Waging the War of Ideas

John Blundell

• Publisher: London Publishing Partnership
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780255366847
• eBook ISBN: 9780255367004
• Edition: 4

This paper discusses how wars of ideas can be waged, using the author's extensive experience, both as director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and at other classical liberal think tanks. John Blundell begins his stimulating collection of published essays, reviews and introductions by showing how the founders of the IEA successfully fought the conventional planning wisdom of the 1960s and 1970s, providing the ideas which, by the 1980s and 1990s, had brought about increased freedom and a revival in the use of markets. He draws lessons from those days and then surveys the contemporary scene, showing how the anti-liberal ideas emerging now are different from those which prevailed in the early years of the IEA. As well as giving a valuable view of the IEAs development in the past, these essays also offer advice on how to continue winning in the new circumstances of the present. Waging the War of Ideas has been constantly in demand since it was first published in 2001. This new and expanded edition contains three new chapters and is introduced by Professor Walter Williams.

1. How to move a nation

(Reason, February 1987)

1946: Recently demobilised from Britain’s Royal Air Force, highly decorated fighter pilot Antony Fisher finds in the Reader’s Digest a condensation of F. A. Hayek’s classic critique of socialism, The Road to Serfdom. It confirms his own worries about his country’s tilt toward socialism.

Travelling to London, Fisher seeks out Hayek at the London School of Economics (LSE). ‘What can I do? Should I enter politics?’ he asks. With Fisher’s war record, good looks, gift for speaking, and excellent education, it is no idle question.

‘No,’ replies Hayek. ‘Society’s course will be changed only by a change in ideas. First you must reach the intellectuals, the teachers and writers, with reasoned argument. It will be their influence on society which will prevail, and the politicians will follow.’

1949: Ralph Harris, a young researcher from the Conservative Party, gives a Saturday afternoon lecture in a small village in southeastern England. Fisher – now a farmer – is present and loves what he hears. Taking Harris aside after the meeting, he explains his ideas for an organisation to make the free-market case to intellectuals. ‘One day,’ he says, ‘when my ship comes in, I’d like to create something which will do for the non-Labour parties what the [socialist] Fabian Society did for the Labour Party.’

Harris is excited. ‘If you get any further,’ he says, ‘I’d like to be considered as the man to run such a group.’

1953–7: In 1953 Fisher starts what is to become the highly profitable Buxted Chicken Co., the first attempt at factory farming in Britain. By September 1954, it is showing a profit, and he can begin to think more about starting a free-market institute.

In November 1955, Fisher and two friends sign a trust deed establishing the Institute of Economic Affairs. Looking for someone to run the IEA, Fisher remembers Harris. They have not communicated since that first meeting in 1949. Harris is now 31 and, after seven years teaching economics at St Andrews University in Scotland, is writing editorials at the Glasgow Herald. In June 1956, the intellectual Harris meets the businessman Fisher in London. On the promise of a starting budget of £1,000 and a part-time salary of £10 a week – the same starting salary as Buxted Chicken’s general manager – Harris agrees to become the new Institute’s general director on 1 January 1957.

Also in the summer of 1956, the embryonic Institute interests economist Arthur Seldon in writing a paper on pensions. A former socialist and the son of a cobbler from London’s East End, Seldon had become a classical liberal while studying at the LSE. Within weeks of reaching London, Harris meets Seldon and an extraordinarily fruitful partnership begins.

1987: It is early January and cold. Some thirty years have passed since Ralph Harris – now Lord Harris of High Cross – left Scotland. Today, sitting in the offices of the IEA in London – so close you could hit a cricket ball through Parliament’s windows – he reviews the list of 250 major corporations that support its work; it has a budget approaching $1 million1 and a staff of a dozen. For the past decade, its ideas have clearly been in the ascendancy. Some commentators have gone so far as to call the IEA’s cramped offices the home of the new orthodoxy.

South of London in his home in rural Kent, Arthur Seldon, now 70 but as active, creative and productive as ever, also reviews a list. It is a list of over 300 titles he has produced and more than 500 authors he has nurtured and developed for the IEA. On his coffee table lie copies of the Institute’s glossy bimonthly magazine Economic Affairs and a new book, The Unfinished Agenda: Essays on the Political Economy of Government Policy in Honour of Arthur Seldon, containing chapters by eleven internationally renowned economists including Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock.

Six thousand miles west, in downtown San Francisco, Antony Fisher enters the offices of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which he established in the 1970s to aid and encourage the formation of new institutes around the world. Now a full-time think-tank entrepreneur, he too has a list – 36 institutes in 18 countries, all based on the IEA model.

On the walls of the former house where IEA has its offices hang the portraits of famous economists, most notably Hayek, Friedman and Ludwig von Mises – but also John Maynard Keynes. And hanging there, too, is Keynes’s famous statement that ‘The ideas of economists... are more powerful than is commonly understood.’ It is from here that the IEA team has steered market ideas from total heresy to partial orthodoxy – at least in certain quarters.

Looking back to his decision 30 years ago to give up a secure, well-paid job to risk his future and that of his young family in the service of an unpopular cause, Harris laughs so loudly the tape jumps. ‘I was mad!’ he says, and one can almost believe him. ‘I did not calculate the risk at all! Fisher’s enthusiasm and my desire to return to London and do something were sufficient.’

Arthur Seldon was more careful. Becoming part-time editorial director in June 1959, he managed to hold on to his main job as an economist for a brewing-industry association until he too became full-time in July 1961. Ever since his days at the LSE in the mid-to-late 1930s, Seldon had wanted a chance to ‘fight back’. This was it.

Government planning was in its ascendancy. Market ideas were scoffed at as old-fashioned – or worse. Recalls Jack Wiseman, a University of York professor long associated with the IEA: ‘One day, leaving the London School of Economics, a fellow economist asked if I could use a lift. I said I was going to the IEA. “Good God,” he replied, “you aren’t one of that fascist lot, are you?” I went to the IEA – he later became Governor of the Bank of England!’

Says Harris, ‘We were a scorned, dismissed, heretical minority. There was a preordained path for the state to regulate, to plan and to direct – as in war, so in peace. If you questioned it, it was like swearing in church. At times this overwhelming consensus intimidated us, and we sometimes held back. We often felt like mischievous, naughty little boys.’

It was not at all clear at first exactly what the new Institute would do in the face of such widespread, deep-set hostility. The strategic choices Harris and Fisher faced were limited. British laws governing charitable institutions, as well as Hayek’s advice and their own distaste for the political process, ruled out any kind of lobbying and direct involvement with public policy.

One possibility was a broad-based populist organisation. Founder Antony Fisher, who admired the popularising work done by Leonard Read’s Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in the United States, favoured this approach and would regularly send Harris heavily marked copies of FEE publications. Although Harris liked much of what he read there, he felt they were not scholarly enough for the job in the UK.

While Fisher and Harris were debating, Arthur Seldon resolved the question. In the summer of 1957, he handed in a manuscript entitled ‘Pensions in a Free Society’, which was to become one of the first IEA publications. It was well-reasoned, thorough, non-polemical and of interest to scholars and specialists – but also easily accessible to lay audiences.

Seldon himself believed that market ideas, through education and persuasion, would out-flank the politicians by first winning over the intellectuals and journalists, whom Hayek had once dubbed ‘second-hand dealers in ideas’. To this day he uses a military analogy. The IEA would be the artillery firing the shells (ideas). Some would land on target (the intellectuals), while others might miss. But the Institute would never be the infantry engaged in short-term, face-to-face grappling with the enemy. Rather, its artillery barrage would clear the way for others to do the work of the infantry later on. The IEA would show why matters had gone wrong and set out broad principles, while others would argue precisely how matters should be put right. Fisher, whatever his personal preferences, stepped back and let Harris and Seldon run things.

The IEA has from the beginning concentrated on publishing papers and pamphlets for an intellectual audience, works whose sole concern – in the words of the IEA’s first brochure – would be ‘economic truth’ unswayed by current ‘political considerations’. The goal of these efforts, the IEA said, was a society in which people would understand free-market economics ‘together with an understanding of the moral foundations which govern the acquisition and holding of property, the right of the individual to have access to free competitive markets and the necessity of a secure and honest monetary system’.

An early problem was finding outside authors willing to put pen to paper for the fledgling Institute. ‘We were old hat, old fashioned,’ comments Seldon, ‘and Ralph and I had to work on everything.’ After Seldon’s Pensions appeared, they collaborated on books about consumer credit and advertising. The latter proved good advertising of its own. When left-wing economist Nikolas Kaldor criticised the book, recalls Seldon, ‘This criticism made a very favourable impression in the corporate world. Companies began asking “How can we help?” to which we would say, “Send us a cheque!” ’

From the start, Harris and Seldon were adamant that they would always be independent of their financial contributors. This meant not only never seeking nor accepting taxpayers’ money but also making sure all donations were ‘without strings’. Seldon remembers warning potential corporate donors, ‘We shan’t say what you want.’

Slowly but surely the IEA began to find an audience. From the start, its books were well reviewed, not by economists, but by journalists in the financial and general news press. The reviewers liked them, says Harris, because ‘they were not polemical but well-researched and documented. Facts and figures – not theory – won us acclaim in the early days and led to meetings with editors and journalists.’

But by the early 1960s, economists began to accept the presence of the maverick IEA, and a few even began to suggest titles of papers they might contribute. Founder Antony Fisher wanted to see ‘an IEA paper on every topic that might be discussed’. The result was the Hobart Papers, named after the Institute’s new address in Hobart Place.

At the time, it was doubtful that the Hobart Papers would find an audience, recalled Norman Macrae of The Economist in 1984. ‘I remember writing a polite review of Hobart Paper 1 in early 1960, but saying privately that the venture would probably go bust, and that only a fool would write Hobart Paper 2,’ he wrote in a pamphlet marking the 100th Hobart Paper. ‘This last proved true prophecy, because I proceeded to write Hobart Paper 2 myself.’

The object of Macrae’s scepticism – the first Hobart Paper – was Basil Yamey’s Resale Price Maintenance and Shoppers’ Choice (1960). Fisher himself had baulked at the publication of this work. He thought the topic – why manufacturers shouldn’t be allowed to require all retailers to sell products at the same price – overwhelmingly dull and unimportant and Yamey’s treatment to be far too scholarly. He feared nobody would read it. ‘I can remember saying to Ralph, who sent me the draft, that it was so dull, couldn’t I have “more fun for my m...

Table of contents

• The author
• Foreword to the 3rd edition
• Foreword to the 4th edition
• 1. How to move a nation
• 2. Waging the war of ideas: why there are no shortcuts
• 3. No Antony Fisher, no IEA: The Case for Freedom after 50 years
• 4. Hayek and the second-hand dealers in ideas
• 5. The power of ideas
• 6. The right use of ideas
• 7. More on the power of ideas
• 8. Hayek, Fisher and The Road to Serfdom
• 9. Foreword to The Representation of Business in English Literature
• 10. Foreword to A Conversation with Harris and Seldon
• 11. Just in Time: Inside the Thatcher Revolution
• 12. The Hoover Institution
• 13. On Milton Friedman’s 90th birthday we still need his remedy
• 14. The achievements of Peter Bauer
• 15. Beyond ideology: towards the demise of the state and the coming era of consumer politics
• 16. Looking back at the condensed version of The Road to Serfdom after 60 years
• 17. Lessons of the past fifty years show we need to create a freemarket utopia
• 18. A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America
• 19. Tribute to Lord Harris of High Cross and Dr Arthur Seldon CBE
• 20. John Blundell – an obituary
• About the IEA