There’s an irony worth pointing out in the story of the “Net Book Agreement,” which sounds like it ought to be something dealing with e-books but was actually a pact between British publishers and booksellers agreed to in 1899. The NBA specified that shops should sell books for prices set by the publishers; any discounting would lead to all major publishers refusing to supply any more books to the violator. In 1997, the Restrictive Practices Court ruled that the NBA was anti-competitive and therefore “against the public interest” — and henceforth, illegal. That might seem like a liberalizing, free-market decision, right? But maybe it wasn’t, since the NBA was a form of voluntary cartelization. From a pure laissez-faire perspective, there was nothing wrong with it.

I wrapped up my post on e-books with some happy talk about how what’s good for readers is ultimately good for writers — though I hedged that assurance with some qualifications. All hedging aside, however, is it really true that readers and writers have the same interest? Doesn’t the simple supply-demand relationship between readers and authors become more complex when publishers are introduced? (You could connect this to what I discussed in my earlier post about state and society.)

The Net Books Agreement provides interesting example. It may well have been the case for a time that the best arrangement for readers, writers, and publishers, taken together, was the one that existed under the NBA. That would, in fact, be the conclusion a believer in social harmony and laissez faire (in this sphere, anyway) would have to reach, assuming the NBA was as freely entered into and enforced as its Wikipedia article suggests. By contrast, the Restrictive Practices Court, in striking down the NBA, was acting on a theory of social conflict — that is, that the interests of booksellers and publishers coincided against the interests of the public.

This goes to show, I suppose, how complicated the relationship of procedurally “conservative” and “liberal” views of society to substantially “conservative” and “liberal” policies can be. It does seem perverse, doesn’t it, to call the court’s action here “conservative,” when it broke down a settled social arrangement in the name of free competition? But then, the cause of free competition might not really have been what this was all about, since pressure to get rid of the NBA came, as one publisher’s website says, from “the enormous growth of bookseller retail chains – like Blackwell’s, Dillons, and Waterstones – which have grown to take 30 percent of the U.K. market,” and the effect of scrapping the NBA has been to put independent bookstores out of business. In short, there seem to be fewer, not more, competitors in the market as a result of trashing this supposedly “anti-competitive” agreement.

(The same publisher’s website notes, “the demise of the Net Book Agreement makes the U.K. book market more like that of the U.S., and it can be viewed as yet another step toward globalization” — that is, globalization by judicial fiat, not free trade. The difference in this case may be moot, however: the NBA was collapsing anyway as booksellers and publishers voluntarily walked away from it.)

A thoroughly laissez-faire approach to trade would permit voluntary cartels, which might in some instance, as the example of the NBA suggests, actually lead to more rather than less competition. What exists in practice under the name of liberalism, however, is not laissez faire but a blend of liberal rhetoric, some “conservative” or “socialist” assumptions about state and society, and a variety of half-disguised concrete interests (in this example, those of the big retailers). Conservatives who favor regulating trade, meanwhile, should might think about how readily regulatory power is employed in the service of an ideology of openness and “liberalism.”

There’s a temptation in thinking about these questions to want to rationalize the vocabulary — to abolish any paradoxes or inconsistencies by imposing a strict definition on liberalism (or conservatism, or whatever else). Since these terms are used in a loose way in real life, however, it may be worth preserving the paradox to understand something about how politics — and political economy — works.