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
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Map of France Showing Cities Mentioned by Bastiat
Cartography by Mapping Specialists, Madison, Wisconsin.
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Cartography by Mapping Specialists, Madison, Wisconsin.
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Economic Sophisms First Series 1
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Author’s Introduction to Economic Sophisms
PUBLISHING HISTORY:
Original title: No title given.
Place and date of first publication: Economic Sophisms (First Series) (1846).
First French edition as book or pamphlet: Economic Sophisms (First Series) (1846).
Location in Paillottet’s edition of OC: Vol. 4. Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets I, pp. 1–5.
Previous translations: 1st English ed., 1846; 1st American ed., 1848; FEE ed., 1964.
In political economy there is a lot to learn and very little to do. (Bentham)2
In this small volume, I have sought to refute a few of the arguments against the deregulation of trade.
This is not a conflict that I am entering into against protectionists. It is a principle that I am attempting to instill into the minds of sincere men who hesitate because they doubt.
I am not one of those who say: “Protection is based on interests.” I believe that it is based on error or, if you prefer, on half-truths. Too many people fear freedom for this apprehension not to be sincere.
This is setting my sights high, but I must admit that I would like this small work to become in some way a manual for men called upon to decide between the two principles. When you do not possess a long-standing familiarity with the doctrine of freedom, protectionist sophisms will constantly
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come to one’s mind in one form or another. To release it from them, a long effort of analysis is required on each occasion, and not everyone has the time to carry out this task, least of all the legislators. This is why I have tried to do it all at once.
But, people will say, are the benefits of freedom so hidden that they are apparent only to professional economists?
Yes, we agree that our opponents in the debate have a clear advantage over us. They can set out a half-truth in a few words, and to show that it is a half-truth we need long and arid dissertations.
This is in the nature of things. Protection brings together in one single point all the good it does and distributes among the wider mass of people the harm it inflicts. One is visible to the naked eye, the other only to the mind’s eye.3 It is exactly the opposite for freedom.
This is so for almost all economic matters.
If you say: Here is a machine that has thrown thirty workers out into the street;
Or else: Here is a spendthrift who will stimulate all forms of industry;
Or yet again: The conquest of Algiers4 has doubled Marseilles’s trade;
Or lastly: The budget assures the livelihood of one hundred thousand families.
You will be understood by everyone, and your statements are clear, simple, and true in themselves. You may deduce the following principles from them:
Machines are harmful;
Luxury, conquest, and heavy taxes are a blessing;
And your theory will have all the more success in that you will be able to support it with irrefutable facts.
We, on the other hand, cannot stick to one cause and its immediate effect. We know that this effect itself becomes a cause in its turn. To judge a measure, it is therefore necessary for us to follow it through a sequence of results up to its final effect. And, since we must give utterance to the key word, we are reduced to reasoning.
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But right away here we are, assailed by these cries: “You are theorists, metaphysicians, ideologues, utopians, and in thrall to rigid principles,” and all the prejudices of the public are turned against us.
What are we to do, therefore? Call for patience and good faith in the reader and, if we are capable of this, cast into our deductions such vivid clarity that the truth and falsehood stand out starkly in order for victory to be won either by restriction or freedom,