ABSTRACT
In recent years there has been a determined international effort to develop freedom of trade although, as Edmond McGovern indicates, the EC has achieved rather more than the WTO. What is the imperative that drives this ‘official’ commitment to free trade? What sort of evaluation of free trade is implicit in this international endeavour? The answer appears to be essentially utilitarian or welfarist in character. There is a strong presumption that free trade promotes the economic well-being of those engaged in it and it should be promoted and sustained to secure that desirable goal. Thus, the general structure of what I shall call the ‘official ideology’ is consequentialist: free trade is valued for what it brings about and the goods that it brings about are collective and diffuse in character rather than targeted at the entitlements of specific individuals. (Those who take this view of free trade need not, of course, value everything else in the same way.)
