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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