Margaret Thatcher: A Legacy of Freedom

It is a great pleasure to be back at Hillsdale College, Michigan. It is some 32 years since I first visited the college for a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Those few days were an important education in American politics for me. The conference was attended by many people who had just returned from the Republican Convention at which President Ford had narrowly defeated Ronald Reagan. They were full of enthusiasm for Reagan and full of conviction that one day he would become president. Their enthusiasm--and their passion too for sound doctrine--swept me along. I think I became a firm Reaganite at that conference here in Hillsdale. And I have never had cause to regret my conversion. I was already "a Thatcherite of the first hour", to use Gaullist terminology. Indeed, along with Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon, Keith Joseph and such distinguished alumni of that Hillsdale meeting as Madsen Pirie and Stuart Butler, who went on to found the Adam Smith Institute in London in the late 1970s--well, we all have a good claim to have been Thatcherites even before Lady Thatcher. Most of the intellectual groundwork for what became Thatcherism was done in places like the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Mont Pelerin Society--and Hillsdale College.