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A Note on the Publishing History of Economic Sophisms and What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen

Establishing the publishing history of what was to become Economic Sophisms is somewhat difficult because the work appeared in three different formats during Bastiat’s lifetime and after his death (possibly four if one counts later editions and translations).

Economic Sophisms first appeared as short articles in various journals and newspapers which published Bastiat’s material, such as his free-trade journal, Le Libre-échange,1 and the main organ of the Parisian free-market political economists, Le Journal des économistes. In the second phase, some of the material was also published as stand-alone books or pamphlets, such as Economic Sophisms First and Second Series, which appeared in book form in early 1846 and 1848, respectively, in slightly reworked form. The third phase came after Bastiat’s death, in 1850, when his friend and literary executor, Prosper Paillottet, had access to Bastiat’s papers and from this and the previously mentioned published sources was able to edit and publish the first edition of Bastiat’s Œuvres complètes (1854).

In most cases Paillottet indicated in footnotes the place and date of the original publication of the essays, but in some cases he did not. Sometimes he wrote that the piece was an “unpublished draft” (presumably one he found in Bastiat’s papers), and at other times he simply said nothing, thus complicating the task of the researcher, as we no longer have access to Bastiat’s original papers. We have taken Paillottet’s word in every case, as he is the best and sometimes only source we have for this information, although at all times it must be recognized that he was a close friend and strong supporter of Bastiat,

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which surely must have colored his judgment. That being said, we have not found any instance where Paillottet has been wrong (except that the journal Jacques Bonhomme was published in June–July 1848, not March 1848);2 our main frustration is that his information is not as complete as we would like it to be.

ECONOMIC SOPHISMS, FIRST SERIES

The First Series of Economic Sophisms was completed in November 1845 (Bastiat signed the conclusion, “Mugron, 2 November 1845”) and was probably printed in late 1845 or early 1846. The Bibliothèque nationale de France does not show an edition published in 1845, but there are two listed for 1846, one of which is called the second edition. Presumably the other is the true first edition which appeared in early (possibly January) 1846.

The first eleven chapters (of an eventual twenty-two) had originally appeared as a series of three articles in Le Journal des économistes in April, July, and October 1845 under the name “Sophismes économiques.” If chapters twelve to twenty-two were also published elsewhere, the place and date of original publication were not given by Paillottet.

The French printing history of the First Series is as follows: the first collection was published, according to Paillottet, at the end of 1845 (probably December), but all the printed copies bear the date 1846. The First Series continued to be published as a separate volume until 1851 and the appearance of a fourth edition (second edition in 1846, third edition in 1847).

ECONOMIC SOPHISMS, SECOND SERIES

The French printing history of Economic Sophisms, Second Series is as follows: it was published, according to Paillottet, at the end of January 1848 and consisted of seventeen essays, seven of which had previously appeared in the newspaper Le Libre-échange (between December 1846 and July 1847), two in Le Journal des économistes (in January and May 1846), and one in Le Courrier français (in September 1846). For the other seven articles no previous publication details were given. Only one edition of the Second Series appeared as a separate volume, in 1848.

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The first edition to combine both the First and Second Series in a single volume was an edition of 1851, which appeared simultaneously in Paris and Belgium. Thereafter, the Second Series always appeared in print with the First Series.

ECONOMIC SOPHISMS, “THIRD SERIES”

We have collected together in this volume a number of other writings by Bastiat which might well have been drawn upon had he lived long enough to compile a third series of Economic Sophisms. This was also the thinking of Paillottet, who collected twenty-two pieces of what he called a nouvelle série de sophismes économiques (a new series of economic sophisms) for volume 2 of the Œuvres complètes.3 We decided to include them as well in this volume. Sixteen aticles come from Bastiat’s free-trade journal, Le Libre-échange (published between December 1846 and its closure in March 1848), two articles from Bastiat’s revolutionary magazine La République française (March 1848), one from Le Journal des économistes (March 1848); for the remaining five articles, no sources were given.

WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS NOT SEEN, OR POLITICAL ECONOMY IN ONE LESSON

There is also another pamphlet which we think deserves to be included in our expanded collection of Economic Sophisms because of its similarities of style and content, namely, What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.4 This is the last work (other than letters) which Bastiat wrote before his death, in 1850. In a footnote Paillottet provides us with these fascinating details.5

The importance which Bastiat must have placed on getting this work published is revealed by the enormous effort he expended in rewriting it

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from scratch twice at a time when his health was rapidly failing and when he was under considerable pressure to complete Economic Harmonies, which remained unfinished at his death. What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen was eventually published as a small stand-alone pamphlet of seventy-nine pages in July 1850 by Guillaumin. Another edition appeared in 1854 (possibly the second edition) in volume 5 of Paillottet’s Œuvres complètes; another two in 1863 (possibly the third edition) in volume 5 of Œuvres complètes, as well as in volume 2 of Œuvres choisies (pp. 336–92). The fourth edition of 1869 and the fifth edition of 1879 were both stand-alone books.

THE POST-1850 PUBLISHING AND TRANSLATION HISTORY OF ECONOMIC SOPHISMS AND WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS NOT SEEN

In French, Economic Sophisms and What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen remained in print throughout the nineteenth century as part of Bastiat’s Œuvres complètes. Once the Œuvres complètes appeared in 1854, it does not seem that Economic Sophisms was ever printed again in French as a separate title. The same is not true for What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, which was printed as a separate book by Guillaumin and by other publishers as well. In Paris, Henri Bellaire issued an edition with a biographical introduction and numerous notes (1873).6 In Belgium an edition even appeared (which also included the essay “The State”) on the eve of the outbreak of World War I (1914).7

The international interest in Bastiat’s work can be partially gauged by the speed with which it was translated and the variety of languages in which it was published. For example, an English translation of Economic

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Sophisms appeared in 1846;8 in 1847 German, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian translations appeared;9 1848 saw a Danish edition10 as well as an American edition with an introduction by Francis Lieber.11 The Francis Lieber edition contained both the First and Second Series. Another American edition of Economic Sophisms (which also included both series) appeared in Chicago in 1869 as part of a movement against the post–Civil War tariffs which resulted from the Morrill tariff of 1861.12 The first British edition containing both series appeared in 1873 in Edinburgh.13

When the debate about protective tariffs resurfaced in Britain and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bastiat’s essays were again used in the intellectual battle, with several reissues being made by groups such as the Cobden Club, which used titles that made it very clear on what side of the fence they stood.14 In North America the American Free Trade League issued two editions (in 1870 and 1873),15 and an “adaptation designed for the American reader” appeared in 1867 and 1874.16

The translation history of What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen is similar to that of Economic Sophisms. It was translated very quickly into other languages soon after it appeared in French in 1850, with a Dutch translation appearing in 1850, Danish in 1852, and German in 1853.17 The first English translation, in 1852 by William Hodgson, appeared in the Manchester Examiner and Times before being published as a pamphlet in the same year.18 Another edition appeared in the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle a short time later.19 Of considerable interest is the “People’s Edition” by an unnamed translator, which was intended to be distributed among working people.20 It went through at least four editions between 1853 and the late 1870s.

Until the Foundation for Economic Education published new translations of some of Bastiat’s major works in the mid 1960s, there was very little interest in Bastiat’s free-trade ideas after the First World War. From this period we have been able to find only two editions of his Economic Sophisms, a 1921 reprint of an English edition from 190921 and an American edition which appeared toward the close of World War II, in 1944. The latter is noteworthy because of the introduction by the American libertarian author Rose Wilder Lane.

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This edition was published by Raymond Cyrus “R. C.” Hoiles, who had moved from Ohio to run a daily newspaper in California, the Santa Ana Register, in 1935. Around this time he discovered the work of Bastiat and used his newspaper’s printing presses to publish a series of works by Bastiat using the nineteenth-century English translations by Patrick James Stirling, which had been published in the 1860s and 1870s.22 Hoiles adapted them for an American audience by commissioning new forewords or by making his own compilations of Bastiat’s writings to be used in his battle against the New Deal.

The new foreword to what was now called Social Fallacies was by the libertarian journalist and writer Rose Wilder Lane, who described Bastiat as “one of the leaders of the revolution whose work and fame, like Aristotle’s, belong to the ages.… What modern science owes to Aristotle, a free world will someday owe to Bastiat.”23 Hoiles in his “Publisher’s Statement,” which introduces the Social Fallacies, explained why he thought reprinting Bastiat in 1944 was warranted:

The reason for republishing Bastiat’s “Economic Sophisms” (which we have called “Social Fallacies”) is that we believe Bastiat shows the fallacy of government planning better than any other writer of any period. Since he wrote a century ago, his work cannot be regarded as party-policies now. It deals with fundamental principles of political economy which out-last all parties.24

In the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, Bastiat’s ideas found an American supporter in the economic journalist Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993), who wrote for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. In 1946 Hazlitt published a popular defense of free-market ideas titled Economics in One Lesson in which he acknowledged the influence of Bastiat by taking Bastiat’s subtitle for What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen as the title for his own book. He noted in his introduction that, like Bastiat, he wanted to debunk the economic sophisms he saw around him:

My greatest debt, with respect to the kind of expository framework on which the present argument is being hung, is to

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Frédéric Bastiat’s essay Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas, now nearly a century old. The present work may, in fact, be regarded as a modernization, extension, and generalization of the approach found in Bastiat’s pamphlet.25

In postwar America Bastiat’s works were made available to a new generation of readers with new translations of his key works published by the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, under the direction of Leonard Reed. The project began with the translation and publication of Bastiat’s pamphlet “The Law” in 1950, exactly one hundred years after its first appearance in June 1850. Other works were translated with the assistance of the William Volker Fund, and these appeared in 1964 along with a new biography of Bastiat written by Dean Russell in 1965.26 The trilogy of works which the Foundation for Economic Education published in 1964—Selected Essays on Political Economy (including “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”), Economic Sophisms, and Economic Harmonies—have remained the backbone of Bastiat studies in America ever since.27

With regard to French-language editions of Bastiat’s work, after a hiatus of nearly seventy years since the appearance of the Belgian edition of Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas in 1914, a revival of interest in Bastiat in the early 1980s led to the reprinting of a number of his works, beginning in 1983 with a reissue of two of his pamphlets, “Property and Law” (Propriété et loi) and “The State” (L’état), by the Economic Institute of Paris,28 as well as a collection of Bastiat’s economic writings edited by Florin Aftalion (which included excerpts from Economic Sophisms).29 This was followed in 1994 by the reissue of Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas by Alain Madelin30 and another in 2004 by Jacques Garello.31 Michel Leter has edited two volumes of Bastiat’s writings for the publisher Les Belles Lettres in a series called La bibliothèque classique de la liberté (The Classic Library of Liberty). Leter’s

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edition of Economic Sophisms appeared in 2005,32 and his collection of Bastiat’s pamphlets, which included What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, was published in 2009.33

To commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Bastiat, an international conference was held in Bayonne in June 2001 under the auspices of the Cercle Frédéric Bastiat and M. Jacques de Guenin. It was here that Liberty Fund’s project of translating the collected works of Bastiat was conceived. Concurrent with Liberty Fund’s publishing project, Jacques de Guenin and the Institut Charles Coquelin are publishing a seven-volume French-language edition, the first volume of which appeared in late 2009.

David M. Hart