… is from pages 164-165 of J. Marcus Fleming’s 1976 essay “Mercantilism and Free Trade Today,” which is chapter 6 in The Market and the State: Essays in Honour of Adam Smith (Thomas Wilson and Andrew S. Skinner, eds.):
To me, however, it appears that [Adam] Smith isolated, quite successfully, the dominant feature of the ideology underlying the practices he wished to attack. For, of course, he was quite aware that mercantilist doctrine was a way of rationalizing, as being in the general interest, policies whose main motivation lay in special interest, notably the desire of merchants and manufacturers to monopolize the home market.
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