he became friends with Otto Abetz, the future German ambassador to Paris during the occupation. In February 1936 he interviewed Adolf Hitler for the journal Paris-Midi, for which he was criticised for being too friendly to the dictator. That same year he joined Jacques Doriot's Parti populaire français (PPF). He became the editor in chief of its journal L'Émancipation nationale (National Emancipation), wherein he supported fascism. He broke with the PPF in 1938 when Doriot supported the Munich Agreement. Jouvenel's mother passionately supported Czechoslovakian independence, and so he began his career as a private secretary to Edvard Beneš, Czechoslovakia's first prime minister. In 1947, along with Friedrich Hayek, Jacques Rueff, and Milton Friedman, he founded the Mont Pelerin Society. Later in life, de Jouvenel established the Futuribles International in Paris. After the French defeat in 1940 Jouvenel stayed in Paris and under German occupation published Après la Défaite, calling for France to join Hitler's New Order. He fled to Switzerland just before the liberation of Paris by the Allies. Jouvenel was among the very few French intellectuals to pay respectful attention to the economic theory and welfare economics that emerged during the first half of the 20th century in Austria, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This understanding of economics is shown by his work The Ethics of Redistribution. Dennis Hale of Boston College has co-edited two volumes of essays by Jouvenel. Later in his life, Jouvenel's views shifted back to the left. In 1960, he complained to Milton Friedman that the Mont Pelerin Society had "turned increasingly to a Manichaeism according to which the state can do no good and private enterprise can do no wrong." He was sympathetic to the student protests of 1968 and critical of the Vietnam War. He also expressed support for the Socialist François Mitterrand. Sternhell controversy Zeev Sternhell published a book, Ni Droite, ni Gauche ("Neither Right nor Left"), accusing De Jouvenel of having had fascist sympathies in the 1930s and 1940s. De Jouvenel sued in 1983, claiming nine counts of libel, two of which the court upheld. However, Sternhell was neither required to publish a retraction nor to strike any passages from future printings of his book. Bibliography Après la Défaite (After the Defeat), 1941 On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth, 1948 The Ethics of Redistribution, 1951 Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good, 1957 The Pure Theory