Free market: the history of an idea

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

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.)

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.

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.)