John Blundell - Waging the War of Ideas

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 IEA Occasional Paper, containing published papers by its Director General, John Blundell, is part of that continuing struggle and duty of liberty-loving people worldwide.

John Blundells papers and reviews include a short documentation 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 suffering and murder in pursuit of the Marxist-Leninist world vision under the USSRs 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 UKs top generals in the war of ideas were Antony Fisher and Professor Friedrich Hayek. Professor Hayeks The Road 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. Fishers success in the UKs first broiler-chicken farm, mass-producing Buxted Chickens, provided the economic resources that helped promulgate and market Professor Hayeks 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 generous donors, Sir Antony Fisher was not passive. He understood the ideas of liberty and was an active soldier in the war of ideas. Moreover, Antony Fisher was key to the start of free-market think tanks in Europe, Africa and the Americas.

Mr Blundells papers treat us to a thumbnail sketch of the genesis of the 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 IEAs general director. One year later, Ralph Harris was joined by Arthur Seldon who became the Institutes first editorial director. Harris and Seldon co-authored many of the IEAs 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 UKs academic institutions, news media and politicians, the HarrisSeldon publications and those of their colleagues were seen at best as heretical and at worst as fascist. Ultimately, however, the IEAs persistence won the respect of the more thoughtful members of the media and the academic community and also of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The IEAs research provided the Prime Minister and her administration with intellectual ammunition 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 IEAs stellar forte and this collection of papers by John Blundell is a continuance of that tradition and speciality.