IBL is proud of making available to the public the recording of the proceedings of the Meetig of the Mont Pèlerin Society held in Turin in 1961. This conference was an important milestone in the history of liberal thought and in the life of Bruno Leoni himself.
This meeting is also significant for being the occasion of the last public speech pronounced by Luigi Einaudi before his death a few months later, and the first appearance at a Mont Pèlerin Society conference of Sergio Ricossa, who was going to be the most consistent and original popularizer of liberal ideas in Italy. The organization of the conference benefited from the inexhaustible energy of Bruno Leoni himself. As Secretary of the Mont Pèlerin Society—he was holding the office since 1960— and the unofficial "host" of the Meeting, held in his home turf in Turin, Leoni strove to organize a successful event.
As Ricossa remembered, "I made my acquantance with Bruno Leoni at the meeting of the Centro di studi metodologici and we came to know each other a little better when I assisted him in the organization of the Turin meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1961. I was impressed by the utter lack in his character of those traits commonly associated with the quintessential university professor, secreted in his academic ivory tower and with his head perpetually in the clouds: a cartoonish description, to be sure, that did not fit Leoni in the least. He was, in contrast, a down-to-earth sort of man, dynamic and energetic, more apt to conjure up the image of an erupting volcano. He spoke, he acted, he laughed."
Leoni put this extraordinary strength and this uncommon mix of qualities in the service of a meeting of a most outstanding roster of names: from the founder of the Mont Pèlerin Society, Friedrich A. von Hayek to the incoming president Wilhelm Roepke, from Ludwig von Mises to Luigi Einaudi, from Otto von Habsburg to Salvador de Madariaga, not to mention Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, Daniel Villey, Felix Morley and many others.
At the Turin meeting the elder thinkers of the liberal movement engaged a number of younger emergent scholars, who were to play an important role in the discourse on liberty. This meeting originated a number of magisterial lectures, that IBL is proud to make finally available to the public.
Note: All audio files are in mp3 format. The number preceding the link ("Play") indicates the quality of the audio on a 1-to-10 scale.