This Little Historian Went to Market

The historian of science Steven Shapin famously opened his 1996 study of The Scientific Revolution by declaring, “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” Jacob Soll doesn’t make a similarly bold venture into paradox at the beginning of Free Market: The History of an Idea by asserting that there’s no such thing as a free market, and this is a book about it. But the reader will likely reach that conclusion anyway, for its central theme is that a free market in the abstract, ideal sense has never existed and never can.