In a small Swiss village above the northern shore of Lake Geneva, in April 1947, the German economist Walter Eucken peeled and ate an orange with obvious delight. It was his first orange in many years. His visit to Switzerland, to attend an international meeting of three dozen classical liberal academicians and journalists, was his first trip outside Germany since the end of the Second World War. Despite his strong opposition to the Nazis, Eucken had remained in Germany for the duration of the war, where central control of the economy made oranges unavailable (except perhaps to the ruling elite). The German economy remained centrally controlled by the occupying powers immediately after the war’s 1945 end. Eucken had almost been unable to travel to Switzerland because of the difficulty of securing an administrative authorization to leave the country.

THE POSTWAR CLIMATE OF OPINION

In a November 1992 interview, Milton Friedman recalled the climate of opinion in the 1940s and 1950s: “It was a climate in which those of us who believed in free markets and in a socially and politically free society were a tiny, very much beleaguered minority. Collectivism– economic, social, political– was very much in the ascendancy.”