Sir Antony George Anson Fisher AFC (28 June 1915 – 8 July 1988), nicknamed AGAF, was a British businessman and think tank founder.
[4] The experience both traumatised Fisher and, according to a biography, galvanised him into a belief that he must act to make the world a freer and more prosperous place where nation states would not go to war.
[4] After World War II, Fisher was alarmed by the election of a Labour government, the nationalisation of industry, and the introduction of central economic planning.
F. A. Harper of the FEE introduced Fisher to former colleagues from the Agriculture Department of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who showed him intensive chicken farming techniques.
[11] Set up by Fisher and Oliver Smedley,[12] the IEA was founded after Hayek had suggested that an intellectual counterweight through think tanks was necessary to combat the prevailing post-war consensus around Keynesianism and the Butskellism of Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell.
Fisher, Harris, and others built the IEA and its affiliates of Atlas Network into a bastion of free-market economics and neoliberalism,[9] which supplanted the post-war Keynesian paradigm.
Cockett writes, "On the strength of his reputation with the IEA, he was invited in 1975 to become co-director of the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, founded by the Canadian businessman T. Patrick Boyle in 1974.
[12] Discussing the rise of neoliberalism, Timothy Mitchell writes that by 1979, when Thatcher won the election, "what had begun as a fringe right-wing intellectual current" had just become "the most powerful political orthodoxy in the West".
[13] According to Mitchell, when Fisher established the Atlas Foundation of Economic Research, its 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".