Published February 6, 2025
What Is a Free Market?
Few ideals are so quick to our lips today as that of “freedom.” Except during brief periods of national insecurity or soul-searching, when the language of “safety,” “health,” or “justice” comes temporarily to the forefront, it has remained resilient as the common currency of our politics, on both the right and the left. To be sure, the word is put to use in service of radically different and often opposed ideals, but this should hardly surprise us. As Oliver O’Donovan observes, “Freedom is the looking glass in which we search our features anxiously for signs of ‘unfreedom.’ But the collapse of any vital condition can occur in a multitude of ways, so what appear to be straightforward descriptions of freedom turn out to be hugely various political ideals, some of them in tension with others.”
This is especially so when it comes to economic freedom, a concept that, especially in America, has succeeded in crowding out almost all other ways of thinking about freedom. For the generation after World War II, America’s mission in the world was almost inseparable from its claim to represent “the free enterprise system” against the closed societies and command economies of the Soviet Union and its satellites. This point was sharpened by Milton Friedman and his disciples—among them Ronald Reagan—in the 1970s and 1980s, so that by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1990, “free markets” eclipsed all else as the essential gift that the West sought to export to the rest. Although American politics is ostensibly divided between a pro-free-market Republican Party and a more ambivalent Democratic Party, almost everyone in American politics at least pays lip service to the ideal. But what is this ideal? What might it mean for a market to be free?
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Brad Littlejohn was a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs from 2022-2025. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.
