ABSTRACT
The Adam Smith Institute (ASI) was conceived in 1976 by three graduates of St Andrews University in Scotland, Madsen Pirie and the brothers Eamonn and Stuart Butler. Following a year-long period of preparation, the Institute was formally established on 31 August 1977 when it moved into offices in Great George Street, WC1, close to the Treasury and the Palace of Westminster. The principal figures in the ASI are its president, Madsen Pirie, and director, Eamonn Butler. Together, Butler and Pirie “run the Institute as a team. The functions both men play appear to overlap, but the general impression is that Butler is involved more with the day-to-day running of the organization, while Pirie is the ideas man” (Heffernan 1996:73). Stuart Butler, the third founder member, went on to work as a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based thinktank (see Chapter 1) which enjoys friendly relations with the ASI, in 1981 and is now its vice-president for domestic policy studies (Cockett 1994:282). As Hames and Feasey (1994:223) have pointed out, the ASI resembles the Heritage Foundation, albeit on a much smaller scale than that wealthy organization. Like Heritage it “specialises in relatively short and issue-oriented publications”, and some of its best-publicized activities have apparently been copied from American conservative bodies.
