Atlas Foundation exported the neoliberal think-tank model worldwide

Evidence

By 1981, the fund raising was successful enough for Fisher to establish the Atlas Foundation for Economic Research. He took its name from Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s novel of 1957 depicting the vital role played by experts and men of ideas and the virtues of the right of private property and of a self-interested individualism threatened by the powers of government (see Mühlbauer 2006). The foundation’s goal was to coordinate activities and corporate funding among the network of European and American think tanks and to extend it by developing and financing a group of neoliberal organizations outside Western Europe and the United States. De Soto was to be the first and most successful outcome of this initiative. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1943

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader question of how corporate funding operationalized the Mont Pèlerin intellectual network, echoing the ‘knowledge production’ literature on think tanks. — connects to: A single foundation seeded a third of all market-oriented think tanks; Atlas emerged from the IEA as a deliberate global franchising of think tanks — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 542; Atlas served as the travel broker connecting freedom intellectuals to local think tanks — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 583 (+9 more)
• SEED: Article angle: the Atlas Foundation as a ‘franchise model’ for ideology — replicating the IEA template in the Global South, beginning with De Soto in Peru.