The IEA, the LSE, and the Influence of Ideas

by Arthur Seldon, Colin Robinson (Editor)

Overview

Volume 7 of The Collected Works of Arthur Seldon includes six works that discuss the role of the Institute of Economic Affairs, where Seldon spent most of his working life.

Friedrich Hayek regarded himself as partly responsible for the creation of the IEA. The Institute, founded by Sir Antony Fisher, was influential not only in the United Kingdom—where it had a major impact on the policies of the Thatcher governments of the 1980s—but all around the world. Many of the classical liberal and free-market think tanks in the United States and other countries were established by Fisher and were modeled on and took their inspiration from the IEA.

In the works in this volume, Seldon emphasizes the power of ideas to transform society and provides insight into how he saw the place of the IEA (and his own role within it) in starting to bring about that transformation.

Arthur Seldon has been writing on classical liberal economics since the 1930s, when he was a student at the London School of Economics during Friedrich Hayek’s time there. For over thirty years, from the late 1950s, he was Editorial Director of the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, where his publishing program was one of the principal influences on governments all around the world, persuading them to liberalize their economies. His Collected Works in these seven volumes are a major contribution to classical liberal thought.

Colin Robinson was a business economist for eleven years. He was then appointed to the Chair of Economics at the Universityof Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom, where he founded the Department of Economics and is now Emeritus Professor. He is the author of 23 books and over 150 scholarly articles and has edited many other books. For many years he has been associated with the Institute of Economic Affairs and from 1992 to 2002 he was the IEA’s Editorial Director.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865975569
Publisher:	Liberty Fund, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/19/2005
Series:	The Collected Works of Arthur Seldon , #7
Edition description:	Volume 7
Pages:	335
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.95(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Table of Contents

Introduction by Colin Robinson ix

THE ESSENCE OF THE IEA 3

NEW HOPE FOR ECONOMIC POLICY IN A CHANGING POLITY 19

RECOLLECTIONS: BEFORE AND AFTER THE ROAD TO SERFDOM 29

ECONOMIC SCHOLARSHIP AND POLITICAL INTEREST: IEA THINKING
AND GOVERNMENT POLICIES 43

FROM THE LSE TO THE IEA 69

THE MAKING OF THE INSTITUTE: A SELECTION OF ARTHUR
SELDON’S PREFACES 1960–1996

The IEA Papers: Subjects and Authors 79
Introduction 83
I. Prefaces to Hobart Papers 87
II. Prefaces to Hobart Paperbacks 233
III. Prefaces to IEA Readings 259
A Last Word 279

Index 281

Index to The Collected Works of Arthur Seldon 287