Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”. Bastiat Frédéric
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![Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen” - Bastiat Frédéric Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen” - Bastiat Frédéric The Collected Works of Frederic Bastiat](/cover_pre945630.jpg)
The new foreword to what was now called Social Fallacies was by the libertarian journalist and writer Rose Wilder Lane, who described Bastiat as “one of the leaders of the revolution whose work and fame, like Aristotle’s, belong to the ages.… What modern science owes to Aristotle, a free world will someday owe to Bastiat.”23 Hoiles in his “Publisher’s Statement,” which introduces the Social Fallacies, explained why he thought reprinting Bastiat in 1944 was warranted:
The reason for republishing Bastiat’s “Economic Sophisms” (which we have called “Social Fallacies”) is that we believe Bastiat shows the fallacy of government planning better than any other writer of any period. Since he wrote a century ago, his work cannot be regarded as party-policies now. It deals with fundamental principles of political economy which out-last all parties.24
In the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, Bastiat’s ideas found an American supporter in the economic journalist Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993), who wrote for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. In 1946 Hazlitt published a popular defense of free-market ideas titled Economics in One Lesson in which he acknowledged the influence of Bastiat by taking Bastiat’s subtitle for What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen as the title for his own book. He noted in his introduction that, like Bastiat, he wanted to debunk the economic sophisms he saw around him:
My greatest debt, with respect to the kind of expository framework on which the present argument is being hung, is to
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Frédéric Bastiat’s essay Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas, now nearly a century old. The present work may, in fact, be regarded as a modernization, extension, and generalization of the approach found in Bastiat’s pamphlet.25
In postwar America Bastiat’s works were made available to a new generation of readers with new translations of his key works published by the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, under the direction of Leonard Reed. The project began with the translation and publication of Bastiat’s pamphlet “The Law” in 1950, exactly one hundred years after its first appearance in June 1850. Other works were translated with the assistance of the William Volker Fund, and these appeared in 1964 along with a new biography of Bastiat written by Dean Russell in 1965.26 The trilogy of works which the Foundation for Economic Education published in 1964—Selected Essays on Political Economy (including “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”), Economic Sophisms, and Economic Harmonies—have remained the backbone of Bastiat studies in America ever since.27
With regard to French-language editions of Bastiat’s work, after a hiatus of nearly seventy years since the appearance of the Belgian edition of Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas in 1914, a revival of interest in Bastiat in the early 1980s led to the reprinting of a number of his works, beginning in 1983 with a reissue of two of his pamphlets, “Property and Law” (Propriété et loi) and “The State” (L’état), by the Economic Institute of Paris,28 as well as a collection of Bastiat’s economic writings edited by Florin Aftalion (which included excerpts from Economic Sophisms).29 This was followed in 1994 by the reissue of Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas by Alain Madelin30 and another in 2004 by Jacques Garello.31 Michel Leter has edited two volumes of Bastiat’s writings for the publisher Les Belles Lettres in a series called La bibliothèque classique de la liberté (The Classic Library of Liberty). Leter’s
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edition of Economic Sophisms appeared in 2005,32 and his collection of Bastiat’s pamphlets, which included What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, was published in 2009.33
To commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Bastiat, an international conference was held in Bayonne in June 2001 under the auspices of the Cercle Frédéric Bastiat and M. Jacques de Guenin. It was here that Liberty Fund’s project of translating the collected works of Bastiat was conceived. Concurrent with Liberty Fund’s publishing project, Jacques de Guenin and the Institut Charles Coquelin are publishing a seven-volume French-language edition, the first volume of which appeared in late 2009.
David M. Hart
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Map of France Showing Cities Mentioned by Bastiat
Cartography by Mapping Specialists, Madison, Wisconsin.
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Cartography by Mapping Specialists, Madison, Wisconsin.
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Economic Sophisms First Series 1
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Author’s Introduction to Economic Sophisms
PUBLISHING HISTORY:
Original title: No title given.
Place and date of first publication: Economic Sophisms (First Series) (1846).
First French edition as book or pamphlet: Economic Sophisms (First Series) (1846).
Location in Paillottet’s edition of OC: Vol. 4. Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets I, pp. 1–5.
Previous translations: 1st English ed., 1846; 1st American ed., 1848; FEE ed., 1964.
In political economy there is a lot to learn and very little to do. (Bentham)2
In this small volume, I have sought to refute a few of the arguments against the deregulation of trade.
This is not a conflict that I am entering into against protectionists. It is a principle that I am attempting to instill into the minds of sincere men who hesitate because they doubt.
I am not one of those who say: “Protection is based on interests.” I believe that it is based on error or, if you prefer, on half-truths. Too many people fear freedom for this apprehension not to be sincere.
This is setting my sights high, but I must admit that I would like this small work to become in some way a manual for men called upon to decide between the two principles. When you do not possess a long-standing familiarity with the doctrine of freedom, protectionist sophisms will constantly
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come to one’s mind in one form or another. To release it from them, a long effort of analysis is required on each occasion, and not everyone has the time to carry out this task, least of all the legislators. This is why