As the economic depression of the 1930s worsened and the political extremes of totalitarianism came to the fore, it was this doctrine of commitment that was to prevail. A generation of young French intellectuals sought to escape from what they regarded as a crisis of civilisation. Often undecided about the relative merits of communism and fascism, they were nevertheless almost universally anti-liberal, against capitalism and critical of parliamentary democracy. Disillusionment and self-doubt were combined with an illiberal radicalism and ideological blindness. However, this was not the only response to be articulated in these troubled times. Indeed, as we ourselves face a year of mounting economic uncertainty and escalating international tension, it might be worth pausing and reflecting upon how one group of intellectuals provided a different answer to the economic crisis and moral dramas of their day.

The event in question took place over four days in an obscure building, the Musée Social, just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris at the end of August, 1938. Present were some 26 academics, business people and writers, mostly from Europe, but including the American commentator and journalist Walter Lippmann (who, as it turned out, was in Paris on honeymoon at the time). Also in attendance, apart from the young Raymond Aron, were some of Europe's leading economists: Louis Rougier and Jacques Rueff from France, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek of the Austrian School, and two Germans, both living in exile, Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow. Although invited, neither the future Italian President Luigi Einaudi nor the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was able to attend.

The immediate cause of this coming together was the publication of a French version of Lippmann's An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society by the Librarie de Médicis, the same publisher that had also recently published Rougier's Les Mystiques Economiques and von Mises's anti-collectivist broadside, Socialism. The wider context was the challenge to liberalism and the free market posed by the rise of a generalised state interventionism in the form of planning, corporatism and socialism. Capitalism seemed on the brink of systemic failure and for many it was capitalism itself that was to blame. Its decline and its end appeared inevitable.