Free Market
The History of an Idea
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
From a MacArthur “Genius,” an intellectual history of the free market, from ancient Rome to the twenty-first century
After two government bailouts of the US economy in less than twenty years, free market ideology is due for serious reappraisal. In Free Market, Jacob Soll details how we got to this current crisis, and how we can find our way out by looking to earlier iterations of free market thought. Contrary to popular narratives, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. But in the eighteenth century, thinkers insisted on free markets without state intervention, leading to a tradition of ideological brittleness. That tradition only calcified in the centuries that followed.
Tracing the intellectual evolution of the free market from Cicero to Milton Friedman, Soll argues that we need to go back to the origins of free market ideology in order to truly understand it—and to develop new economic concepts to face today’s challenges.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Leading theorists of markets believed in government controls and moralistic constraints to rein them in, according to this sprawling intellectual history. Soll (The Reckoning), a philosophy, history, and accounting professor at USC, recaps two millennia of market analysis that emphasized the need for economic exchange to be shaped by principles of fairness, not just profit-seeking, and guided by the state. (Even Adam Smith, he notes, deplored the machinations of businessmen and supported tariffs and other government economic interventions.) Soll's hero is Louis XIV's finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who used state regulation and subsidies to jump-start 17th-century France's industrial market economy—an approach followed, Soll contends, in Alexander Hamilton's industrial policies and the New Deal. Soll unearths much interesting history—medieval Franciscan monks became pioneering economists by pondering how to manage their vows of poverty—but his arguments against libertarianism and "free-market thought" slip into caricature; he calls British economist Alfred Marshall and his followers "Captain Ahab-like in their fixation" on evicting the government from the economy and suggests that modern-day free-market advocacy is the province of reactionaries and racists. Despite its impressive synthesis of cultural, economic, and social history, this analysis is more likely to inflame than settle debates over the proper functioning of markets.
