but rather a frank expression of an eternal principle of order and justice, since only principles have power. They alone are the flame of intelligent minds or the rallying point for misguided convictions.
Recently, a universal shiver of terror has run through the entire territory of France. At the single word communism, every soul has become alarmed. Seeing the strangest systems appear in broad daylight and almost officially, and subversive decrees issued in succession, which may be followed by even more subversive ones, everyone has asked himself where we are all going. Capital has become terrified, credit has fled, work has been suspended, and the saw and hammer have been stopped in mid task as though a disastrous and universal electric current had suddenly paralyzed both mind and arm. Why? Because the principle of property, whose essence has already been compromised by the protectionist regime, has suffered further violent shocks as a consequence of the first. Because the intervention of the law with regard to industry and as a way of adjusting values and redistributing wealth, an intervention of which the protectionist regime was the first manifestation, is threatening to reveal itself in a thousand known or unknown forms. Yes, I say it loud and clear; it is the landowners, those who are considered to be property owners par excellence, who have undermined the principle of property, because they have called upon the law to give their lands and products an artificial value. It is the capitalists who have suggested the idea of leveling out wealth by law. Protectionism was the forerunner of communism; I will go even further, it was its first manifestation. For what are the suffering classes asking for now? Nothing other than what the capitalists and landowners have asked for and obtained. They are asking for the intervention of the law to balance, adjust, equalize wealth. What the capitalists and landowners have done by means of customs, the poor want to do by way of other institutions, but the principle is always the same: to take from some people on the basis of legislation to give the proceeds to others, and certainly, since it is you, property owners and capitalists, who have had this disastrous principle accepted, you should not complain if those more unfortunate than you claim the benefit. They have at least a right to it that you did not.15
But at last our eyes are being opened, and we see toward what abyss this initial blow against the essential conditions of public safety is driving
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us. Is this not a terrible lesson, clear proof of the chain of cause and effect through which at long last the justice of providential retribution is appearing, when we now see the rich terrified out of their wits by the invasion of a false doctrine whose iniquitous foundations they themselves laid and whose consequences they thought they could peacefully turn to their own profit? Yes, protectionists, you have been the promoters of communism. Yes, landowners, you have destroyed in people’s minds the true concept of property. It is political economy that disseminates this concept; and you have proscribed political economy because, in the name of the right to property, it opposed your unjust privileges.16 And when they have seized power, what has also been the first thought of these modern schools of thought that so terrify you? It is to eliminate political economy, since economic science is a constant protestation against the legal leveling out that you have sought and others are seeking today, following your example. You have asked the law for things that are far and away beyond what may be demanded of the law. You have asked it not for security (which would have been your right) but for added value on what belongs to you, which could not be given to you without damaging the rights of others. Now the folly of your claims has become universal folly. And if you wish to stave off the storm that threatens to engulf you, you have just one means left. Acknowledge your mistake; renounce your privileges; restrict the law to its own powers and limit the legislator to his role. You have abandoned us and you have attacked us, probably because you did not understand us. At the sight of the abyss you have opened up with your own hands, make haste to come over to our side and adopt our propaganda in favor of the right to property by, I repeat, giving this word its widest meaning, including in it both the faculties of man and all that they are able to produce, whether in production or trade!
The doctrine that we are defending arouses a certain mistrust because of its extreme simplicity; it limits itself to asking the law for security for all. People find it hard to believe that the mechanics of government can be reduced to these proportions. What is more, since this doctrine encloses the law within the limits of universal justice, some reproach it for excluding fraternity. Political economy does not accept this accusation. That will be the subject of another article.
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[vol. 4, p. 298. “Justice et fraternité.” Originally published in the 15 June 1848 issue of Le Journal des économistes.]
On a great many points the Economists2 are in opposition to a number of schools of socialism, which claim to be more advanced and which are, I readily agree, more active and popular. Our adversaries (I do not wish to call them detractors) are the communists; the followers of Fourier and Owen; MM Cabet, Louis Blanc, Proudhon, and Pierre Leroux; and many others.
What is very strange is that these schools differ among themselves at least as much as they differ from us. It is therefore necessary (1) that they admit a common principle that we do not admit and (2) that this principle lends itself to the infinite diversity among them that we observe.
I believe that what radically divides us is this:
Political economy reaches the conclusion that only universal justice should be demanded of the law.
Socialism, in its various branches and through applications whose number
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is of course unlimited, demands in addition that the law should put into practice the dogma of fraternity.
Well, what is the result? Following Rousseau, socialism accepts that the entire social order is encompassed by the law. We know that Rousseau based society on a contract. On the very first page of his book on the Revolution,3 Louis Blanc says: “The principle of fraternity is that which, viewing the members of the extended family as interdependent, at some point tends to organize various forms of society, the work of man, on the model of the human body, the work of God.”4
Starting from this point, that society is the work of man, the work of the law, socialists are inevitably led to the conclusion that nothing exists in society that has not been ordered and arranged in advance by the legislator.
Therefore, seeing that political economy limits itself to demanding from the law justice everywhere and for all, that is, universal justice, they have concluded that it did not acknowledge fraternity in social relationships.
The reasoning for this is strict. “Since society is contained in law,” they say, “and since you ask the law only for justice, you are therefore excluding fraternity from the law and consequently from society.”
From this have come the imputations of rigidity, coldness, hardness, and lack of feeling that have been heaped on economic science and those who profess it.
But is the leading premise admissible? Is it true that all of society is encompassed in the law? It can be seen immediately that if it is not, then all these imputations collapse.
Now! To say that positive law, which always acts with authority, through constraint, resting on the force of coercion, with the bayonet
