A Voyage “Among the Most Idealistic and Disinterested of Men” and Women

In his 1933 Yale Review essay on "national self-sufficiency," John Maynard Keynes famously reneged on his earlier belief in free trade.A careful endorsement of economic nationalism, the essay is also a reflection on an earlier generation of free traders who "counted among the most idealistic and disinterested of men" (and, it turns out, a great deal of women too), but whose beliefs were now being tested to the limit by the return of economic conflict and the emergence of state communism and fascism. 1 Keynes uses a slightly mocking tone towards "those who cling to the old ideas" but who "in no country of the world today can be reckoned as a serious force," and while Keynes' readers would have readily recognized these idealistic and peaceloving free traders, they are much less familiar figures one hundred years later."Free trade" is indeed more likely to conjure up the heady days of neoliberal globalization and the Washington Consensus of the 1990s and early 2000s.But support for free trade was never only the preserve of neoliberals or earlier liberal imperialists.As Marc-William Palen reminds us in his widely read book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free-Trade World, a motley group of radical liberals and socialist internationalists once saw eye to eye in their quest for a world at peace and free of high tariffs.They were peace activists, politicians, thinkers, men and women who shared ambitious, if not utopian, "visions of a free-trade world."This intellectual history shines new light on this neglected story and has correspondingly attracted a great deal of attention.2 In a world of rampant neo-mercantile reaction, with trade wars our quotidian lot, Pax Economica offers reassuring news for shell-shocked liberals."Our current neo-mercantilist moment, should it continue," Palen writes, "might spell the beginning of the end of the post-Cold War neoliberal regime.But