The Adam Smith Institute arrived unannounced in the late 1970s, heralding the collapse of the postwar Keynesian consensus and the birth of a new order with sharp, boldly designed and pithily titled pamphlets. Its name became synonymous with the radical leading edge of neoliberalism. It gained widespread media coverage for its ideas and gathered round itself a tribe of like-minded libertarians who became the embodiment of free market ‘thinking-the-unthinkable’ for new times. Its star remained in the ascendant as long as Margaret Thatcher commanded the political heights; its existence since her fall has been a half-life.
Think Tank: The Story of the Adam Smith Institute is the first-person account of that story by the ASI’s longstanding director Madsen Pirie. It is a pacey, engrossing tale of how rank amateurs with no resources, few friends but unshakeable belief created a powerful and highly original thinktank. Pirie and Eamonn Butler, his collaborator and successor, were never in it for the money or political power. They had little, if any, of either for much of the time. They were simply libertarian academics, with an eye for the main chance, a genius for organisation, and a sharp awareness of the media. To the 1980s right they were what Marxism Today was to the left: creative, disorientating and bold, with a keen understanding of the importance of networks, branding and long-range vision.
Once their clear-sighted and simple libertarianism had broken into the mainstream of politics, they applied it uniformly to each and every economic and social issue. This gave them reach into areas of policy previously considered off-limits: privatisation, tax reform, the marketisation of public services. But it also explains their decline in the 1990s and their irrelevance to politics after Thatcher. At no point did they critically self-reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of their ideas in practice. They just carried on applying the template, which is why the conservative political class had to invent new thinktanks in the New Labour era in order to modernise its thinking. The ASI just stood on the same ground it had always occupied.
Consequently, this account is remarkably free of any substantive analysis of the deeper trends at work during the ASI’s life. If you really want to understand its rise and subsequent fall, you will have to look elsewhere.
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Nick Pearce is director of IPPR