Historian Jacob Soll traces the idea of the free market from its origins to its current crisis, revealing a more complex history than the simple story of markets liberating humanity from state control. Soll examines how thinkers from Cicero through Adam Smith to Milton Friedman developed and debated ideas about markets, government, and freedom. He shows that Smith himself was far more nuanced about markets' limitations than contemporary free-market advocates acknowledge, and that successful market economies have always depended on robust government institutions. The book traces how free-market ideology became detached from the cautious empiricism of its founders, transformed into a fundamentalist creed that ignored the conditions necessary for markets to function well. Soll examines moments when unregulated markets produced not prosperity but catastrophe, from nineteenth-century financial panics to the 2008 crisis. He argues that understanding this history is essential for developing economic policies that actually work, rather than adhering to ideological prescriptions that fail repeatedly. The book challenges readers on both left and right, showing that markets are neither inherently liberating nor inherently exploitative but depend on institutional contexts that political choices create. Soll calls for a new economics that learns from history rather than ignoring it.