№ 2 - 2007
Matviyenko I.G.
How Free Is “Free Trade”? (To the Question of the Use of the Concept)

An attempt has been undertaken in the article to designate the problem field of the concept of free trade, its substantive limits and the points of intersection with the problem fields of the concepts of state, interest, sovereignty, as well as to analyze the possibilities of the use of the said notion in political discourse. Having resorted to the methodology of evolutionary concept-analysis, the author retraced the history of the formation and development of the notion of free trade, demonstrating in what way the originally rather definite sense of the term was being gradually washed away, owing to the building up of additional meanings, equally applicable to the notion of protectionism, too. According to the author’s conclusion, stability of the concept of free trade and its constant reproduction in economic and political discourse are due to the fact that the idea of free trade has step by step transformed into a myth and in such capacity exists at the level of “background knowledge”.