If anyone is qualified to write a history of free-market thinking, it is surely Jacob Soll. He is a professor of history, philosophy and accounting at the University of Southern California, and he has needed to draw on all three disciplines to write this history, which stretches from Cicero to Milton Friedman and beyond. The book is simultaneously interesting and frustrating. The subject’s interest is obvious enough: given the striking success of free marketeers over the past three decades in dictating government policy in the Western world, the ideas that animate them are plainly important.

The frustration stems from the author’s ambitions. He doesn’t merely begin with Cicero and end with the Chicago School but crams in so much else that the reader is alternately left saying ‘hold on a moment’ and ‘please explain’. That much of the detail is fascinating in itself adds to the sense that Soll should have concentrated his forces a little – or written twice as long a book.

What we have is interestingly contentious. As any such book is likely to do, Free Market employs Adam Smith as a hinge. But in contrast to the standard triumphalist picture of the simultaneous rise of free trade and the Industrial Revolution, in which Smith is portrayed as a precursor of 19th-century economic theorists like Marx (who, of course, saw himself as the heir of Smith), Soll roots Smith firmly in the soil of the 18th-century agricultural economy. Smith’s purpose in writing The Wealth of Nations was not to compose a hymn to the virtues of the unfettered market but to set out the need for an elite of disinterested, upper-class landowners to steer and manage a society that might otherwise succumb to the kind of corruption that the unbridled pursuit of economic self-interest is likely to bring in its train. Merchants, whom one might think the heroes of free-market theory, are treated with extreme suspicion. Wherever ‘people of the same trade … meet together, even for merriment and diversion’, said Smith, the conversation will more than likely turn into a ‘conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices’.

Who, then, is the hero of Free Market? The answer is Cicero. One might think this a surprising choice. Cicero has a good deal to say about the virtues of generosity and public spirit, but little about thrift, careful investment or what one might think of as the