Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics

by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Free Trade Reimagined begins with a sustained criticism of the heart of the emerging world economy, the theory and practice of free trade. Roberto Mangabeira Unger does not, however, defend protectionism against free trade. Instead, he attacks and revises the terms on which the traditional debate between free traders and protectionists has been joined.
Unger's intervention in this major contemporary debate serves as a point of departure for a proposal to rethink the basic ideas with which we explain economic activity. He suggests, by example as well as by theory, a way of understanding contemporary economies that is both more realistic and more revealing of hidden possibilities for transformation than are the established forms of economics.
One message of the book is that we need not choose between accepting and rejecting globalization; we can have a different globalization. Traditional free trade doctrine rests on shaky empirical and theoretical ground. Unger takes a new approach to show when international trade is likely to be useful or harmful to the socially inclusive economic growth that every nation wants. Another message is that the movement of people and ideas is more important than the movement of things and money, and that freedom to change the institutions defining a market economy is just as important as freedom to exchange goods on the basis of those institutions.

Free Trade Reimagined ranges broadly within and outside economics. Presenting technical issues in plain language, it appeals to the general reader. It puts a disciplined imagination in the service of rebellion against the dictatorship of no alternatives that characterizes life and thought today.

Genres: Law, Economics

240 pages, Hardcover

First published September 24, 2007

About the author

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (born 24 March 1947) is a philosopher and politician. He has written notable works including Politics: A Work In Constructive Social Theory and The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. He has developed his views and positions across many fields, including social, and political, and economic theory. In legal theory, he is best known for his work in the 1970s-1990s while at Harvard Law School as part of the Critical Legal Studies movement, which is held to have helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools and which led to the writing of What Should Legal Analysis Become? His political activity helped the transition to democracy in Brazil in the aftermath of the military regime, and culminated with his appointment as Brazil's Minister of Strategic Affairs in 2007 and again in 2015. His late work in economics culminates in his characterization and program toward The Knowledge Economy. His work is seen to offer a vision of humanity and a program to empower individuals and change institutions.

At the core of his philosophy is a view of humanity as greater than the contexts in which it is placed. He sees each individual possessed with the capability to rise to a greater life. At the root of his social thought is the conviction that the social world is made and imagined. His work begins from the premise that no natural or necessary social, political, or economic arrangements underlie individual or social activity. Property rights, liberal democracy, wage labor—for Unger, these are all historical artifacts that have no necessary relation to the goals of free and prosperous human activity. For Unger, the market, the state, and human social organization should not be set in predetermined institutional arrangements, but need to be left open to experimentation and revision according to what works for the project of individual and collective empowerment. Doing so, he holds, will enable human liberation.

Reviews

[Mark Crawford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book along with Dani Rodrik's The Globalization Paradox and not long after reading Richard Koo's The Other Half of Macroeconomics--and on the whole I am pleased at how well Unger's understanding of economic theory and trade theory jibes with that of those leading experts. Unger would not disagree (I think) with Rodrik's observations about the necessary trade-offs between hyperglobalization, the nation-state, and democratic politics. But he also lays appropriate stress upon the ability to experiment with new institutions and practices associated with international trade, to avoid surrendering to the "necessitarian" assumptions that have tainted both classical and neo-classical traditions of economic thought.

Unger's suggestions that there are good reasons for wanting alternative regimes of property and contract surely carry somewhat more authority becuase they come from a longtime member of the Harvard Law Faculty. They also resonate with a hybrid civil/common law tradition in Canada that is just starting to grapple with how to incorporate indigenous law traditions into its evolving legal system.

Unger states that our ideas about every national or worldwide regime for market-based exchange must always operate at two levels: one (the domain of conventional economic analysis) concerns the freedom to trade in goods and services and to combine factors of production; another at which we look to the freedom to "revise, piece by piece and step by step, the framework of institutional arangements and assumptions at which we trade and combine. Our reasoning at the first level should be informed by our thinking at the second" (p. 217). If I am right, the shocks of recent financial crises and a global pandemic may have opened the door to a more "open horizon of possible worlds" (p.220).

[Peter]

A wonderful analysis of what kinds of possibilities are lost in imagining that issues of international trade are best understood from the current debate between free trade advocates and those who wish to restrict it.