"Between 1992 and 2007 the party was intellectually closer to Labour," says Julian Astle, a director of CentreForum, the Lib Dems' favourite think-tank.
Mr Alexander may not be quite so doctrinaire an economic liberal, say some, but, like Mr Clegg, he is intellectually closer to Mr Laws than to the soggy end of the Lib Dem spectrum.
It is intellectually closer to the hermeneutic tradition than to the positivism that underlay the analytic philosophy of history of the 1960s.
While certainly not a hawk, he has intellectually moved closer to ending the asset purchases than people might realize.
"He was shallow intellectually," recalled his close friend Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine.
Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris, Mr. Theodore says, are "all very close intellectually and in terms of organization".
In school, "he devoured books and went at the teachers intellectually," Bill Powell, a close friend at Northwestern, said.
The "Europeanists," such as the literary critic Eugen Lovinescu, saw no alternative to the Western model, since Europe intellectually was drawing closer together.
The comedian said he thought that President Obama reacts to criticism intellectually, which makes him "closer to being a white kid".
"Two of the nation's greatest secretaries of state in the modern period, Dean Acheson and Henry Kissinger, were not personally close but were intellectually bonded to their presidents," said Walter Isaacson, the author of a biography of Mr. Kissinger and the co-author, with Evan Thomas, of "The Wise Men," a book about America's postwar foreign policy establishment.
