Free market : the history of an idea

Free market The history of an idea

Jacob Soll, 1968-

Book - 2022

"After two government bailouts of the American economy in less than twenty years, free market thought is due for serious reappraisal. Free Market: The History of an Idea shows how the idea became so powerful, why it succeeded, and why it has failed so spectacularly. In 1990, the G7 Countries enjoyed 70 percent of world GDP. In the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was supposed to be a story of the success of free markets. However, in the past thirty years, that number has dropped by half, and Asia has emerged as a major motor of world economic growth. Today, state-run China is the second biggest economy on earth, and tiny Singapore, with its state-owned companies, has become a new model of wealth creation. In other words, Mi...lton Friedman's free market dogma, that only private companies can create wealth and that states hamper it, has not proved very clearly to be untrue. This book shows how we got to the current crisis of free market thought, and suggests how we can find our way out. Contrary to popular free market narratives, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. But in the eighteenth century, some free-market thinkers began insisting only pure free markets, without state intervention, could work. A tradition of free-market ideological brittleness emerged, and it has led orthodox free market economics to some spectacular failures. It is a paradox that an economic theory rooted in the idea of competition, adaptation and evolution, has refused to follow its own precepts. This book shows that we need to go back to the origins of free market thought in order to understand its dynamism, as well as its inherent weaknesses, and to develop new economic concepts to face the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century."--

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Subjects
Free enterprise > History.
Capitalism > History.
Economic history.
Published
New York : Basic Books 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
Jacob Soll, 1968- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
viii, 326 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780465049707
  • Introduction: A New Origins Story of Free Market Thought
  • 1. The Dream of Cicero
  • 2. The Divine Economy
  • 3. God in the Medieval Market Mechanism
  • 4. Florentine Wealth and the Machiavellian Marketplace
  • 5. England's Free Trade by Means of the State
  • 6. Freedom and Wealth in the Dutch Republic
  • 7. Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the State-Made Market
  • 8. The Nightmares of the Sun King and the Dream of Free Markets
  • 9. The Movement of the Planets and the New World of English Free Trade
  • 10. England Versus France: Trade War, Debt, and the Dream of Paradise Found
  • 11. The French Cult of Nature and the Invention of Enlightenment Economics
  • 12. Free Markets Versus Nature
  • 13. Adam Smith and the Benevolent Free-Trade Society
  • 14. Free Market Empire
  • 15. The End of Virtue: Liberalism and Libertariamsm
  • Conclusion: Authoritarian Capitalism, Democracy, and Free Market Thought
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

Soll's Free Market: The History of an Idea is an unsatisfactory attempt at an otherwise interesting project in the history of economic thought. Soll (philosophy, history, and accounting, Univ. of Southern California) is extremely loose in his usage of economic concepts and terms, of which he demonstrates an incomplete and sometimes incorrect understanding. Soll bills his book as a history of an idea but includes irrelevant character attacks on thinkers he identifies as being advocates of free markets and offers no similar condemnation of the personal lives of the free-market critics he cites. In some instances, Soll greatly stretches references to support his desired arguments; in others, the references have no relation to Soll's argument or even contradict it. Finally, Soll presents some historical data in such a heavily curated manner that they offer a very different impression than a more complete treatment would. Summing Up: Not recommended. --Garrett Wood, Virginia Wesleyan University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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