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01 IEA Waging War to Page Waging the War of Ideas Waging the War of Ideas JOHN BLUNDELL Second edition The Institute of Economic Affairs Second, expanded edition published in Great Britain in 2003 by The Institute of Economic Affairs 2 Lord North Street Westminster London sw1p 3lb in association with Profile Books Ltd First edition published in 2001 by The Institute of Economic Affairs This collection copyright © The Institute of Economic Affairs 2003 ‘How to move a nation’ reprinted, with permission, from the February 1987 issue of Reason magazine. Copyright 2001 by the Reason Foundation, 3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd, Suite 400, Los Angeles, CA 90034. www.reason.com <http://www.reason.com/> ‘Waging the war of ideas: why there are no shortcuts’ copyright © 1990 by the Heritage Foundation; reprinted by permission ‘The right use of ideas’ reprinted by permission of the Daily Telegraph ‘On Friedman’s 90th birthday we still need his remedy’ reprinted by permission of the Daily Telegraph ‘Beyond ideology: towards the demise of the state and the coming era of consumer politics’ reprinted by permission of the Scotsman, © Scotsman 2003 All other individual articles copyright © The Institute of Economic Affairs The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. isbn 0 255 36547 0 Many IEA publications are translated into languages other than English or are reprinted. Permission to translate or to reprint should be sought from the Director General at the address above. Typeset in Stone by MacGuru Ltd [email protected] Printed and bound in Great Britain by Hobbs the Printers CONTENTS The author 9 Foreword by Walter E. Williams 11 1 How to move a nation 17 (Reason, February 1987) 2 Waging the war of ideas: why there are no shortcuts 33 (The Heritage Lectures, no. 254, at the Heritage Foundation, 14 November 1989) Afterword by Milton Friedman 47 3 No Antony Fisher, no IEA: The Case for Freedom after 50 years 48 (Economic Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 3, September 1998) 4 Hayek and the second-hand dealers in ideas 56 (Introduction to The Intellectuals and Socialism, IEA, Rediscovered Riches no. 4, October 1998) 5 The power of ideas 65 (Economic Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 4, December 1998) 6 The right use of ideas 68 (Daily Telegraph, 1 March 1999) 7 More on the power of ideas 73 (Economic Affairs, Vol. 19, No. 3, September 1999) 8 Hayek, Fisher and The Road to Serfdom 78 (Introduction to Reader’s Digest condensed version of The Road to Serfdom, IEA, Rediscovered Riches no. 5, November 1999; reissued as IEA, Occasional Paper 122, October 2001, reprinted April 2003) 9 Foreword to The Representation of Business in English Literature 90 (IEA, Readings 53, October 2000) 10 Foreword to A Conversation With Harris and Seldon 101 (IEA, Occasional Paper 116, May 2001) 11 Just in time: inside the Thatcher revolution 107 (Economic Affairs, Vol. 21, No. 2, June 2000) 12 The Hoover Institution 114 (Economic Affairs, Vol. 22, No. 1, March 2002) 13 On Friedman’s 90th birthday we still need his remedy 120 (Daily Telegraph, 30 July 2002) 14 The achievements of Peter Bauer 124 (IEA, Occasional Paper 128, September 2002) 15 Beyond ideology: towards the demise of the state and the coming era of consumer politics 129 (Scotsman, 17 March 2003) 16 Looking back at the condensed version of The Road to Serfdom after 60 years 134 (Economic Affairs, Vol. 24, No. 1, March 2004; forthcoming) Chronology of the IEA 148 About the IEA 164 THE AUTHOR John Blundell was educated at King’s School, Macclesfield, and at the London School of Economics. He headed the Press, Research and Parliamentary Liaison Office at the Federation of Small Businesses from 1977 to 1982, and was a Lambeth Borough councillor from 1978 to 1982. From 1982 to 1993 he lived in the USA where he was, inter alia, president of the Institute for Humane Studies (1988–91); president of the Atlas Economic Research Foun- dation (1987–91); president of the board of the Congressional Schools of Virginia (1988–92); and president of the Charles G. Koch and Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundations (1991–2). He assumed his duties as director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs on 1 January 1993. He also served as co-founder and chairman, from 1993 to 1997, of the Institute for Children, Boston, MA; founder director (1991–3), Institute for Justice, Washington DC; international trustee (1988–93), The Fraser Institute, Vancouver, BC; and founder trustee of Buckeye Institute, Dayton, OH. He is a director of Fairbridge and of the International Policy Network and chairman of the executive committee of the board of Atlas Economic Research Foundation (USA). He is also a board member of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason Uni- versity,Fairfax,VA;oftheInstituteofEconomicStudies(Europe)in Paris, France; and of the Mont Pélerin Society. 9 FOREWORD Basic to the struggle to promote personal liberty is the task of persuading our fellow men not only that free market allocation of goods and services is economically efficient and wealth-enhancing but also, and much more importantly, that market allocation is morally superior to other methods of exchange. Waging the War of Ideas, this Institute of Economic Affairs Occasional Paper, con- taining published papers by its director general, John Blundell, is part of that continuing struggle and duty of liberty-loving people worldwide. John Blundell’s papers and reviews include a short documen- tation of the war of ideas from the post-World War II days, when communism and economic planning were seen as the wave of the future, to the post-Thatcher/Reagan period. The pro free-market policy of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations went a long way towards laying the groundwork for the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result of tales of economic incompetence, human suf- fering and murder in pursuit of the Marxist-Leninist world vision under the USSR’s brutal regime, communism no longer has any intellectual respectability. Indeed, save for minor mopping-up operations here and there, communism as an idea has been relegated to the dustbin of history. The UK’s top generals in the war of ideas were Antony Fisher and Professor Friedrich Hayek. Professor Hayek’s The Road 11 waging the war of ideas to Serfdom, written in 1944, was the opening salvo of the attack on the ideas of the Fabian Socialists that had taken over thinking in the UK and on the Continent. Entrepreneur Antony Fisher played a vital role in the war of ideas. Fisher’s success in the UK’s first broiler-chicken farm, mass-producing Buxted Chickens, provided the economic resources that helped promulgate and market Pro- fessor Hayek’s ideas of spontaneous order and liberty. After all, what is the value of ideas on liberty if they are consigned to dusty library shelves and known by few academics? Unlike many gener- ous donors, Sir Antony Fisher was not passive. He understood the ideas of liberty and was an active soldier in the war of ideas. More- over, Antony Fisher was key to the start of free-market think tanks in Europe, Africa and the Americas. Mr Blundell’s papers treat us to a thumbnail sketch of the gen- esis of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). The collection of four photographs hanging in the boardroom of the Institute tells a concise history, as John Blundell explains: ‘Hayek advises Fisher; Fisher recruits Harris; Harris meets Seldon. In nine words, that is the start of the IEA.’ Thus, in 1956, Ralph Harris (later to become Lord Harris of High Cross) became the IEA’s general director. One year later, Ralph Harris was joined by Arthur Seldon who became the Institute’s first editorial director. Harris and Seldon co-authored many of the IEA’s early papers; the theme then, as well as now, was that market allocation of goods and services, without the heavy hand of government, produces a superior outcome. During the 1950s and 1960s, when socialism ruled the UK’s academic institutions, news media and politicians, the Harris– Seldon publications and those of their colleagues were seen at best as heretical and at worst as fascist. Ultimately, however, the IEA’s persistence won the respect of the more thoughtful members of 12 foreword the media and the academic community and also of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The IEA’s research provided the Prime Minister and her administration with intellectual ammuni- tion to prevent Britain, as Blundell says, from ‘becoming the first fourth-world country, namely a rich nation returning to poverty’. A major shortfall among practitioners of economics is that we have not made our theory and principles readily accessible to the ordinary person untrained in economics. Many of our fellow men therefore fall easy prey to charlatans and quacks, of all political persuasions, promising one version of the ‘free lunch’ or another. To make economic affairs readily accessible and comprehensible to the ordinary person has been the IEA’s stellar forte and this collection of papers by John Blundell is a continuance of that tradition and speciality. walter e. williams John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia As with all IEA publications, this paper represents the views of the author, not those of the Institute (which has no corporate view), its managing trustees, Academic Advisory Council members or senior staff.
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