In this bold and insightful book, Jacob Soll traces out a history of the free market. Dismissing the modern idea that the market possesses the alchemical capacity to transmute undiluted selfish hedonism into the common good, Soll argues that from Cicero to Adam Smith the main corollary of the market was not selfishness but virtue. Stoic self-control rather than an Epicurean quest for pleasure was the fundamental catalyst and guarantor of free exchange. Without a strong sense of commitment to duty, sociability, and moderation, the trust forming the core of commerce would be impossible. Good morals therefore constituted the necessary condition for ethical people to engage in voluntary trade. Ranging over two centuries and multiple languages, Soll traces how the idea of market morality evolved, exploring the thinking of intellectual luminaries such as St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Francesco Petrarch, and, eventually, Adam Smith.
The other strand of Soll’s reading of the intellectual history of the free market is the necessity of a strong authority with the willingness and capacity to provide the market with support and regulation. While the church initially played this role, from the Italian Renaissance onwards it was the state that was assigned the responsibility. One of Niccolò Machiavelli’s many famous propositions was that the state had to be strong enough at all times to manage people’s capricious passions. Soll chronicles the evolution of this idea through the writings of, among others, Jean Bodin, Antonio Serra, Gerard de Malynes, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and Adam Smith. He outlines more than twenty different roles assigned to the state by different writers as essential to the workings of the free market. Hence, rather than thinking about the free market as a mechanism that exists independently of the state, Soll points to a long history of thinking in which the market and the state were conjoined.
The two strands of Soll’s reading come together in his discussion of Adam Smith. He reads Smith as arguing that the virtues of empathy and duty were “market drivers” and that only a society with a “strong governing elite” could generate free markets. Soll insists that this governing elite played a key role in fostering a “Ciceronian moral regeneration” (pp. 196–197) in the eighteenth century. Indeed, much of Smith’s project was motivated by an interest in reworking ancient moral principles to make them relevant to an age of commercial flourishing. In arguing that the operative principles of Smith’s system were “moral actions, love, and cooperation” (p. 203), Soll makes it abundantly clear that his book is designed as a sustained challenge to Friedrich Hayek’s and Milton Friedman’s interpretation of both Smith and the free market. Smith was no “libertarian defender of modern corporations” and, to him, the free market was never a space for the exclusive interplay of unlimited selfish desires.
The book closes with a discussion of how the idea of the virtue-state-market triad evolved in the subsequent two and a half centuries. In a skillfully navigated whirlwind, the reader is treated to brief, yet rich, discussions of Alexander Hamilton, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Friedrich List, Richard Cobden, William Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, and others. Soll ends with a more sustained discussion of Hayek, Friedman, and the neoliberal movement they inspired.
Intent on showing how philosophers, theologians, political theorists, and economists have theorized the benign interplay between virtue, state, and market, Soll challenges the ideologically motivated use of the term “free market.” In common parlance the concept has come to denote the ideal of an economy that is, as much as possible, devoid of government interference and regulation. Although, properly speaking, neither Hayek nor Friedman argued for the complete removal of the government from the economy, they and their followers used the term “free market” as a moniker, along with the neoclassical assumption of “perfect markets,” to signal a commitment to a reduced economic role for the government. Soll’s book offers arguments from history for why this stylized notion of “free market” actually undermines the market’s capacity to function properly. Rather than continue to embrace the twentieth-century notion of “free market,” Soll posits that the future will be better served if we reconfigure the concept of “free market” to mean a social and economic mediation device that functions best if its participants uphold certain stoic virtues and the state is equipped with the capacity to protect the integrity of the market mechanism.
Wide-ranging, fast-paced, erudite, and entertaining, Soll’s Free Market deserves a large audience. While many scholars before him have tried to write the book that finally replaces Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers, Soll’s Free Market may very well be the one that succeeds.
