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Introduction

The pamphlets and articles in this volume clearly show Frédéric Bastiat to be a keen observer and analyst of the political and economic problems of his time. Many of the pamphlets were written while he was an active politician, a position he held unfortunately for only a short period of time. Bastiat was elected to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 and then to the Legislative Assembly in May 1849 but died on Christmas Eve in 1850, at the age of forty-nine.¹

Despite his brief life, Bastiat was a privileged witness to a particularly unsettled period of French history: after the Revolution of 1789 came a period of political chaos, followed by the Napoleonic Empire, the return of the monarchy in 1815, a revolution in 1830, and another one in 1848, at which date the Second Republic was founded and universal suffrage adopted for the first time in French history. It was also during this period that the “bourgeoisie” became an increasingly influential social class that made possible, after the death of Bastiat, the takeoff of economic growth under Emperor Napoléon III and the beginnings of industrialization in Britain and France. These were the events that provided the background for Bastiat’s numerous writings on economics and politics.

THE POLITICAL PAMPHLETS AS MODELS OF APPLIED ECONOMICS

Bastiat was both a thinker and an actor in public affairs. He was a politician who was inspired by both economic and ethical principles, which is a

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rare occurrence, whether then or now. Next to Bastiat “the economist,” who wrote such monumental theoretical works as Economic Harmonies (1850), we have Bastiat the “political pamphleteer,” who wrote in response to the political and economic battles of the moment.² To those economists who dream of attempting to implement their ideas, political life might seem attractive; however, only a very few, like Bastiat, are lucky enough to get that opportunity. While France was wracked by wave after wave of revolutionary change between 1848 and 1850, Bastiat had the chance to present his ideas in speeches to the Assembly, in broadsides handed out in the street, as essays in popular journals, and as articles in academic journals.

Throughout the pamphlets, Bastiat demonstrates how the combination of careful logic, consistency of principle, and clarity of exposition is the instrument for solving most economic and social problems. He does not hesitate to present facts and even statistics to his readers, but he does so in a manner that is understandable and coherent because the material is analyzed through the filter of rigorous economic theory.³

In this volume the reader will find discussions covering a wide variety of topics, such as the theory of value and rent (in which Bastiat made path-breaking contributions), public choice and collective action, regulations, taxation, education, trade unions, price controls, capital and growth, and the balance of trade, many of which topics are still at the center of political debate in our own time. Far from being dry and technical discussions of abstruse matters, all Bastiat’s pamphlets are written with such outstanding limpidity that reading them is a joy.

EYEWITNESS TO POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC UPHEAVALS (1848–50)

After a period as a successful provincial magistrate, Bastiat was elected in the immediate aftermath of the February revolution of 1848 to the Constituent Assembly in Paris. He represented his home département (the Landes,

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located in the southwest region of France) and became active in opposing both the socialism of the left and the authoritarianism of the right. As a classical liberal advocate of natural rights, universal franchise, the ultraminimalist state, and absolute free trade, Bastiat was not completely at home on the right or on the left side of the Assembly, though he oft en sat on the left because of his opposition to many of the establishment’s policies. On the right sat the monarchists, militarists, large landowners, supporters of the very limited voting franchise, and business interests who advocated tariff protection and subsidies. Occupying the left were the republicans, democrats, socialists, and advocates of state-supported make-work schemes and other subsidies to the poor. As some of his speeches indicate, Bastiat could cleverly play off one side against the other, appealing to the right in his attacks on socialism but appealing to the left in his support of the republic and his criticism of state subsidies to the rich.

In 1846 a key economic reform occurring in Britain caught Bastiat’s attention: Prime Minister Robert Peel’s abolition of the Corn Laws.⁴ The repeal of these laws eliminated many price controls on imported food stuffs and thus lowered the cost of food for those British consumers who were the least well off. The person behind the successful repeal was Richard Cobden whose organization, the Anti–Corn Law League, mobilized British opinion and forced Peel to act as he did. Bastiat, impressed with this popular and successful movement, very much wanted to emulate Cobden’s success by organizing a homegrown French free-trade movement and spent much of his time during the mid-1840s trying to bring this about, with disappointing results.⁵

TOWARD the end of his life, as a deputy in the Constituent Assembly and then in the Legislative Assembly, Bastiat became immersed in the struggles against the rise of socialist groups from the left and the opportunistic, interventionist policies of other groups on the right. Many of his pamphlets from this period were economic in nature and designed to alert people to the dangers of growing government intervention in the economy and attacks on the rule of law. The pamphlets are period pieces to the extent that they

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reflect the day-to-day or week-to-week battles for liberty fought by Bastiat in the Assembly (he served on a budget committee and thus had access to important economic data). However, they are also timeless works of applied economic theory that still stand today as insightful, informative, and even exemplary forms of their kind.

REPUBLICANISM AND UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE

Bastiat was a “sincere” republican in the sense that he favored a republican system of government (as opposed to a monarchical one) and, more precisely, because he favored universal suffrage. Yet he was also aware of the dangers of unrestrained democracy if it were allowed to violate the people’s rights to property (“plunder”) and liberty (“slavery”). In his famous pamphlet “The Law” (1850) Bastiat explains that the law, far from being what it ought to be, namely the instrument that enabled the state to protect individuals’ rights and property, had become the means for what he termed “spoliation,” or plunder.

As the will and the capacity to legislate became commonplace—the result of universal suffrage—plunder, too, became commonplace. Bastiat’s views on law and plunder are both modern and prophetic, given that democracy was a relatively new experience in France. Like his contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville, Bastiat was an astute observer of the society of his time as well as a visionary of what unrestrained democracy might lead to, as the following passage shows:

Whatever the disciples of the Rousseau school think, those who say that they are very advanced and whom I believe to be retarded by twenty centuries, universal suffrage (taking this word in its strictest sense) is not one of the sacred dogmas with regard to which any examination or even doubt is a crime.⁶

Bastiat points out the logical contradiction of the Rousseauean law-makers who believed that ordinary citizens are naturally inclined to make bad choices in their own lives (but not in choosing their political representatives apparently), so that they must be deprived of their freedom, whereas the elected rulers of society would necessarily be inclined to make good choices

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concerning the lives of others: “And if humanity is incapable of making its own judgments, why are people talking to us about universal suffrage?”⁷

Bastiat concludes with a sad commentary on the effects that unbridled democracy has had in France, writing that although the French people “have led all the others in winning their rights, or rather their political guarantees, they nevertheless remain the most governed, directed, administered, taxed, hobbled, and exploited of all peoples.”⁸

In the pamphlet “Plunder and Law”⁹ (1850), written before “The Law” appeared, Bastiat had already expressed his uneasiness concerning the idea of universal suffrage:

Following the February revolution, when universal suffrage was proclaimed, I hoped for a moment that its great voice would be heard to say: “No more plunder for anyone, justice for all!” . . . No, by bursting into the National Assembly, each class came to make the law an instrument of plunder for itself according to the principles they upheld. They demanded progressive taxes, free credit, the right to work, the right to state assistance, guaranteed interest rates, a minimum rate of pay, free education, subsidies to industry, etc., etc.; in short, each wanted to live and develop at other people’s expense.¹⁰

We thus find in Bastiat’s writings clear statements about the dangerous confusion that exists between two opposite concepts of the law, “law and legislation”—to use the words of the twentieth-century Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992). Legislation is the output of the political process; it is an instrument of plunder and it breeds a war of all against all. But law, properly conceived, is, as Bastiat states, “the common power organized to obstruct injustice and, in short, the law is justice”¹¹—a straightforward but striking formula that encapsulates a whole body of theory.

IN witnessing these processes at work in the French assemblies of 1848 and 1849, Bastiat was led to some important theoretical insights into the nature of the state itself. He most clearly expressed these views in another pamphlet,

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“The State,” which he wrote in that most revolutionary year of 1848 and from which comes perhaps his best-remembered quotation: “The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.”¹²

STATE EDUCATION

In his writings Bastiat gives a lot of attention to the problem of education. A good example is his opposition to the importance placed upon the teaching of Latin in the school curriculum. In his own education Bastiat had attended a progressive school that emphasized modern languages and practical subjects. He was opposed to learning Latin and reading the works of the famous Latin authors because, in his view, Roman civilization was based on slavery and the glorification of war and the state; commerce, individual rights, and natural law were ignored or downplayed.

In a submission to the Mimerel Commission in 1847,¹³ Bastiat opposed the politicalization of the teaching of economics in higher education. Apart from the fact that political economists were not granted their own faculty but had to teach within the schools of law, the commission at first wanted to abolish the teaching of political economy altogether. Eventually it relented and recommended that if the political economists must teach, they should be required by the state to soften their relentless criticism of protection by giving “equal time” to protectionist ideas—an early version of “teaching the debate,” if you will. Bastiat naturally opposed this measure. His view of state education became so severe that he saw no other option than its complete abolition. His pamphlet “Baccalaureate and Socialism” (1850) was written expressly in order to explain an amendment he had proposed to the National Assembly: he dared to ask that the state-run universities no longer be the sole grantors of degrees, thereby ending the state’s monopoly over the awarding of such degrees.¹⁴

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HAYEK AND SPONTANEOUS ORDER

Two of the themes Bastiat pursues in the pamphlets are his advocacy of the “harmony” and justice of freely acting individuals in the marketplace and his criticism of state intervention and “plunder” to create authoritarianism or socialism. Friedrich Hayek called these opposing worldviews “spontaneous order” and “constructivism,” respectively.

During the 1840s a new socialist movement sprang up in France, and it would play a significant role during the upheavals of the 1848 revolution.¹⁵ Bastiat’s writing on this topic¹⁶ places the reader at the very center of the debates that explain the historical evolution of France and of a great part of the world. Similarly, as Hayek has persuasively argued, Bastiat is at the very center of the fundamental debates of political philosophy.¹⁷

The coexistence since the eighteenth century of both these streams of thought (the classical liberal and the socialist) has arguably been the source of the ambiguity in the meaning of the words liberty and property during the French Revolution and its aftermath. One can see this conflict played out in the various versions of declarations of rights that emerged periodically during the Revolution, beginning with the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).

Bastiat criticized such thinkers as Fénelon, Montesquieu, Rousseau,

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Mably, and Robespierre, who had done much to inspire modern enlightened public opinion. Bastiat objected to their claims that property rights are created by the state and are thus “conventional” and not “natural,” that is, existing prior to any man-made law. Rousseau comes in for particularly harsh criticism by Bastiat for the distinction he makes between “individual liberty” (which Rousseau regards as “natural”) and “property” (which Rousseau considers purely conventional).

According to Bastiat, this false distinction led Rousseau to conclude that the state had the right to enact legislation establishing the right to work, the right to get relief (welfare), and the right to impose progressive taxation. Robespierre, one of the leaders of the French Revolution, especially during the 1793–94 Reign of Terror, had been directly influenced by Rousseau, whom Bastiat quotes in “Baccalaureate and Socialism”: “Property is the right held by each citizen to enjoy and dispose of possessions that are guaranteed to him by the law.”¹⁸ In Bastiat’s view, if property were not a natural right that existed prior to the state, then the state (or whoever temporarily controlled the organs of the state) could define what “property” was and legislate to create any kind of society it desired.

THE French revolutionaries of the 1790s and the 1840s had tried to apply what Bastiat called the “communist principle” to the formation of declarations of rights and constitutions and to the development of government policies regarding price controls, make-work schemes, and other economic interventions by the state. Such an extreme form of despotism frightened many French citizens in the 1790s. These citizens, seeking security and stability, turned toward a Roman-inspired form of despotism,¹⁹ such as that offered by Napoléon Bonaparte.

After lurching from the radicalism of the Jacobins to the militaristic dictatorship of Napoléon and to the conservatism of the restored Bourbon monarchy, the French people seemed to have settled upon a form of political

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armistice after the July revolution, with the forces of revolution and counterrevolution achieving a kind of temporary balance. Bastiat, however, unhappily believed that the French continued to educate their youth with the ideas of Rousseau and Caesar, thus trapping them in a maze that began with dreams of utopia, followed by experimentation in an attempt to create this utopia on earth, and then finally political reaction after these dreams inevitably fell apart. In its incarnation in the revolutionary period this maze began with the ideas of Rousseau, was followed by the revolutionary communism of Robespierre and his followers, and ended in the military despotism of Napoléon. In 1848 it looked to Bastiat as if France were going to repeat this pattern all over again, this time under the influence of the new socialist movement that had sprung up in the 1840s.

PEACE, LIBERTY, AND TAXES

In the pamphlet “Peace and Freedom or the Republican Budget” (1849), Bastiat’s skill as a writer and thinker enables him to rapidly turn the mundane topic of the national budget into one of principle and high theory. He quickly goes beyond strict budgetary considerations to reach a high level of theoretical analysis and, in so doing, provides an original and audacious contribution to the field of tax theory. In fact, he may be the first author to support the idea that “taxes kill taxes”—in other words, the concept known in our own time as the Laffer Curve.

In this text Bastiat blames both the “financiers,” who try to obtain fiscal equilibrium by taxing people, and the so-called advanced republicans, who make so many promises to their constituents that an increase in taxes is unavoidable. Bastiat believed that it was important to secure the stability of the young republic by alleviating the tax burden on the people, thus inducing them to “love the republic.” For Bastiat, in order for public finance to blossom, the rational thing to do would be to decrease tax rates, not increase them, because, for the state, “taxing more is to receive less.”²⁰ Bastiat does not hesitate to write that even if there is a budget deficit, taxes must be reduced, as much out of principle as out of the recognition that economic hardship has been so severe that the people have to receive some relief. As he put it, such a solution “is not boldness, it is prudence”!²¹

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THE LEFT, TAXES, AND TRADE UNIONS

In Bastiat’s lifelong quest to instill into the French people the ideals of liberty, peace, and prosperity—that is, those principles today associated with the conservative right—Bastiat sat on the parliamentary benches with the left. His political position is more easily understood if one remembers that, in his time, those who sat on the right in the Assembly were mainly conservatives, not classical liberals. They were nostalgic for the ancien régime of the pre-1789 period, namely the era of the monarchy and aristocratic class privileges. In fact, Bastiat was very critical of the efforts made by the wealthiest and most politically connected individuals to protect their own interests by manipulating the power of the legislature and the state. Like his friend and colleague in England Richard Cobden, Bastiat passionately believed that in advocating for free markets, low taxes, and free trade he was defending the interests of the poor.

The difficulty of Bastiat’s balancing act in the Assembly between left and right can clearly be seen in the reaction to two of his speeches: “Discourse on the Tax on Wines and Spirits” (1849) and “The Repression of Industrial Unions” (1849).

In the first speech Bastiat, who represented an agricultural district in which the production of wine was particularly important, attempts to convince his colleagues that the farmers in his locality have to bear an unfair tax burden. He defends the interests of his constituents without compromising what he rightly considers to be the lessons of sound economic theory. What is particularly striking in this speech is the fact that he receives applause from those sitting on the left’s benches. Bastiat points out that poor people suffer the most from state interventionism and that politically influential businessmen are able to induce the state to pass laws giving them protection from foreign competition, with the result that higher prices are created for ordinary consumers.

Bastiat concludes therefore that liberalizing trade and freeing up markets benefit the poor. Note that in Bastiat’s time, as in ours, it was a commonly held view that liberals (in the classical sense of the word) supported business interests over the interests of ordinary consumers. It is fascinating to discover that when Bastiat gave this speech, both the champions of the poor and the supporters of the republic (the left) seemed to understand what he was saying and to approve it. Unfortunately, the applause he received in the Assembly was not followed up by any concrete legislation to bring about the reforms he advocated.

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In the second speech, “The Repression of Industrial Unions,” Bastiat opposes legislation that restricts the right of workers to form the unions proposed by the right. Bastiat explains why both businessmen and workers must be granted the freedom to form trade unions; he argues that “the word union is synonymous with association”²² and that human freedom implies the right to associate with whomever and for whatever purpose one chooses. In addition, Bastiat strongly supports the right to strike, since an individual can legitimately decline to sell his or her work and “when it [an action] is innocent in itself, it cannot become guilty because it is carried out by a large number of individuals.”²³ He further proclaims, “For what is a slave if not a man obliged by law to work under conditions that he rejects?” This sentence was greeted in the Assembly with repeated shouts of “Hear! Hear!” from the benches of the left.

Contrary to frequently held modern views, Bastiat’s belief is that a consistent (classical) liberal is necessarily against all forms of slavery and is in favor of the right to associate and also to strike, with the important condition that violence is not used. Thus, the state should not forbid trade unions and strikes, but it should punish those who use violence in any strike-related activity. On the basis of these clear principles of individual liberty, Bastiat supported the proposal to allow the creation of trade unions, concluding that “only principles have the power to satisfy people’s minds, to win over their hearts, and to unite all serious minds.”²⁴

THE ECONOMISTS, THE SOCIALISTS, AND LEGAL PLUNDER

According to Bastiat and the liberal, free-trade political economists of his time, there was only one school of economics, that of Les Économistes.²⁵ On the other hand, there were many schools of socialism, all of which opposed the ideas of Les Économistes. The reason for this difference is straightforward in Bastiat’s view: true economists are concerned with principles, and if people agree on principles they cannot express conflicting or incoherent statements. On the contrary, socialists want to rebuild human nature and each school has its own recipe for changing society. Bastiat expresses this view clearly in “Justice and Fraternity” (1848): “I believe that what radically

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divides us is this: political economy reaches the conclusion that only universal justice should be demanded of the law. Socialism, in its various branches and through applications whose number is of course unlimited, demands in addition that the law should put into practice the dogma of fraternity.”²⁶

For Bastiat, the approaches of the political economists and the socialists are incompatible with each other because socialism necessarily impinges upon individual rights whenever one wants to redistribute wealth by using constraint. The main criterion for evaluating human actions is to ask whether an act is made freely or whether it is obtained by violence. According to Bastiat, legal violence is the most dangerous of human actions because it is wielded without any risk to the politicians and their supporters; moreover, it is even considered virtuous because politicians use it in the name of brotherhood and solidarity. Bastiat’s consistency in opposing all forms of coercion, whether legal or not, separates him from most of his contemporaries.

FREEDOM TO EXCHANGE

It is not surprising that Bastiat frequently opposes protectionist measures and pleads the case for free trade, but what is surprising is the broad range of arguments he uses to make his case. He draws his arguments from many fields of inquiry, such as economics, history, philosophy, and ethics. He reminds us that he was the founder of the Association pour la liberté des échanges (the free-trade association) and not the “association for commercial freedom” or the “association for the gradual reform of tariffs.” The “association for commercial freedom” would suggest support for only a narrowly based interest group that worked in the area of “commerce.” Likewise, the “association for the gradual reform of tariffs” would be inappropriate in Bastiat’s view because it would imply a willingness to compromise with those groups who benefited from protection at the expense of the broad mass of consumers who suffered from it. Thus, he chose for his organization the more general and somewhat abstract name “Association pour la liberté des échanges,” explaining that “the term free trade implies the freedom to dispose of the fruits of your work, in other words, property,”²⁷ and this property could be in the form of wine, cotton cloth, gold bullion, or ideas.

Bastiat also makes a striking comparison between slavery and protectionism:

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“If I use force to appropriate all the work of a man for my benefit, this man is my slave. He is also my slave if, while letting him work freely, I find a way through force or guile to take possession of the fruit of his work.”²⁸ In his battle with both conservatives and socialists Bastiat wanted to make the rhetorical and philosophical point that protectionism was just another form of that age-old means of granting privileges to one group at the expense of the liberty and property of another group. Thus he gave “this new form of servitude the fine title of protection.”²⁹

CONCLUSION

Throughout the writings in this volume, we discover the personality of Bastiat. He is a keen observer and analyst of the times and a passionate politician who rushes into many debates with the hope of changing the course of history during the crucial period in which he lived. It is as if he somehow anticipated that he had only a very short time left to live.

The time between his election to the Assembly in early 1848 and his death on Christmas Eve in 1850 was a scant twenty months. During this period he carried out his parliamentary duties, wrote numerous pamphlets, and worked feverishly to complete his magnum opus, Economic Harmonies.³⁰ His aim was to convince as many people as possible that liberal economic theory is the only way to evaluate political decisions rationally and to help bring about the creation of a free, prosperous, and peaceful society.

Pascal Salin

My thanks to David M. Hart for his editorial contributions and his insights into the history of this period.