Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade.

• Author: Bruce, David S.

Free trade is, as always, in trouble - the best tribute to its power and effectiveness. But, also as always, the centers of support for and opposition to free trade are shifting. Ross Perot focused his 1988 campaign on resistance to free-trade doctrine. Even the U.S. Trade Representative's Office, long a sanctuary for openness, was headed in the first Clinton term by Mickey Kantor, who said publicly that Americans had never been keen on the idea and tried to act accordingly. His successor and ex-deputy, Charlene Barshefsky, a classic example of the bookkeeper taught to read, busies herself with the theology of bilateralism while running interference for America's most vested interests in the name of anti-dumping.

Amid such turbulence, we should welcome an overview of the intellectual history of free trade. Douglas A. Irwin of the Chicago Business School has attempted such an undertaking, appropriately entitled Against the Tide. The book divides into accounts of the origins of free-trade doctrine and the controversies it has aroused - fifteen sections in all, examining in detail the ideas of leading theorists from Adam Smith to Harry Johnson. It depicts the turmoil of intellectual countercurrents and criticism as acutely as the positive arguments on behalf of free trade. Irwin's essentially chronological presentation quotes widely and judiciously to provide a useful and economical synopsis of the literature, especially valuable for bringing to bear the views of such great twentieth-century thinkers as Jacob Viner. The historical and intellectual connections play illuminatingly backward as much as incrementally forward.

After a brief chapter on "Early Foreign Trade Doctrines", Irwin focuses in earnest upon the mercantilists, as they came to power in the principal countries of Europe around 1650; for "mercantilist doctrines not only constitute a major epoch in economic thought, but provide the immediate backdrop for the emergence of free trade thought." He further points out that mercantilist thinking broke with previous economic doctrine in actively promoting the expansion of trade, albeit under state guidance. From mercantilism Irwin progresses to Adam Smith's counterattack, seeking, among other things, to show how Smith's thinking originated in what he terms the "physiocratic and moral philosophy" of the previous century, and emphatically not in the economic literature of his own epoch.

Having clearly and capably articulated Smith's arguments, Irwin closes his first section with a general treatment of free trade's part in classical economic doctrine before moving in his second section to treat the influence and arguments of Robert Torrens, John Stuart Mill, Frank Graham, and Mikhail Manoilescu. He follows these with omnibus intellectual sketches of "The Australian Case for Protection", "The Welfare Economics of Free Trade", "Keynes and the Macroeconomics of Protection", and "Strategic Trade Policy." The book's brief conclusion is clear, to the point, and well expressed, but the chapter on Mill and his classic defense of special-case protection the...