Neomercantilists rejected the liberal advocacy of free trade, urging instead strategic trade protectionism and other forms of government economic activism in order to promote state wealth and power. Their goals were similar to those of pre-Smithian mercantilist thinkers, but they defended their priorities in new ways by engaging critically with the ideas of classical economic liberals. This chapter describes the important role of Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List in helping to pioneer neomercantilist thought as well as other less well-known thinkers from Europe and the United States who developed distinctive and influential versions of this perspective. Many of them were inspired by List but adapted his ideas in some interesting ways, including William Ashley, Mihail Manoilescu, Gustav Schmoller, and Sergei Witte. Another key figure, Henry Carey, was more inspired by Hamilton than List, but developed an important version of neomercantilist thought that was very distinctive from both of theirs. These thinkers highlight how neomercantilism in Europe and United States had more diverse content than the common textbook depiction suggests.

This chapter turns to Max Weber's thought, situating him within the larger tradition of German social liberalism, to unearth the implicit assumptions that structure current theories of the relationship between democracy, domination, and the welfare state. Weber's thought forces democratic thinkers and actors to confront the inevitability of complex, bureaucratic organizations in the modern state and the distinctive challenges they pose to transformative politics. At the same time, Weber himself had an ambivalent relationship to such democratic politics. He shares with the social liberals the idea that welfare institutions can turn the democratic demands of the German socialists into the objects of instrumental state administration. They could, so he hoped, transform political conflicts over the organization of power within society-and the challenge to entrenched structures of domination that entailed-into conflicts over material needs that could be rendered calculable by state institutions. Weber's thought represents, at once, a necessary point of departure for thinking about democratic action in the welfare state as well as a particularly vivid distillation of the underlying assumptions that narrow the political horizon of current democratic theorists.