Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, first met Antony Fisher (later Sir Antony) in the autumn of 1980 when he invited Gissurarson and other participants at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Stanford to a reception at his house in San Francisco. Fisher and his wife Dorian lived in an elegant flat on the eleventh floor at 1750 Taylor Street. Fisher was in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War when his brother was killed. Consequently, he decided to try and make the world a better place. At the end of the War he read an extract of The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. von Hayek, published in Reader’s Digest. Hayek argued that Hitler’s national socialism and Stalin’s communism were two branches of the same tree, and also warned against central economic planning which would require a police state.
Fisher asked Hayek for advice, as he was eager to become active politically. Hayek told him that political influence was really wielded by those who set the agenda, decided on the premises of political debate as gatekeepers and wordsmiths. Therefore, Fisher should establish a think tank instead of standing in elections. Fisher took his advice, and in 1955 he founded the Institute of Economic Affairs in London whose task it is to explore where pricing can replace taxing and where problems can be resolved by spontaneous cooperation and not by commands from above. The IEA had a great impact on the political climate in Great Britain and elsewhere.
Fisher was later to repeat this initiative in other countries, and in 1981 he founded the Atlas Network, an umbrella organisation of free-market think tanks. At present, about 500 institutes in about 100 countries belong to the Network which annually holds the ‘Freedom Dinner’ as a kind of harvest feast. In 2023 the Freedom Dinner was held in New York on 16 November, and it was attended by Professor Gissurarson and also by Dr. Birgir Thor Runolfsson, Chairman of the Economics Faculty at the University of Iceland. The Templeton Prize for the effective operation of a think tank was awarded to the Foundation for Economic Freedom in the Philippinese and the Sir Antony Fisher Prize for individual initiative and leadership was awarded to Temba Nolutshungu of South Africa.
