But the big questions they addressed are also recognisable. Who was to blame for the world economic crisis? How should the proponents of economic liberalism respond? Did market capitalism have a future? What level of state intervention, if any, was necessary and appropriate? Did laissez faire mean laissez souffrir? In what ways could economic liberalism respond to the social problems of the day? How could economic equilibrium be restored? Everyone agreed that bureaucratic state planning (much in vogue during the 1930s) was not the way forward and that liberal socialism was a contradiction in terms. They similarly agreed that a free-market economy was best equipped to maximise levels of productivity (even in times of war) and was best able to attain the highest standard of living for all consumers. They defended free trade and the international division of labour. More than this, they saw that a market economy was alone compatible with human liberty and dignity.

Yet their disagreements were no less fundamental. Viewed superficially, they gravitated around the issue of the level of state intervention compatible with the maintenance of the price mechanism. At the bottom, however, the question was whether the very principles of economic liberalism required radical renovation and whether liberalism's decline could be reversed simply by reasserting the virtues of free competition and the regulatory role of prices. Men such as Lippmann and Rougier evidently thought that significant innovations were required, both men arguing that the doctrinaire and complacent formulas of 19th-century laissez-faire economics were no longer of relevance to the workings of modern capitalism. Others, most notably Mises and Hayek, saw nothing essential to criticise in these principles, placing the blame for the economic ills of their day upon distortions to the market resulting from state intervention. For the Austrian school, the market was the product of a natural spontaneous order: for their opponents, it was a juridical order that presupposed the legal intervention of the state and that required constant adaptation to meet new social and industrial conditions.

Put simply, the ambition was to sketch out a general framework and programme that would allow the revival of economic (and political) liberalism. In August 1938, there could be no broad agreement upon such an important issue. Nor are we seemingly any closer to agreement today. Yet, the meeting in Paris tried to sketch out an agenda for the future of liberalism that was surprisingly innovative. If it placed a return to a free and competitive market as its first priority, it did not exclude the pursuit of collective ends and was prepared to contemplate the redistribution of wealth through taxation, government spending on social insurance and education, and a new legal regime for banks and financial services. Not to everyone's delight, Jacques Rueff labelled it a "liberalism of the Left". Others were happier with the term "positive liberalism". Rougier spoke of a "constructive liberalism".