Little of practical substance actually came out of the Paris meeting. It was resolved to establish the Centre International d'Etudes pour la Rénovation du Libéralisme. One meeting was held in January 1939. Lippmann, Hayek and Röpke were delegated to set up American, British and Swiss sections. Nothing came of this and the society ceased to exist with the outbreak of war. Subsequently, however, Louis Rougier was to describe the Colloque Lippmann as the founding moment of neo-liberalism and it is clear that the idea of an international association of liberals lived on. It was indeed the case that, after the war, 12 of the conference participants were to be found at the first meeting of the free-market Mont Pelerin Society. Left-wing critics in search of a neo-liberal conspiracy have since drawn a direct line from these two meetings to the Thatcherism and Reaganomics of the 1980s. To do so is both naïve and simplistic. It can just as well be claimed that the Lippmann colloquium contributed to the theory that underpinned the post-war German social-market economy. Yet there can be no doubting that the men who gathered together in August 1938 in the shadow of totalitarianism and of war did so in the belief that free markets best produced wealth, best guaranteed peace and best preserved freedom, and that the worst of courses was the pursuit of a generalised state interventionism. The proper function of the state was to determine the legal framework that best served the free development of economic activities.

In other words, when all around were saying that doing nothing was not an option, their reply was that what mattered was doing the right thing. We should perhaps leave the last word to Rougier, the man who brought the participants of the Colloque Lippmann together: "This truly was," he wrote, "a gathering of men of good faith, of good men and of free men, convinced that western civilisation's best chance lay in its return to liberalism rightly understood, the only way of assuring an improved standard of living for the masses, peace among peoples, freedom of thought, and the honour of the human spirit." Today such men seem in short supply.