About Atlas’s Founder Sir Antony Fisher
Although it was founded in 1981, the story of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation begins in 1947 when Antony Fisher, a Royal Air Force pilot in World War II, arranged a meeting with economist Friedrich Hayek, who had recently authored The Road to Serfdom. That remarkable book resonated with Fisher, who was alarmed by the growing public acceptance of intrusive government in Western democracies like his native Great Britain. Fisher was inclined to enter politics to defend individual liberty against creeping socialism, but Hayek advised against this. Positive reform would be impossible, he cautioned, without first affecting a change in the climate of ideas.
Several years later, after achieving success as an entrepreneur, Fisher decided the most effective way to act on Hayek’s advice would be by establishing an independent research institute that would bring innovative, market-based perspectives to issues of public policy. In 1955, he founded the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, which gradually gained credibility and laid the intellectual groundwork for what later became the Thatcher Revolution. By that time, Fisher was frequently sought for consultation about how to start a think tank and do it right. During the 1970s, he helped in the early stages of the Manhattan Institute, Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and Fraser Institute in Vancouver, Canada.
In 1981, Fisher founded the Atlas Economic Research Foundation to institutionalize this process of creating new think tanks. Since then, Atlas has played an important role in setting up and supporting numerous market-oriented public policy organizations all over the world. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis in Texas, Fundación Libertad in Argentina, Hong Kong Centre for Economic Research, Lithuanian Free Market Institute, Liberty Institute in India, and Association for Liberal Thinking in Turkey.
Today, Atlas supports and works actively with approximately 200 market-oriented think tanks – some from highly developed countries and others from parts of the world where economic freedom is poorly understood.
While the think tank movement has grown significantly over recent years, the spirit of Atlas’s work remains the same. To win the long-term policy battles that will shape history, we must energize public policy discourse through credible research by institutes that are dedicated to free markets and individual liberty, and that are well managed and independent of vested interests. Atlas serves those who are changing the climate of ideas in order to fulfill its motto: ‘Bringing freedom to the world.’
