Markets, Misunderstood

A sweeping new book on the history of free market thought misses the mark

- MATT ZWOLINSKI

FREE MARKET TRIES to trace the history of free market thought from Cicero to Milton Friedman, with discussions of St. Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, John Locke, Richard Cantillon, JeanBaptiste Colbert, Adam Smith, and many others. The terrain covered is vast, and it would take a scholar of unusual expertise and extraordinary care to guide us safely through.

Jacob Soll, alas, is not that scholar. Soll, a professor of philosophy, history, and accounting at the University of Southern California, falls well short of his goal, partly due to the unavoidable difficulty of the task and partly due to his overriding commitment to an untenable historical thesis.

Soll begins by stating his agenda. Unlike modern economists such as Milton Friedman, who allegedly define the free market as “the absence of any and all government activity in economic affairs,” Soll “accepts the state as embedded in the market and vice versa.” This vision, for Soll, is best exemplified by the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who served as France’s first minister of state under King Louis XIV. Soll claims Colbert has been unjustly maligned as a misguided mercantilist. Much of the book is spent trying to vindicate Colbertism, arguing that the mainline of economic thought either erred in rejecting it or tacitly embraced its key principles.

For instance, Soll paints Adam Smith as a closet Colbertist who “sought protectionism and empire to aid internal development and to keep investment capital within the nation.” Smith, according to Soll, “enthusiastically supported both colonial conquest and slavery” and adhered to the physiocratic view that “farm labor was the source of all wealth.”