Read Against the Tide An Intellectual History of Free Trade Douglas A Irwin 9780691058962 Books
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About two hundred years ago, largely as a result of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, free trade achieved an intellectual status unrivaled by any other doctrine in the field of economics. What accounts for the success of free trade against then prevailing mercantilist doctrines? And how well has free trade withstood various theoretical attacks that have challenged it since Adam Smith's time? In this readable intellectual history, Douglas Irwin explains how the idea of free trade has endured against the tide of the abundant criticisms that have been leveled against it from the ancient world and Adam Smith's day to the present. An accessible, nontechnical look at one of the most important concepts in the field of economics, Against the Tide will allow the reader to put the ever new guises of protectionist thinking into the context of the past and discover why the idea of free trade has so successfully prevailed over time.
Irwin traces the origins of the free trade doctrine from premercantilist times up to Adam Smith and the classical economists. In lucid and careful terms he shows how Smith's compelling arguments in favor of free trade overthrew mercantilist views that domestic industries should be protected from import competition. Once a presumption about the economic benefits of free trade was established, various objections to free trade arose in the form of major arguments for protectionism, such as those relating to the terms of trade, infant industries, increasing returns, wage distortions, income distribution, unemployment, and strategic trade policy. Discussing the contentious historical controversies surrounding each of these arguments, Irwin reveals the serious analytical and practical weaknesses of each, and in the process shows why free trade remains among the most durable and robust propositions that economics has to offer for the conduct of economic policy.
Read Against the Tide An Intellectual History of Free Trade Douglas A Irwin 9780691058962 Books
"My grandfather loves this book."
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Tags : Against the Tide An Intellectual History of Free Trade [Douglas A. Irwin] on . About two hundred years ago, largely as a result of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations</i>, free trade achieved an intellectual status unrivaled by any other doctrine in the field of economics. What accounts for the success of free trade against then prevailing mercantilist doctrines? And how well has free trade withstood various theoretical attacks that have challenged it since Adam Smith's time? In this readable intellectual history,Douglas A. Irwin,Against the Tide An Intellectual History of Free Trade,Princeton University Press,0691058962,BUSINESS ECONOMICS / Economic History,Business Economics,Business Economics International - General,Business Economics/International - General,Business / Economics / Finance,Business/Economics,Economic financial crises disasters,Economic history,Economics, finance, business management,FREE TRADE,International - General,Non-Fiction,Scholarly/Graduate,UNIVERSITY PRESS,United States
Against the Tide An Intellectual History of Free Trade Douglas A Irwin 9780691058962 Books Reviews :
Against the Tide An Intellectual History of Free Trade Douglas A Irwin 9780691058962 Books Reviews
- Drinking Berlin is like receiving wine from a sommelier - special, personal and precious. Chapters -
The Counter-Enlightenment
The Originality of Machiavelli
The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities
Vico’s Concept of Knowledge
Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment
Montesquieu
Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism
Herzen and His Memoirs
The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess
Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity
The ‘Naivety’ of Verdi
Georges Sorel
Nationalism Past Neglect and Present Power
From introduction by Mark Lilla ''Either way, it shows that the intellectual issues central to the Counter-Enlightenment have also been central to modern historical experience, down to the momentous, horrifying developments that intruded into Berlin’s own twentieth-century life. In the essay on Herzen and his memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, we are plunged into the swirl of revolutionary activity in mid-eighteenth century Europe and Russia, in the company of a lucid pessimist committed to socialism but distrustful of violent fanatics convinced they have discerned the final goal of history.''
''We see what can happen to such people in the essay on Sorel, which traces the bloody-minded politics of the will from belle époque anarchism to Italian Fascism, then to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and even the Black Panthers (it was written in 1971).''
''Other essays introduce us to Moses Hess and Benjamin Disraeli, whose very different Jewish lives illustrate the moral and psychological complexities of reconciling pre-given communal belonging with universal political ideals. The book ends with a sobering reflection on how legitimate national feeling, which Berlin sympathised with and thought would persist, could metastasise into nationalistic ideologies bent on erasing the identity of others.'' Well said.
A few pages later Lilla continues ''In a sense, Berlin’s ‘cases’ in the history of ideas are closer in spirit to the modern sciences than much of what passes for philosophy today. Scientists are empiricists. Asked whether a mechanical part will crack under freezing conditions, their first instinct is to plunge it into an ice bucket and see what happens. Biography and history are to the philosophically inclined historian of ideas roughly what laboratories are to scientists (though, mercifully, nothing in history can be made to repeat itself).''
''One can sit at a seminar table and try to work out the truth-conditions of an assertion and the inferences that can be reasonably drawn from it. One can also look to the inferences people actually have drawn from it under different conditions, what they thought it implied, and what it inspired them to do. The results can be surprising.''
I think this is the essence and glory of Berlin. He explains what he thinks these men believed and taught. Then presents what actually happened with their ideas. Fascinating!
Berlin is not the easiest read. Educated vocabulary and assumes knowledge with the epoch. Nevertheless, Berlin grows on you as the insight connects with the vision. I think his conclusions regarding these ideas and thinkers is provoking. This presentation of the ideas - behind both European history and our time, provide some of the best explanations available.
The twelve page preface by Lilla and a twenty-two page introduction by Housheer are great. These two essays alone are worth the price of the book!
Dozens of footnotes. (Links worked great on the kindle app on my iPad.) Includes six page appendix of Berlin's letters. - This is a good selection of representative essays in the history of ideas by Isaiah Berlin. The good news is that it is Isaiah Berlin. The bad news is that it is Isaiah Berlin. I'll go against the grain and say that, frankly, the more Berlin that I read, the less impressed I am.
I have two problems with Berlin. The first is that his stock in trade is sweeping generalization, piling emotive summary upon emotive summary. After a while, you begin to suspect that, under the guise of giving you the Big Picture, all he's really giving you is a lot of arm-waving.
The second problem is that Berlin is a bad writer. Yes, yes. He is a strong master of a big vocabulary, and all of his sentences, no matter how complex and convoluted, are syntactically correct. He never uses the wrong word or makes a grammatical mistake. But his sentences, almost all of them, and there are a lot of them, go on and on, piling clause on clause and then in mid-sentence you get something like "in contrast to..." and then more and more clauses that describe, in excruciating and unnecessary detail, all of the features that do NOT describe whoever or whatever, so many words ago, was the actual subject of the sentence. Sort of like that last sentence, only worse. So if you really try to read Berlin (and not just allow yourself to be sweep along by the tsumai of his words), you essentially have to decode, parse, disentangle each and every sentence.
So, the bottom line is that I started out interested in Berlin, and wanting to like him, and in the end found that very difficult to do.
For a good contrast with Berlin's style of history of ideas, I'd recommend taking a look at Arthur O. Lovejoy's "The Great Chain of Being" or something by M. H. Abrams like "Natural Supernaturalism". Lovejoy invented the discipline of the history of ideas, and "The Great Chain of Being" is his masterpiece. If you read it, you will see what careful scholarship in the history of ideas looks like.
So I say, by all means read Berlin. You CAN learn from him. But if you're like me, after a little while, you just can't read any more. It just all blurs together into feeling and rhetoric, and you will find that, when the dust is settled, you walk away actually not knowing or understanding much more than you did when you walked in. - A good overview of thought on theories of free trade and protectionism from the 17th century on, with emphasis on works in English.
- These are monumental essays that bring the philosophy of history into our real politik--an insightful view of issues that are as current now as they were 100 years ago. Brilliant!
- Berlin's essays are always a pleasure to read, insightful and unpredictable, and this collection is no exception. Some of these essays have appeared in other collections, and I enjoyed them the second time around too. The history of ideas is a richly rewarding field of intellectual endeavor, but it unfortunately doesn't attract many who can write as well they think they can think. Berlin is one of the best. In contrast, Peter Watson's recent thick volume Ideas A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud]] seems shallow and hurried.
- My grandfather loves this book.
- I like this author.
- Great
