Did you know that many authors who are overlooked in high school and higher education are famous French figures abroad? For instance, who knows that the most frequently cited reference by Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan was Frédéric Bastiat? This French economist, a deputy of the Landes in 1848, who even has a street named after him near the Champs-Élysées, was not published in French between 1863 and 1983.
Why are his ideas so poorly known in our country, both in the academic field and in journalistic or political spheres?
As a teacher, I am concerned to see every day the complete disconnect of secondary and university education from the realities of the contemporary world. And I'm not even talking about the ideological biases of many of my colleagues. "All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education," Bastiat wrote. Almost two centuries later, our national education system is still as centralized and immovable.
ECO102 is therefore designed to revive the philosophy of Frédéric Bastiat, his conceptual contribution, and his intellectual legacy. Through him, we will revisit the French school of political economy of the 19th century.
With the rise of socialism among intellectuals and the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe, the dissemination of Bastiat's ideas disappeared in France at the beginning of the 20th century. It was not until the end of World War II that Bastiat reappeared in the United States. One of the architects of this revival was Ludwig von Mises, who fled Europe in 1940. Settled in New York, he organized seminars that attracted remarkable minds: George Stigler, Milton Friedman, both future Nobel Prize winners in economics, Israel Kirzner, but also writers like Henry Hazlitt. The latter popularized Bastiat's thought through his book Economics in One Lesson. In 1969, Dean Russell published Frédéric Bastiat: Ideas & Influence, the first book entirely devoted to Bastiat ever published in English. This book was published by the Foundation for Economic Education.
But as early as the 1950s, the same organization had already published The Law, an English translation of La loi which sold more than a million copies. Proudhon said, "Property is theft." This is not the viewpoint of Bastiat, who believes that property has a legitimate philosophical foundation. It is not merely possession based on force as with Rousseau or Hobbes, nor is it a mere customary right that politics merely protects, as with Montaigne or Pascal. Property is a right that derives its legitimacy from its moral foundation.
Bastiat is thus led to contrast two opposing philosophical systems:
- 1° The first system is that of Rousseau, for whom the legislator must organize society, like a mechanic who invents a machine from inert matter.
- 2° The second system, the system of freedom, is one in which society, individuals, and properties exist prior to laws.
From the introductory course, I present Frédéric Bastiat: his life and intellectual trajectory, his fight for freedom, and notably his decisive encounter with the father of free trade in England: Richard Cobden.
In this course, you will also find unique insights into the deadlock of Social Security, the consequences of the thirty-five-hour workweek and the social handling of unemployment, globalization and anti-globalists, privileges and public sector strikes, corruption and scandals, the ENA (École Nationale d'Administration), unions and lobbying groups, electoral promises, and bureaucracy.
But you will also be enthused by the spirit that drives this French economist of the 19th century, a contemporary of Tocqueville.
