[...] the Mont Pèlerin Society was constituted as a private members-only debating society whose participants were hand-picked (originally primarily by Friedrich Hayek, but later through a closed nomination procedure) and which consciously sought to remain out of the public eye. The unusual structure of the thought collective helps explain why neo-liberalism cannot be easily defined on a set of 3x5 cards, and needs to be understood as a pluralist organism (within certain limits) striving to distinguish itself from its three primary foes: laisser-faire classical liberalism, social welfare liberalism, and socialism.\n Since the Mont Pèlerin Society thought collective believed that the masses will never understand the true architecture of social order, and intellectuals will continue to tempt them to intervene and otherwise muck up the market, they felt impelled to propound the central tenet of neo-liberalism, namely that a strong state was necessary to neutralise what they considered to be the pathologies of democracy.