Here’s how an individual spreads liberty: ideas, graft and patience

Linda Whetstone spread classical liberal ideas from her kitchen table in Sussex, from which she created and distributed more than 150,000 CDs of key freedom texts to students in over 60 countries

Ideas matter. Keeping ideas alive, nurturing and spreading them and finding a continual supply of advocates to promulgate them, is what facilitates lasting change. It is a painstaking task, requiring both patience and persistence – especially when the philosophy you are promoting is not the fashion of the day.

Linda Whetstone, the leading practitioner of this approach for the past 60 years, died suddenly in Florida on Wednesday, aged 79. She had been attending the Liberty Forum, the largest annual gathering of freedom advocates from all corners of the globe. It culminated in a gala dinner of nearly 800 people at a Miami baseball stadium on Tuesday evening, at which she was feted as one part philosopher queen, one part free-market rock star.

Whetstone was the daughter of Sir Antony Fisher, the businessman and war hero, who had read Friedrich Hayek’s seminal work, The Road to Serfdom, and was inspired to find a mechanism for spreading pro-freedom thinking in the face of the rise of socialism. The result was the creation of the Institute of Economic Affairs in 1955. The IEA eschewed any engagement in day-today political fights, but sought to shape the climate of opinion over the longer term through a programme of research and education.

For years, the IEA toiled away on the outer fringes of mainstream debate. It produced papers on topics such as the abolition of currency exchange controls and the denationalisation of the telecoms industry – considered heretical ideas at the time. But the IEA’s strategy paid off. Upon entering Downing Street in 1979, Margaret Thatcher wrote to Fisher crediting him and the IEA with creating the intellectual climate that made her victory possible.

From a young age, Whetstone threw herself into her father’s mission. She attended her first Mont Pelerin Society conference at 17 – a network of thinkers and academics created by Hayek to nurture classical liberal thinking. She went on to become president of the society in 2020. She has also served for decades on the IEA board of trustees.

However, her real contribution was not so much in the prestigious offices she held, but instead based on her matter-of-fact determination to spread classical liberal ideas across the globe. She did this, literally, from her kitchen table in Hartfield, Sussex, where she created and distributed more than 150,000 CDs of key freedom texts to students in over 60 countries. In the past two years alone, she oversaw the delivery of more than 30,000 pro-freedom books to more than 20 countries in 10 different languages. She also travelled to the corners of the world, often the poorest corners, to inspire directly and motivate scholars.

The great economist Milton Friedman once observed that the role of a think tank is to keep a plethora of ideas alive and available, so they can be picked up and implemented when circumstances allow. Whetstone’s life and career was dedicated to that end. Her impact – huge even in her own lifetime – will continue to reverberate across the world in the years to come.