The hysteria surrounding Trump’s tariffs prompted me to dust down my old economics textbook. I was reminded that tariffs are a legitimate, albeit imprecise and potentially counterproductive, tool used by governments to try to help grow domestic industries.

There was nothing in what I learned as an economics student at university to suggest tariffs were inherently evil. But then I was in college before neoliberalism really took off – under a succession of political leaders from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama – to become the world’s ruling ideology.

The German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has monitored this hardening of attitudes over the years, noting how “protectionism” has become a dirty word. Under modern capitalism, “protection of home populations and their way of life from economic subordination by ‘free markets’”, has become “widely regarded as unethical”, he writes in Taking Back Control?, his latest book.

Streeck is a European intellectual admired by nerdy sections of the left. He was called “the Karl Marx of our time” in a New York Times profile last year, while President Michael D Higgins has referenced his ideas in past speeches. But Streeck (his name rhymes with........

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