MPS-2017

The Ratio Institute welcomes all members, guests and fellows to the 2017 Special Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society on the theme ”The Populist Threats to the Free Society and the Reconstruction of the Liberal Project” in Stockholm, Sweden, November 2 – 5, 2017.

Our society was founded in 1947, as it is stated in the aims, to discuss the crisis of the times, realizing that the central values of civilization were in danger.

Today 70 years later we face similar, if not identical, problems. In many or even most Western democracies populism, authoritarian nationalism, statism, interventionism, protectionism and similar creeds are on the rise. Individual freedom, the market economy, the rule of law, free trade and the open society are under threat.

There is a need for our group of economists, historians, philosophers, and other students of public affairs, both younger and more senior, to meet and develop the intellectual arguments and to reassert the valid ideals that can challenge the populist threats to the free society.

As argued by F. A. Hayek (1949):

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage.

Welcome,Nils Karlson
The Ratio Institute
Organizer