The historian of science Steven Shapin famously opened his 1996 study of The Scientific Revolution by declaring, “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” Jacob Soll doesn’t make a similarly bold venture into paradox at the beginning of Free Market: The History of an Idea by asserting that there’s no such thing as a free market, and this is a book about it.
That great orator and philosopher established the two pillars upon which his successors erected free market doctrine: first, that agriculture, especially as directed by landed aristocrats, was the true source of wealth; and second, that morality was a necessary component of the market’s pursuit of economic equilibrium.
Today the free market is indelibly associated with industrialization. But for most of history, its advocates, including Smith, saw agriculture as the only legitimate source of wealth and scorned trade and industry as irrelevant. Typical in this regard were the physiocrats, the 18th-century French economic thinkers whose outstanding figure was the physician Francois Quesnay. Physiocracy sought to restore the primacy of farming in the face of growing industry and commercialization.
Even though it’s less than 270 pages long, Soll’s study covers considerable territory, from late Republican Rome through the Christian triumph of the Middle Ages to the commercial republics of Renaissance Italy and the Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-French rivalries of the 17th and 18th centuries, then Britain’s 19th-century imperial dominion, finally completing his journey with the free market apostles of the 20th century.
There are, moreover, several shocking errors that make one wonder how they could get past a major publisher or, frankly, how a historian of Soll’s stature could make them.
They failed to foresee a time when humans would skimp on foodstuffs in order to afford trinkets.