Free Trade and Democracy Analytical Essay by Top Papers

The paper discusses how ideas about free trade and democracy were products of the eighteenth century in France and England, brought to the fore in 1789 by the French Revolution, though these ideas had started before in the writings of Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, and others. The paper explains that these ideas would meld in the capitalist system as it developed through the early twentieth century. The paper then shows how the nineteenth century saw the industrialization of most of Europe and America, using free trade as a spur to commercial development even as it at times also challenged certain democratic ideals and served as part of the impetus for the development of Marxism and related doctrines not based on the idea of free trade or on democracy.