Controversy erupted this week with reports that the Institute of Economic Affairs, a thinktank, offered access to government ministers in exchange for cash from its donors, whose identities it keeps secret. But why are such institutions called thinktanks rather than think-aquaria, or think-helicopters?
“Think tank” originates in the late 19th century as a jocular term for the brain, so “tank” here is a container or vessel. By the late 1950s it also meant a research institution: a tank, perhaps, of think tanks. The Rand Corporation, set up in 1948 as a source of military research, claims that “the term ‘think tank’ was first applied” to itself in the 1960s. This implies, oddly, that its handsome resources don’t stretch to a copy of the OED: the phrase was used in 1958 about Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
Since then, thinktanks have bred like rabbits, and many are now simply lobbying organisations for powerful interests, camouflaged under a thin veneer of pseudo-academicism and a dubiously justifiable charitable status. If they really were tanks, they’d be parked on the lawn of democracy and firing explosive shells at the walls.
