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Free Market: The History of an Idea - Hardcover | Diverse Reads

Free Market: The History of an Idea

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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.

ISBN-13: 9780465049707

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Basic Books

Publication Date: 09-06-2022

Pages: 336

Product Dimensions: 6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)

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