Angus Burgin

Angus Burgin’s recent book, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Harvard University Press, 2012), has received a great deal of acclaim from reviewers and readers alike.  Burgin is an assistant professor of history at Johns Hopkins University.  In Great Persuasion, Burgin explains that he focuses on the members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international organization founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947 to bring together economists, philosophers, journalists, and philanthropists who sought to rehabilitate public support for the market mechanism.  In the years before the founding of the society, advocates of laissez-faire were marginalized within both the international scholarly community and the American political environment; a half-century later, opposition to state interference in the actions of the competitive market had become pervasive within economics faculties and increasingly influential in the public sphere.  The Great Persuasion surveys the dynamics that made this transformation possible:  between economists and politicians, intellectuals and rhetoricians, and transnational academic networks and domestic policy debates.