists of laissez-faire whose legacy Hayek had spent the postwar years working to overcome. He deliberately cultivated the persona of a contrarian gadfly in the venues of public debates, and never shied way from an intellectual opponent or buttressed his positions in the sake of compromise.In addition to Hayek and Friedman, Burgin puts the spotlight on intellectual figures who are generally ignored by histories of neoliberalism but who helped shape the movement in its past and present forms. Louis Rougier, a philosophy professor at the University of Besançon, gathered the first collection of twenty-six individuals in a conference held in Paris in 1938, but was later discredited by his association with the Vichy government. Walter Lippmann, the American publicist, wrote the enormously influential Principles of the Good Society in 1937, before distancing himself from a movement that he found too sectarian or too conservative for his taste. Wilhelm Röpke was a founding member of the German journal Ordo that went on to have a broad influence on German's postwar economic doctrines, known as ordoliberalism. Albert Hunold was a Swiss businessman of little intellectual importance but who exerted leadership of the society until 1962, when he resigned by claiming that the society had "lost its soul".It is rare to find a book that addresses an issue relevant to the public at large, while adding something original to the scholarly literature on a particular topic. The reviews in the Wall Street Journal and other media outlet bear witness to the fact that The Great Persuasion addresses not only a public of professional historians and social scientists, but is also of broader policy relevance. It should appeal to anyone interested in contemporary debates about the role that the state and markets should play in the economy - arguably the most important theme in policy discussions. On the other hand, The Great Persuasion is a scholar's book, apparently trimmed down and edited from a PhD thesis, and with all the markers of academic respectability - the footnotes, the archive collections, the strict neutrality in tone and restrained ambition in scope. Burgin is very clear on where his scholarly contribution resides. He situates his book within the existing literature, noting the remarkable advances in historiography over the past decade.His book fills several gaps in the existing research and offers an original contribution to the field of intellectual history. He is the first to present the creation and early history of the Mt. Pèlerin Society based on archival records of the society and on the correspondence and collected papers of its main protagonists. He provides the first academically sound intellectual biography of Milton Friedman, developed in the last two chapters of the book. His approach is also innovative: it shifts the focus from individuals to networks, and from the US or Western Europe to the Atlantic world. He puts the history of economics back into the history of ideas, claiming that "the problems of economics cannot easily be severed from the problems of philosophy." He gives a different picture of the Mt. Pèlerin Society than the usual clichés identifying it with the hotbed of ultra-liberalism. In fact, Burgin writes, "an exploration of the rhetoric of the society's members in its early years reveals a movement far less doctrinaire than the conventional narrative would indicate."In writing archive-based history, it is often difficult to find the right distance between minute detail and the broad sweep, and not to be bogged down in petty distinctions and curiosa. Again, Burgin achieves a fine balancing act between these two polarities. His quotes from private correspondence or oral histories are always illustrative. They add a unique perspective to a narrative that is as nuanced as it is coherent and demonstrative. True, the author made choices, and delved on some episodes in abundant detail while leaving other developments out of the picture. It may be said that the author spent too much time on the "Hunold affair", which had its origin in petty interpersonal disputes that are of little relevance to the broader narrative. But this episode was an important moment in the transfer of influence within the society from Europe to the United States, and from the cultured polymaths to the professional economists. As Burgin writes, "after Hunold and a bloc of sympathizers resigned their memberships, the society adopted a narrower identity, intellectually and institutionally dominated by Anglo-Americans, unapologetically oriented toward technical economics, and inhospitable to those who did not subscribe to the near-universal preferability of free markets to the alternatives."On the other hand, the influence of Austrian economics is often acknowledged but, apart from Hayek, representatives of this school are not presented in detail. In particular, Ludwig von Mises would have deserved a detailed portrait instead of the passing mentions at several junctures of the text. The author notes that "Mises's refusal to compromise his `pure' version of liberalism left him engaged in ever fewer dialogues, and made it impossible for him to find an academic position commensurate with his professional prestige after he fled Switzerland for the United States." In other words, although Burgin is more nuanced, Mises was the black sheep of the movement, a doomsayer whose radical provocations were considered as voodoo economics by the profession - but, as Friedman (who was no less extreme) acknowledged, "every society needs a few kooks".In writing the definitive history of the Mont Pèlerin Society, Angus Burgin achieves a triple balancing act. He finds the right distance between academic research and broader intellectual relevance, between the detailed account and the big picture, and between hagiography and critique. As other reviewers have pointed out, Burgin is an academic, not an ideologue, and his book keeps the strict neutrality of a detached observer. He believes in the power of ideas, but it is difficult to guess whether he espouses or opposes the ideas he is exposing. "To what extent do we wish to make ours a market-centered world?", he asks in the closing paragraph, while leaving the question open. His only personal belief expressed in the text is that, "for better or for worse, we now live in an era in which economists have become our most influential philosophers, and when decisions made or advised by economist technocrats have broad and palpable influence on the practice of our everyday lives." Maybe the role of the historian is to reclaim the influence of these worldly philosophers, and to lay bare the moral arguments that sustain the economist profession's various persuasions.