[2][3] After receiving the agrégation in philosophy from the University of Lyon, he qualified as a philosophy teacher in 1914 and worked as a teacher in several high schools, before teaching at the École Chateaubriand de Rome, Besançon, the Cairo University, the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Études Internationales de Genève (Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies), and the Fondation Édouard-Herriot (Édouard-Herriot Foundation) in Lyon.
That view, which implies that there are no "objective" a priori truths that exist independently of the human mind, closely resembled the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.
Rougier's conventionalist philosophical position naturally led him to oppose Neo-Thomism, which had been the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church since the 1879 encyclical Aeterna Patris but was gaining particular momentum during the 1920s and the 1930s.
Rougier published several works during this period attacking the contemporary revival of scholasticism, thereby earning the personal enmity of prominent Thomists such as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain.
The political network established by both groups eventually led to the 1947 foundation of the famous Mont Pelerin Society to which Rougier was elected in the 1960s through the personal backing of Friedrich Hayek.
Rougier, as one of the founding fathers of neoliberalism, would no doubt have been admitted to the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society but for a second political engagement, which proved disastrous to his career and his reputation: his activities on behalf of the Vichy regime in France during World War II.
Rougier later claimed in several published works that these meetings resulted in an agreement between Vichy and Churchill that he called the Mission secrète à Londres : les Accords Pétain-Churchill, an allegation that the British government later denied in an official White Paper.
Finally, Rougier was active in an effort that petitioned the United Nations in 1951 by alleging that the Allies had committed human rights violations and war crimes during the Libération.