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, Jean-Baptiste 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 over-riding commitment to an untenable historical thesis.
Soll begins by stating his agenda. Unlike modern economists such as Milton Friedman, who allegedly define the free
