ABSTRACT
"People act according to their self-interest" is stated as though it were a self-evident truth and as though most people knew where their self-interest lay. In addition to self-interest and ideology, one other set of factors bore on a businessman's attitudes toward foreign-trade policy. Both economic self-interest, to the extent that this elusive concept can be identified, and attitudes toward internationalism turned out to be correlated with attitudes toward foreign-trade policy; but so did a number of other things, most notably a man's role in business and society. As difficult as self-interest is to assess, there is little doubt that there are variations in the immediate short-run interest of various American businesses in foreign-trade policy. The ratings of the economists suggest that only a small proportion of American industries have a clear, uncomplicated interest in a high-tariff policy and that a majority are affected by foreign-trade policy only as they have a stake in the economy as a whole.
