of Economic Sophisms was completed in November 1845 (Bastiat signed the conclusion, “Mugron, 2 November 1845”) and was probably printed in late 1845 or early 1846. The Bibliothèque nationale de France does not show an edition published in 1845, but there are two listed for 1846, one of which is called the second edition. Presumably the other is the true first edition which appeared in early (possibly January) 1846.
The first eleven chapters (of an eventual twenty-two) had originally appeared as a series of three articles in Le Journal des économistes in April, July, and October 1845 under the name “Sophismes économiques.” If chapters twelve to twenty-two were also published elsewhere, the place and date of original publication were not given by Paillottet.
The French printing history of the First Series is as follows: the first collection was published, according to Paillottet, at the end of 1845 (probably December), but all the printed copies bear the date 1846. The First Series continued to be published as a separate volume until 1851 and the appearance of a fourth edition (second edition in 1846, third edition in 1847).
ECONOMIC SOPHISMS, SECOND SERIES
The French printing history of Economic Sophisms, Second Series is as follows: it was published, according to Paillottet, at the end of January 1848 and consisted of seventeen essays, seven of which had previously appeared in the newspaper Le Libre-échange (between December 1846 and July 1847), two in Le Journal des économistes (in January and May 1846), and one in Le Courrier français (in September 1846). For the other seven articles no previous publication details were given. Only one edition of the Second Series appeared as a separate volume, in 1848.
[print edition page lxxvii]
The first edition to combine both the First and Second Series in a single volume was an edition of 1851, which appeared simultaneously in Paris and Belgium. Thereafter, the Second Series always appeared in print with the First Series.
ECONOMIC SOPHISMS, “THIRD SERIES”
We have collected together in this volume a number of other writings by Bastiat which might well have been drawn upon had he lived long enough to compile a third series of Economic Sophisms. This was also the thinking of Paillottet, who collected twenty-two pieces of what he called a nouvelle série de sophismes économiques (a new series of economic sophisms) for volume 2 of the Œuvres complètes.3 We decided to include them as well in this volume. Sixteen aticles come from Bastiat’s free-trade journal, Le Libre-échange (published between December 1846 and its closure in March 1848), two articles from Bastiat’s revolutionary magazine La République française (March 1848), one from Le Journal des économistes (March 1848); for the remaining five articles, no sources were given.
WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS NOT SEEN, OR POLITICAL ECONOMY IN ONE LESSON
There is also another pamphlet which we think deserves to be included in our expanded collection of Economic Sophisms because of its similarities of style and content, namely, What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.4 This is the last work (other than letters) which Bastiat wrote before his death, in 1850. In a footnote Paillottet provides us with these fascinating details.5
The importance which Bastiat must have placed on getting this work published is revealed by the enormous effort he expended in rewriting it
[print edition page lxxviii]
from scratch twice at a time when his health was rapidly failing and when he was under considerable pressure to complete Economic Harmonies, which remained unfinished at his death. What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen was eventually published as a small stand-alone pamphlet of seventy-nine pages in July 1850 by Guillaumin. Another edition appeared in 1854 (possibly the second edition) in volume 5 of Paillottet’s Œuvres complètes; another two in 1863 (possibly the third edition) in volume 5 of Œuvres complètes, as well as in volume 2 of Œuvres choisies (pp. 336–92). The fourth edition of 1869 and the fifth edition of 1879 were both stand-alone books.
THE POST-1850 PUBLISHING AND TRANSLATION HISTORY OF ECONOMIC SOPHISMS AND WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS NOT SEEN
In French, Economic Sophisms and What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen remained in print throughout the nineteenth century as part of Bastiat’s Œuvres complètes. Once the Œuvres complètes appeared in 1854, it does not seem that Economic Sophisms was ever printed again in French as a separate title. The same is not true for What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, which was printed as a separate book by Guillaumin and by other publishers as well. In Paris, Henri Bellaire issued an edition with a biographical introduction and numerous notes (1873).6 In Belgium an edition even appeared (which also included the essay “The State”) on the eve of the outbreak of World War I (1914).7
The international interest in Bastiat’s work can be partially gauged by the speed with which it was translated and the variety of languages in which it was published. For example, an English translation of Economic
[print edition page lxxix]
Sophisms appeared in 1846;8 in 1847 German, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian translations appeared;9 1848 saw a Danish edition10 as well as an American edition with an introduction by Francis Lieber.11 The Francis Lieber edition contained both the First and Second Series. Another American edition of Economic Sophisms (which also included both series) appeared in Chicago in 1869 as part of a movement against the post–Civil War tariffs which resulted from the Morrill tariff of 1861.12 The first British edition containing both series appeared in 1873 in Edinburgh.13
When the debate about protective tariffs resurfaced in Britain and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bastiat’s essays were again used in the intellectual battle, with several reissues being made by groups such as the Cobden Club, which used titles that made it very clear on what side of the fence they stood.14 In North America the American Free Trade League issued two editions (in 1870 and 1873),15 and an “adaptation designed for the American reader” appeared in 1867 and 1874.16
The translation history of What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen is similar to that of Economic Sophisms. It was translated very quickly into other languages soon after it appeared in French in 1850, with a Dutch translation appearing in 1850, Danish in 1852, and German in 1853.17 The first English translation, in 1852 by William Hodgson, appeared in the Manchester Examiner and Times before being published as a pamphlet in the same year.18 Another edition appeared in the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle a short time later.19 Of considerable interest is the “People’s Edition” by an unnamed translator, which was intended to be distributed among working people.20 It went through at least four editions between 1853 and the late 1870s.
Until the Foundation for Economic Education published new translations of some of Bastiat’s major works in the mid 1960s, there was very little interest in Bastiat’s free-trade ideas after the First World War. From this period we have been able to find only two editions of his Economic Sophisms, a 1921 reprint of an English edition from 190921 and an American edition which appeared toward the close of World War II, in 1944. The latter is noteworthy because of the introduction by the American libertarian author Rose Wilder Lane.
[print edition page lxxx]
This edition was published by Raymond Cyrus “R. C.” Hoiles, who had moved from Ohio to run a daily newspaper in California, the Santa Ana Register, in 1935. Around this time he discovered the work of Bastiat and used his newspaper’s printing presses to publish a series of works by Bastiat using the nineteenth-century English translations by Patrick James Stirling, which had been published in the 1860s and 1870s.22 Hoiles adapted them for an American
