Economic liberalism

The idea of ‘economic liberalism’ is often seen as emerging parallel with, and as a support to, political liberalism. Consequently it is provided with a heritage reaching back to the first arguments in free trade in the seventeenth century. This article argues that in fact any systematic association of political and economic liberalism emerges only at the end of the nineteenth century, and that the identification of a coherent theoretical basis for economic liberalism is deeply problematic.