Capitalism and the Freedom to Walk Away

Jean Baechler,

who died Aug. 13 at 85, considered such freedom essential for the development of capitalism. Baechler was a sociologist and historian who wrote essays on suicide, war, the nature of political power, the role of experts in society, and democratic values. He was that rare bird: a French intellectual who didn’t despise the market economy. He taught sociology at the Sorbonne, was a member of the prestigious Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and on his lapel wore a Legion of Honor medal. His most original and important contribution was his 1971 book, “The Origins of Capitalism.”

Economic growth, Baechler maintained, is the result of millions of “experiments” by people who act and think differently from the mainstream. For growth to happen, such acts of mutinous innovation must be permissible if not explicitly permitted. Baechler saw capitalism as an offspring of Europe’s peculiar political condition. Despite the attempts of Charlemagne, Charles V, Napoleon and Hitler, Europe never became an empire. A great cultural homogeneity, provided mainly by Christianity, failed to produce a Continentwide political order.

Rivalry and ambition led the nations of Europe to check one another’s power, but also to cope with concrete problems in different ways. The two things went together. Political pluralism in the form of stratified societies, urban populations and an emerging bourgeoisie balanced the power of the modern state since its birth. Baechler thought the roots of capitalism were in the Middle Ages and in the merchant and bourgeoisie civilization that developed at their tail end.

Baechler maintained that democracy wasn’t a modern invention but that it was reinvented in another quintessential European institution: the city, a place for trade where the conditions necessary for free and open exchange thrived. Within the walls of the city, tinkerers and lawyers faced problems to solve, whatever the struggles between great powers. Potential solutions emerged and were tested in millions of daily market experiments.

These days governments pledge to coalesce, not to compete. Think about the global minimum tax, conceived to stifle tax competition world-wide. The European Union is more often an engine for harmonization than competition. More generally, big problems, beginning with climate change, are supposed to have but one solution. The job of the big international institutions is to make us all swallow it.

Should dentists be regulated and taxed in the same way everywhere? Or should the entrepreneurial ones, Sardinian or not, be allowed to search for more hospitable places to establish their practice and offer better prices? We are dealing with a fundamental question here. What if, instead of embracing a single solution, we allowed for more approaches to be dreamed up and tested? A modest idea, perhaps, but it’s the one that made the West rich.

Mr. Mingardi is an associate professor of history of political thought at IULM University, a presidential fellow at Chapman University and director of Istituto Bruno Leoni, a policy think tank.