Douglas Irwin on Peddling Protectionism: A Review Essay

Gregory C.G. Moore

History of Economics Review, 2015, vol. 62, issue 1, 38-57

Abstract: The narrative that follows is a review essay of Douglas A. Irwin’s Peddling Protectionism: Smoot–Hawley and the Great Depression (2011). Although no attempt is made to review the literature devoted to modern trade policy in a systematic fashion, Irwin’s book is placed in recent historical and intellectual context. One chief finding is that Irwin’s research agenda is, in part, a product of a larger intellectual project led by Jagdish Bhagwati in which the case for free trade is further advanced on the grounds that commercial policy is often designed for the benefit of the few rather than the many. Another chief finding is that Irwin’s account of the Smoot–Hawley tariff is sufficiently comprehensive, if not definitive, that there is a danger that his account will completely displace the earlier major tract devoted to this episode, namely, Elmar Eric Schattschneider’s Politics, Pressure and the Tariff (1935). It is argued that Schattschneider’s 1935 account of the Smoot–Hawley tariff constitutes an important contribution to the economics of pressure group activity and is systematically misrepresented in the secondary literature.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/18386318.2015.11681280 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rherxx:v:62:y:2015:i:1:p:38-57

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rher20

DOI: 10.1080/18386318.2015.11681280

Access Statistics for this article

History of Economics Review is currently edited by John Harry Bloch and John Hawkins

More articles in History of Economics Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().