Gustave de Molinari

Gustave de Molinari
Born	3 March 1819 Liège, United Kingdom of the Netherlands
Died	28 January 1912(1912-01-28) (aged 92) Adinkerke, Belgium
Fields	Economics
Known for	"The Production of Security"

Gustave de Molinari (3 March 1819, Liège – 28 January 1912, Adinkerke) was an economist born in Belgium associated with French laissez-faire liberal economists such as Frédéric Bastiat and Hippolyte Castille. Living in Paris, in the 1840s, he took part in the "Ligue pour la Liberté des Échanges" (Free Trade League), animated by Frédéric Bastiat. On his death bed in 1850, Bastiat described Molinari as the continuator of his works. In 1849, shortly after the revolutions of the previous year, Molinari published two works: an essay, "The Production of Security", and a book, Les Soirées de la Rue Saint-Lazare, describing how a market in justice and protection could advantageously replace the state.

In the 1850s, Molinari fled to Belgium to escape threats from France's Emperor Napoleon III. He returned to Paris in the 1860s to work on the influential newspaper, Le Journal des Debats, which he edited from 1871 to 1876. Molinari went on to edit the Journal des Économistes, the publication of the French Political Economy Society, from 1881 until 1909. In his 1899 book, The Society of Tomorrow, he proposed a federated system of collective security, and reiterated his support for private competing defense agencies.

"In his last work, published a year before his death in 1912, Molinari never relented:^[1]

The American Civil War had not been simply a humanitarian crusade to free the slaves. The war "ruined the conquered provinces," but the Northern plutocrats pulling the strings achieved their aim: the imposition of a vicious protectionism that led ultimately "to the regime of trusts and produced the billionaires."

Molinari's grave is located at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, France.

Influence

Some anarcho-capitalists consider Molinari to be the first proponent of anarcho-capitalism.^[1] In the preface to the 1977 English translation Murray Rothbard called The Production of Security the "first presentation anywhere in human history of what is now called anarcho-capitalism" though admitting that "Molinari did not use the terminology, and probably would have balked at the name." Austrian School economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe says that "the 1849 article The Production of Security is probably the single most important contribution to the modern theory of anarcho-capitalism."^[2] In the past, Molinari influenced some of the political thoughts of market anarchist Benjamin Tucker and the Liberty circle.^[3]

The market anarchist Molinari Institute, headed by philosopher Roderick Long, is named after Molinari, who it calls the "originator of the theory of Market Anarchism."^[4]

References and notes

1. ^ ^{a b} Raico, Ralph (2011-03-29) Neither the Wars Nor the Leaders Were Great, Mises Institute
2. ^ Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. Anarcho-Capitalism: An Annotated Bibliography
3. ^ David Hart's Gustave De Molinari And The Anti-Statist Liberal Tradition
4. ^ Molinari Institute

External links

• Molinari Institute
• The Society of Tomorrow by Molinari, published electronically by The Library of Economics and Liberty with annotations, biography, etc.
• Some works by Molinari available in original French from Hervé de Quengo's site.
• The original version of his article "The Production of Security" (1849), which was entitled in French: "De la production de la sécurité".
• Gustave de Molinari, De la production de la sécurité (1849)
• Gustave de Molinari, On the Production of Security (1849)

Persondata
Name	Molinari, Gustave De
Alternative names
Short description	economist
Date of birth	3 March 1819
Place of birth	United Kingdom of the Netherlands
Date of death	28 January 1912
Place of death	Adinkerke, Belgium