Review of Douglas A. Irwin's Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
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.
