This article was written by Nathan Hitchen (’19) for The American Conservative.
The Neomercantilists should be on the shelf of every skeptic of globalization.
What Russell Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind did for post-war conservatives, in relating a genealogy of ideas to a ragtag band of dissenters from the New Deal, Eric Helleiner’s recent book, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (2021), could do for a motley crew of conservatives today, who dissent from the dominant post-Cold War policy vision of deregulated capitalism and globalization. If you believe America needs a reindustrialization strategy to rebuild national strength and working class prosperity, you are not a Marxist. Nor are you a classical liberal, the “small government conservative” of our time. You are a neomercantilist.