HOW THE FREE TRADE MOVEMENT CHANGED POLITICAL ARGUMENT.

HOW THE FREE TRADE MOVEMENT CHANGED POLITICAL ARGUMENT. In 19th century England, there was a dramatic change in the way that people looked at government and society. The language of Utilitarianism is so familiar today that we forget how radical was Jeremy Bentham’s phrase, “The greatest good for the greatest number.” I now realize that in reading about the centuries that came before Bentham, I just have not come across the concept that it was good to advance the interests of the majority of citizens. Peter Clarke, in his review in the July 18 Times Literary Supplement of Frank Trentman’s FREE TRADE NATION, writes about how the movement for free trade (Clarke and Trentman refer to the movement as “FREE TRADE”) changed the terms of political debate forever. Arguments for free trade weigh large losses to producers (land owners) and small gains to a much larger number of consumers. Clarke says, “At root, then, the argument was about living standards for the mass of the people—regarded always as consumers and citizens.” Clarke quotes Trentman: “’The achievement of Free Trade was to invent a much more generalized language of the consumer as a public, national interest.’”