Eric MacGilvray

I was expecting something completely different from this book based on the product reviews and descriptions I read before buying it. I thought it would discuss the rise of market freedom from an (at least partly) historical vantage point, or from the perspective of social or political theory. But the author does not discuss a single historical event, and offers no general ideas about the nature of market society. Instead he has restricted himself to merely reading classic works in political theory; Aristotle, Aquinas, Cicero, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Mill, Rousseau, Hayek, and giving his own interpretation of how the concept of "freedom" evolved in their writings.

He certainly manages this task with great expertise, and academics who specialize in tracing various -isms from one classic to the next will probably find this book worth their while. But more pedestrian readers who don’t interpret books for a living are unlikely to gain more than a few minor tidbits of understanding about market freedom from this work. There’s no doubt that classical authors’ thoughts about freedom were conditioned by the societies they lived in, but the changing fortunes and content of "republicanism" in classical political theory still tells us next to nothing about how markets came to be associated with the idea of freedom.

If you're interested in political theory and have read Phillip Pettit's book Republicanism, then this is an excellent source for studying its roots in classical political theory. But that's all it is. The book's title is very misleading. The "invention of market freedom” can hardly be attributed to classical political theory in any meaningful sense. A more suitable title for this book would be ”Republicanism in the history of European political thought”. That would forewarn prospective readers of its purely academic content.… (altro)