The Online Library of Liberty

Our sister website Econlib <http://www.econlib.org/> has begun a Facebook discussion of Liberty Fund's recently published edition of Frédéric Bastiat's Collected Works, vol. We are cross posting the OLL Editor's comments here as well (with more links to relevant texts).

Author: David Hart [Academic Editor of the Collected Works of FB]

Date: Friday 5 August 2011.

I would like to reiterate a point that Alexandre made in his thoughtful post to begin this discussion of Bastiat, namely that FB saw free trade as a "fundamental freedom". In this sense FB is very much like Milton Friedman, who in our time made the case for there being a strong link between political and economic freedom (see M. Friedman, Capitalism & Freedom (1962)). FB stated in the “Draft Preface for the Harmonies” (1847) in Vol. 1 The Man and the Statesman, pp. 318-20 </title/2393/226010> that "All forms of freedom go together.  All ideas form a systematic and harmonious whole, and there is not a single one whose proof does not serve to demonstrate the truth of the others.  But you act like a mechanic who makes a virtue of explaining an isolated part of a machine in the smallest detail, not forgetting anything.  The temptation is strong to cry out to him, “Show me the other parts;  make them work together; each of them explains the others. . . "

Among the freedoms which FB explicitly mentions are the freedom of discussion & conscience, freedom of teaching, freedom of the press, freedom to work, freedom of association, and the freedom to trade. In the short-lived newspaper, Jacques Bonhomme, which FB edited and wrote along with his younger colleagues Charles Coquelin and Gustave de Molinari in the early days of the 1848 Revolution, he mentions a number of these by name but concludes that these are discrete "freedoms" and have considerable value, but they are only components of a greater whole which he calls "liberty" [this is partly an artifact of the translation as "la liberté" can and is sometimes translated as "freedom" and sometimes as "liberty" but I think this phrasing captures FB's intent]. His concluding line summarizes this view quite clearly: "I am trying to get through to the crowd to preach all the freedoms, the total of which make up liberty." [vol. 1, p. 434 </title/2393/226072/3709057> from article "Freedom" in Jacques Bonhomme, dated 11-15 June 1848.] FB makes this point in a short article which he wrote for the revolutionary newspaper which he and his friends handed out on the streets of Paris at the beginning of the Revolution in Paris. They were concerned that the revolutionary protesters had been influenced too much by socialist ideas and did not see the intimate connection between "political freedom" (which they said they wanted) and "economic freedom" (which they were willing to violate or sacrifice to a higher cause). FB wanted to show them that if you destroy the latter you will ultimately destroy the former. The true friend of liberty sees liberty as a whole piece of cloth which cannot be torn apart into its constituent parts without destroying the thing itself.

But, being an economist (!) FB does seem to favor one freedom above all the others, namely "the freedom to work and trade," and explains why he thinks it is the most important of our freedoms. It is because of its universality (it applies to all men and women in all places) and its immediate necessity (we need to work and trade every day in order to survive). As he forcefully states in the Draft Preface "Like you I love all forms of freedom and among these, the one that is the most universally useful to mankind, the one you enjoy at each moment of the day and in all of life’s circumstances, is the freedom to work and to trade.  I know that making things one’s own is the fulcrum of society and even of human life.  I know that trade is intrinsic to property and that to restrict the one is to shake the foundations of the other.  I approve of your devoting yourself to the defense of this freedom whose triumph will inevitably usher in the reign of international justice and consequently the extinction of hatred, prejudices between one people and another, and the wars that come in their wake. [vol. 1, p. 318 </title/2393/226010/3708267>].

I hope other readers and participants in this discussion will talk about some of the other very interesting aspects of FB's thought which come to light in the letters. These include things such as:

1. his wit and sense of humor
2. his knowledge of music and literature which he draws upon repeatedly his writings
   
3. his proto-feminism
4. his firm opposition to colonialism/imperialism, whether British or French (in Algeria)
5. the problems he faced in being consistent in his views whilst being an elected politician
6. his hatred of the State which engages in "legal plunder" of other people's property
7. his enormous personal courage while enduring enormous physical pain as he did from a serious throat condition (I suspect throat cancer)

Author: David Hart [Academic Editor of the Collected Works of FB]

Date: Friday Aug 5, 2011

A question which might be of interest to the economists among you is the following, to what extent (if any) was FB an "Austrian" economist? There are some at the Mises Institute who think FB was "Austrian" or at least a "precursor" (such as Mark Thornton in this article <http://mises.org/journals/scholar/BastiatAustrian.pdf >). The are also suggestions that FB was developing an early form of "public choice" economic theorizing well before Buchanan and Tullock appeared on the scene.

Critics such as Joseph Schumpeter dismiss FB as no theorist at all. Even Hayek damns him with faint praise, saying he was "a publicist of genius" but no innovator in economic thinking. I think his writings show astonishing flashes of brilliant insight into deep economic problems and issues but because he died before he could finish his major theoretical treatise, Economic Harmonies (an incomplete version of which appeared in 1850), his ideas were not worked into a coherent whole. One can find provocative remarks about subjective value theory, opportunity cost, government tampering with the money supply, that rent was like any other income and not the result of any gift of nature or of god, and his use (perhaps the first ever) of "Crusoe economics" as a thought experiment to explore the pure theory of choice in making economic decisions. Had he lived another couple of years his treatise may have shown more fully the direction in which his thinking was developing.

He was certainly developing his ideas in an intellectual hothouse in the late 1840s which saw his colleagues Charles Coquelin writing on free banking (i.e. ending the government monopoly of the issuing of money) and Gustave de Molinari developing the first arguments for anarch-capitalism (i.e. that even police and defense services could and should be provided competitively on the free market). It would not be so outrageous to see FB as well pushing economic thinking in entirely new and original directions some 30 years before the marginalists appeared on the scene in 1871.