ABSTRACT
FRIEDRICH LIST, a leading German economist and journalist in the first half of the nineteenth century, was one of the earliest and severest critics of the classical school of economists. He denounced Adam Smith and his disciples as the "cosmopolitan school" and advocated what he called first a "natural" and then a "national" doctrine of economics. He held that universal free trade was an ideal that might be achieved in the far distant future but, for the time being, each nation should foster the development of its own manufactures by prohibitions, import duties, subsidies, and navigation laws so as to restrict the flow of imports from more advanced industrial countries. Only by such means could countries like France, Germany, Russia, and the United States ever hope to reach a standard of industrial efficiency which would enable them to compete on equal terms with Britain which was at that time by far the most advanced manufacturing country in the world.
