The Law (1849 book)

The Law, original French title "La Loi", is a 1849 book by Frédéric Bastiat. It was published one year after the third French Revolution of 1848 and one year before his death of tuberculosis at age 49. The essay was influenced by John Locke's "Second Treatise on Government" and in turn influenced Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson". It is the work for which Bastiat is most famous along with "The candlemaker's petition" and the "Parable of the broken window".

In "The Law", Bastiat states that "each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property". The State is a "substitution of a common force for individual forces" to defend this right. The law becomes perverted when it punishes one's right to self-defense in favor of another's acquired right to plunder.

Bastiat defines two forms of plunder: "stupid greed and false philanthropy". Stupid greed is "protective tariffs, subsidies, guaranteed profits" and false philanthropy is "guaranteed jobs, relief and welfare schemes, public education, progressive taxation, free credit, and public works". Monopolism and Socialism are legalized plunder which Bastiat emphasizes is legal but not legitimate.

Justice has precise limits but philanthropy is limitless and government can grow endlessly when that becomes its function. The resulting statism is "based on this triple hypothesis: the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator". The relationship between the public and the legislator becomes "like the clay to the potter". Bastiat says, "I do not dispute their right to invent social combinations, to advertise them, to advocate them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose these plans upon us by law—by force—and to compel us to pay for them with our taxes". All quotations are from the Dean Russell translation of "The Law" [http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss0a.html] ]

Contemporaries mentioned complimentarily in "The Law"

*Charles Forbes Ren%C3%A9 de Montalembert
*Pierre Carlier
*William Penn

Contemporaries mentioned disparagingly in "The Law"

*Charles Dupin
*Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
*François Fénelon
*Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu
*Jean-Jacques Rousseau
*Guillaume Thomas François Raynal
*Gabriel Bonnot de Mably
*Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
*Louis de Saint-Just
*Maximilien Robespierre
*Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne
*Louis Michel le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau
*Morelly
*François-Noël Babeuf
*Robert Owen
*Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon
*Charles Fourier
*Louis Blanc
*Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
*Étienne Cabet
*Pierre Laurent Barthélemy, comte de Saint-Cricq
*Viscount André de Melun
*Adolphe Thiers
*Victor Prosper Considérant

English translations

* [http://www.mises.org/story/2060 Patrick James Stirling Translation, 1874]
* [http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss2.html Seymour Cain translation, 1994]
* [http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss0a.html Dean Russell translation, 1998] , introduction by Walter E. Williams and foreword by Sheldon Richman
* [http://www.freeaudio.org/fbastiat/thelaw.html Audio version of Russell translation]
* [http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/anarchism/library/thelaw.html Ozarkia.net version]

Notes