Laissez‐faire

Laissez‐faire, a French term literally meaning “let [people] do [as they choose],” refers to the view that governments should not intervene in the economic and social realm.First proclaimed by the eighteenth‐century French school of economists known as the physiocrats, and more fully developed by British classical economists such as Adam Smith, laissez‐faire ideas soon found their way to the United States. In the Antebellum Era, hostility to governmental action gained strength not only from the precepts of classical economics but also from the doctrine of natural rights, Americans' belief in individual self‐sufficiency, and the conditions of U.S. life and experience. An influential pre–Civil War expression of laissez‐faire dogma, Francis Wayland's Elements of Political Economy (1837), had gone through eighteen editions by 1861.

After the Civil War, the case against state intervention was made by businessmen, clergymen, jurists, social Darwinists, economists, political scientists, and sociologists like William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) of Yale. Insofar as Americans had any theory of government, observed the English visitor James Bryce in 1888, that theory was laissez‐faire.

Whatever the theory, state and federal governments did not, in practice, confine themselves to the limited, passive role recommended by laissez‐faire advocates. Although the proponents of small government continued to criticize the interventionist state after 1900, they appeared to be in retreat in the first six decades of the twentieth century, when reform and war vastly expanded government's role.

But the small‐government ideology survived. Frederick Hayek's influential Road to Serfdom (1944) championed economic freedom as the indispensable prerequisite to political freedom. Milton Friedman's theory of monetarism, supply‐side economics, and other economic doctrines of the 1960s and 1970s involved a preference for the free market as opposed to public action in the economic sphere. Although unwilling to surrender the benefits they derived from state action, Americans from the 1960s onward expressed a growing distrust of government. As the twentieth century ended, laissez‐faire ideas remained alive and well.
See also Conservatism; Economic Regulation; Economics; Individualism; New Deal Era, The; Social Darwinism; Socialism.

Bibliography

Sidney Fine , Laissez Faire and the General‐Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1805–1901, 1956.
John Kenneth Galbraith , Economics in Perspective: A Critical History, 1987.

Sidney Fine