Free Market: The History of an Idea

by Jacob Soll

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465049707
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	156,130
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Jacob Soll is University Professor and a professor of philosophy, history, and accounting at the University of Southern California. The author of The Reckoning and The Information Master, Soll is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the MacArthur “Genius” grant. He lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A New Origins Story of Free Market Thought 1

1 The Dream of Cicero 11

2 The Divine Economy 23

3 God in the Medieval Market Mechanism 41

4 Florentine Wealth and the Machiavellian Marketplace 61

5 England's Free Trade by Means of the State 73

6 Freedom and Wealth in the Dutch Republic 91

7 Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the State-Made Market 107

8 The Nightmares of the Sun King and the Dream of Free Markets 125

9 The Movement of the Planets and the New World of English Free Trade 141

10 England Versus France: Trade War, Debt, and the Dream of Paradise Found 151

11 The French Cult of Nature and the Invention of Enlightenment Economics 163

12 Free Markets Versus Nature 183

13 Adam Smith and the Benevolent Free-Trade Society 195

14 Free Market Empire 217

15 The End of Virtue: Liberalism and Libertariamsm 237

Conclusion: Authoritarian Capitalism, Democracy, and Free Market Thought 263

Acknowledgments 269

Notes 271

Index 311

Editorial Reviews

09/05/2022

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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

A timely and erudite history…incisive.”—Financial Times

"Free Market offers a rich and valuable antidote to narrower and more traditional accounts of the liberal economic tradition.”—The Guardian

“Nuanced history of a notion that, while central dogma in economics, is in the eye of the beholder….[an] authoritative account…stimulating….a cleareyed exposition of an important tenet of economic thought, with all its shades of meaning.”—Kirkus (starred review)

“If anyone is qualified to write a history of free-market thinking, it is surely Jacob Soll.”—Literary Review

"A truly excellent, excellent, wonderful book.”—J. Bradford Delong, author of Slouching Towards Utopia

“If, as Keynes asserted, ideas are in the end, what is most important, intellectual history captures the driving forces behind social change. There is much to be learned relevant to current policy debates from Jacob Soll’s engaging history of the free market idea. Whether you think you love or hate free markets, you will learn much from this important book.”—Lawrence H. Summers

“In this essential book, Jacob Soll gives us a lucid, frequently surprising, and altogether enthralling account of the history of free market thought. Deeply learned and engagingly written, the book has important implications for how we should think about free markets today. In every sense, it is a revelation.”—David A. Bell, Princeton University

“Jacob Soll's fascinating and pathbreaking study is a historical tour de force and a brilliant exploration of the major economic ideas that have shaped our world.”—Gordon Brown, former prime minister, United Kingdom

“Among the defining values of Western societies, free expression and human rights stand tall. What about the free market? How certain are we about its origins and meaning? As only a master historian can, Jacob Soll takes us through the origins, alternatives, and ambiguities. Defenders as well as detractors must consult this defining history.”—Margaret C. Jacob, distinguished research professor, UCLA

“In an awe-inspiring and enthralling tour from the ancient to the contemporary world, Jacob Soll dissolves the dichotomy of market and government, showing that it was campaigns for affluence led by the state in the century and a half before the French Revolution that birthed the dream of liberating economic affairs from interference. Soll is one of our master historians, and his newest book makes it impossible to think about the wealth of nations—or our political future—in the same way again.”—Samuel Moyn, Yale University

From the Publisher

★ 2022-06-21
Nuanced history of a notion that, while central dogma in economics, is in the eye of the beholder.

Through the influence of libertarians like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, the free market today is presumed to be self-regulating, with state interference only harming it. But as Soll, a MacArthur fellow and professor of philosophy, history, and accounting, shows in this authoritative account, this is far from the views of early proponents of the free market. Cicero, for example, believed that a free market should be the natural outcome of well-meaning, well-educated agrarians coming together to trade justly, with the state aiding the process through the guidance of wise laws. This idea carried into the early modern period by way of intermediaries such as St. Augustine, who continued to view free trade as a species of ethics. “If God helped people do good, and if by their own free will they then were pious and nonmaterialistic, their possession of money and goods could be positive,” Soll glosses, before moving on to the greatest moral economist of all, Adam Smith, who “saw the free market as the product of a peaceful and even gentlemanly process of social and economic progress.” An influential precursor to Smith, Antonio Genovesi emphasized personal integrity and public trust as determinants of the value of labor and commodities, aided again by governments that advanced trade by providing protections against criminals, building roads and harbors, and the like. Conversely, Soll argues, von Hayek considered markets to be the arena of a battle between good and evil, the latter represented by the state. Friedman, whose name is most closely associated with the free market today, agreed, though it did not stop him from supporting unfree societies such as Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. Ironically, Soll concludes in this stimulating book, China is now a leading proponent of free market ideas, even as many Western powers turn to economic nationalism.

A cleareyed exposition of an important tenet of economic thought, with all its shades of meaning.

Kirkus Reviews